Measurement of an electron’s electric dipole moment using Cs atoms trapped in optical lattices

We propose to measure the electron’s permanent electric dipole moment (EDM) using cesium atoms trapped in a sparsely populated, trichromatic, far blue-detuned three-dimensional (3D) optical lattice. In the proposed configuration, the atoms can be strongly localized near the nodes of the light field and isolated from each other, leading to a strong suppression of the detrimental effects of atom-atom and atom-field interactions. Three linearly polarized standing waves with different frequencies create an effectively linearly polarized 3D optical lattice and lead to a strong reduction of the tensor light shift, which remains a potential source of systematic error. Other systematics concerning external field instability and gradients and higher-order polarizabilities are discussed. Furthermore, auxiliary atoms can be loaded into the same lattices as effective “comagnetometers” to monitor various systematic effects, including magnetic-field fluctuations and imperfect electric-field reversal. We estimate that a sensitivity 100 times higher than the current upper bound for the electron’s EDM of $4\times {10}^{-27}e\mathrm{cm}$ can be achieved with the proposed technique.