1. 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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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.

5. OCS
Laser on
Laser off
Scale is in MHz

6. 12050 line. 10 shots.
None of the observed lines exhibit structure.

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

8. UO3 is T-shaped

9. Line Assigner Fit’s Line Freq / MHz QN’s Obs-Calc
Expt’l
A = MHz
B = MHz
C = MHz
UO3 Calc’d
A = MHz
B = MHz
C = MHz
Look’s great but lines are predicted that we don’t see.

10. 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.