MICROWAVE FREQUENCY TRANSITIONS REQUIRING LASER ABLATED URANIUM METAL DISCOVERED USING CHIRP-PULSE FOURIER TRANSFORM MICROWAVE SPECTROSCOPY B. E. Long and S. A. Cooke Funded by the Department of Energy

Background 1981: Balle-Flygare Cavity FTMW facilitated the rotational spectroscopic study of transient species 1989: Suenram, Lovas, Matsumura incorporate a laser ablation source 2005: Pate and co-workers implement a chirp pulse FTMW spectrometer Great resolution and sensitivity “Non-specific production source” * “The search is over” ** * This meeting: Crabtree, McCarthy RE03, see also and Zaleski, Stephens, Walker, Legon FD09 ** Talk FC03, 60th ISMS, 2005

Uranium Toxic Dust is pyrophoric Radioactive (a-decay, t1/2 = 4.46 x 109 years) Lots of bureaucracy Factor that has been most deleterious to my health

G. S. Grubbs II, R. A. Powoski, D. Jojola and S. A. Cooke. J. Phys G. S. Grubbs II, R. A. Powoski, D. Jojola and S. A. Cooke. J. Phys. Chem. A 114(2010) 8009. Experiment covers 7 GHz to 18 GHz. Picture credit: C. T. Dewberry.

OCS Laser on Laser off Scale is in MHz

12050 line. 10 shots. None of the observed lines exhibit structure.

U-requiring transitions Frequency / MHz S/N in O2 S/N in Ar 7999.8894 55/1 15/1 8798.7844 11/1 Not Present 9681.3895 3/1 11181.0201 21/1 11926.976 74/1 11948.8033 12050.3949 6/1 12173.5944 Assignments not available at present. Double resonance experiments inconclusive to date. Autofit software finds multiple 3, and 4 line fits.

UO3 is T-shaped

Line Assigner Fit’s Line Freq / MHz QN’s Obs-Calc 2 11181.019 4 2 2 4 1 3 .148243 6 12440.697 4 2 3 3 3 0 .000000 7 15723.489 5 2 3 5 1 4 -.039173 8 18301.569 8 4 4 8 3 5 -.056911 Expt’l A = 7764.89 MHz B = 5013.92 MHz C = 3054.41 MHz UO3 Calc’d A = 7767.7 MHz B = 5043.6 MHz C = 3058.0 MHz Look’s great but lines are predicted that we don’t see.

To do: Acknowledgements Oxygen-17/18 experiments will be attempted in the near future Stark experiments E-band measurements Acknowledgements Department of Energy – “Experimentally characterizing the electronic structures of f-electron systems using advanced high resolution Fourier transform microwave spectroscopies” Stew Novick, Dan Obenchain, Pete Pringle and all members of the Southern New England Microwave Spectroscopy Consortium.

http://specfitter.droppages.com/