Stark-Induced Electric Dipole Amplitudes for Hyperfine Transitions

Abstract

Stark-induced electric dipole amplitudes between states of the same nominal parity can be important in experiments to observe parity nonconservation in atoms. The Stark-induced E1 amplitudes are expressed in terms of an irreducible spherical-tensor decomposition. This formalism is applied to the specific case of transitions between hyperfine sublevels of a single atomic state. It is shown that in the ground states of alkali atoms, such transitions are suppressed by many orders of magnitude relative to naive expectations.