T. Aoki

We investigate neutralization processes (especially thermal surface neutralization), which are required for the magneto-optical trapping of radioactive atoms. A variety of neutralization methods are first summarized: neutral beam injection for fusion reactors, neutral atom implantation in semiconductor processing, and the production of radioactive neutral atoms in accelerators. We focus on thermal surface neutralization, which produces neutral atoms in the thermal energy range for laser cooling. The experiments were carried out with yttrium, gadolinium, and zirconium foils to neutralize francium and rubidium ions for magneto-optical trapping. The results reconfirm that yttrium foil is a good neutralizer (i.e., it has a neutral release efficiency $>65\%$). In addition, the release fraction when using yttrium foil exceeds 75\% at 1350 K, which is greater than the release fraction for the other foils. This reconfirmation is important because few previous studies have focused on thermal surface neutralization. Moreover, the results show that the neutralization efficiency is strongly influenced by the experimental process itself.

We propose a method for measuring parity violation in neutral atoms. It is an adaptation of a seminal work by Fortson [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 70}, 2383 (1993)], proposing a scheme for a single trapped ion. In our version, a large sample of neutral atoms should be localised in an optical lattice overlapping a grid of detection sites, all tailored as the single site in Fortson's work. The methodology is of general applicability, but as an example we estimate the achievable signal in an experiment probing a nuclear spin independent parity violation on the line $6\mathrm{s}\,^2\mathrm{S}_{1/2}$--$5\mathrm{d}\,^2\mathrm{D}_{3/2}$ in $^{133}$Cs. The projected result is based on realistic parameters and \textit{ab initio} calculations of transition amplitudes, using the relativistic coupled-cluster method. The final result is a predicted spectroscopic signature, evidencing parity violation, of the order of 1 Hz, for a sample of $10^8$ atoms. We show that a total interrogation time of 30000 s should suffice for achieving a precision of the order of 0.1\% --- surpassing previous determinations of the weak charge in Cs by at least a factor of five.