Ramsey Prize Talk: The ACME search for the electron's electric dipole moment (EDM) and a new effort to detect hadronic "EDMs" using a quantum gas of radioactive molecules

Searching for electric dipole moments (EDMs) along the angular momentum axis of quantized particles has emerged as a powerful means to detect new phenomena beyond those in the Standard Model of particle physics. The first part of this talk will discuss the first two generations of the ACME experiment, which uses the large electric field experienced by the EDM of electrons in the polar molecule ThO to amplify the measurable energy shifts associated with the electron EDM. The results from ACME I and II improved the world-best sensitivity to the electron EDM by a factor of 100 and probed for the existence of certain new particles with mass well beyond the direct reach of the Large Hadron Collider. The remainder of the talk will discuss an exciting new frontier in the field: using the strong intra-molecular field to probe nuclear Schiff moments, the rough equivalents of EDMs for nuclei bound in atoms or molecules. The Schiff moments of octupole-deformed, radioactive isotopes are amplified dramatically. Using molecules containing such nuclei can provide observable energy shifts roughly 7 orders of magnitude larger than in current state-of-the-art experiments using ¹⁹⁹Hg atoms. Several proposed approaches to take advantage of this double amplification using trapped molecules are being explored; this talk will focus on one such proposal, to use optically trapped, ultracold ²²³FrAg molecules assembled from quantum gases of francium and silver atoms.