Technique for a direct measurement of the cesium anapole moment using coherent rf and Raman interactions

We report progress toward measurements of the electric dipole (E1) transition moments between hyperfine components of the ground state of atomic cesium. This transition is weakly E1 allowed due to weak interactions between nucleons within the nucleus, which lead to a parity-odd current distribution and its associated anapole moment. In this paper, we discuss the experimental geometry of our measurement scheme, explore the effects of extraneous fields that can obscure the signal, present initial measurements, analyze the sources and magnitudes of measurement noise, and suggest improvements to the current apparatus.