Dielectronic Resonance Method for Measuring Isotope Shifts

Abstract

Longstanding problems in the comparison of very accurate hyperfine-shift measurements to theory were partly overcome by precise measurements on few-electron highly-charged ions. Still the agreement between theory and experiment is unsatisfactory. In this paper, we present a radically new way of precisely measuring hyperfine shifts, and demonstrate its effectiveness in the case of the hyperfine shift of $4s\_{1/2}$ and $4p\_{1/2}$ in $^{207}\mathrm{Pb}^{53+}$. It is based on the precise detection of dielectronic resonances that occur in electron-ion recombination at very low energy. This allows us to determine the hyperfine constant to around 0.6 meV accuracy which is on the order of 10%.