Constraining P and T violating forces with chiral molecules

Abstract

New sources of parity and time-reversal violation are predicted by well motivated extensions of the Standard Model and can be effectively probed by precision spectroscopy of atoms and molecules. Chiral molecules have distinguished enantiomers which are related by parity transformation. Thus they are promising candidates to search for parity violation at molecular scales, which has yet to be observed. In this work, we show that precision spectroscopy of the hyperfine structure of chiral molecules is sensitive to new physics sources of parity and time-reversal violation. In particular, such a study can be sensitive to regions unexplored by terrestrial experiments of a new chiral spin-1 particle that couples to nucleons. We explore the potential to hunt for time-reversal violation in chiral molecules and show that it can be a complementary measurement to other probes. We assess the feasibility of such hyperfine metrology and project the sensitivity in CHDBrI^{+}.