Enhanced sensitivity to variations of fundamental constants in highly charged molecules from analytic perturbation theory

Abstract

Quasi-forbidden electronic transitions in atoms and vibronic transitions between quasi-degenerate states in molecules serve as powerful probes of hypothetical temporal variations of fundamental constants. Computation of the sensitivity of a transition to a variation of the fine-structure constant is conventionally performed by numerical variation of the speed of light in sophisticated electronic structure calculations, and therewith several individual calculations have to be performed. An approach is presented herein that obtains sensitivity coefficients as perturbation to the Dirac-Coulomb Hamiltonian and allows, for instance, computation of their leading-order contributions as expectation values of the relativistic kinetic energy and rest-mass operators. These are available in essentially all \emph{ab initio} relativistic electronic structure codes. Additionally, the corresponding operators for two-component Hamiltonians are derived, explicitly for the zeroth order regular approximation Hamiltonian. The approach is applied to demonstrate great sensitivity of highly charged polar molecules that were recently proposed for high-precision spectroscopy in [Z\"ulch \emph{et al.}, arXiv:2203.10333[physics.chem-ph]]. In particular, a high sensitivity of a wealth of quasi-degenerate vibronic transitions in \ce{PaF^3+} and \ce{CeF^2+} to temporal variations of the fine-structure constant and the electron-proton mass ratio is shown.