Direct measurement of the 3He+ magnetic moments.

ABSTRACT

Helium-3 has nowadays become one of the most important candidates for studies in fundamental physics1-3, nuclear and atomic structure4,5, magnetometry and metrology6, as well as chemistry and medicine7,8. In particular, 3He nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) probes have been proposed as a new standard for absolute magnetometry6,9. This requires a high-accuracy value for the 3He nuclear magnetic moment, which, however, has so far been determined only indirectly and with a relative precision of 12 parts per billon10,11. Here we investigate the 3He+ ground-state hyperfine structure in a Penning trap to directly measure the nuclear g-factor of 3He+ [Formula see text], the zero-field hyperfine splitting [Formula see text] Hz and the bound electron g-factor [Formula see text]. The latter is consistent with our theoretical value [Formula see text] based on parameters and fundamental constants from ref. 12. Our measured value for the 3He+ nuclear g-factor enables determination of the g-factor of the bare nucleus [Formula see text] via our accurate calculation of the diamagnetic shielding constant13 [Formula see text]. This constitutes a direct calibration for 3He NMR probes and an improvement of the precision by one order of magnitude compared to previous indirect results. The measured zero-field hyperfine splitting improves the precision by two orders of magnitude compared to the previous most precise value14 and enables us to determine the Zemach radius15 to [Formula see text] fm.