Progress towards an electron electric dipole moment measurement with laser-cooled atoms

This dissertation recounts the progress made towards a measurement of the electron electric dipole moment. The existence of a permanent electric dipole moment of any fundamental particle would imply that both time reversal and parity invariance are violated. If an electric dipole moment were measured within current experimental limits it would be the first direct evidence for physics beyond the standard model. For our measurement we use laser-cooled alkali atoms trapped in a pair of 1D optical lattices. The lattices run through three electric field plates so that the two groups of atoms see opposing electric fields. The measurement chamber is surrounded by a four layer mu-metal magnetic shield. Under electric field quantization, the atoms are prepared in a superposition of magnetic sublevels that is sensitive to the electron electric dipole moment in Ramsey-like spectroscopy. The experiment requires very large electric fields and very small magnetic fields. Engineering a system compatible with both of these goals simultaneously is not trivial. Searches for electric dipole moments using neutral atoms in optical lattices have much longer possible interaction times and potentially give more precise information about the inherent symmetry breaking than other methods. This comes at the cost of a higher sensitivity to magnetic fields and possible sources of error associated with the trapping light. If noise and systematic errors can be controlled to our design specifications our experiment will significantly improve the current experimental limit of the electron electric dipole moment.