Abstract
Recent advances in high resolution spectroscopy with tunable lasers have made it possible to determine a new value of the Rydberg constant with an almost tenfold improvement in accuracy over recent other experiments. Our research group at Stanford University, i.e. M. H. Nayfeh, S. A. Lee, S. M. Curry, I. S. Shahin, and myself, has recently completed a measurement of the absolute wavelength of the optically resolved 3D5/2 - 2P3/2 component of the red Balmer line Hα of atomic hydrogen and Dα of deuterium.1 Doppler broadening was eliminated by saturation spectroscopy2 with a pulsed tunable dye laser. An iodine stabilized He-Ne laser served as wavelength standard.3 The same measurements provide a new precise value for the Hα – Dα isotope shift. In addition, the splittings between the stronger fine structure components in the optical spectrum were determined to within a few MHz.
Portions of this work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant GP-28415, by the U.S. Office of Naval Research under Contract ONR-0071, and by a Precision Measurement Grant from the National Bureau of Standards.
Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, 1973–75.
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References
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© 1975 Plenum Press, New York
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Hänsch, T.W. (1975). Rydberg Constant. In: zu Putlitz, G., Weber, E.W., Winnacker, A. (eds) Atomic Physics 4. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-2964-0_7
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