Experimental Progress Toward the Measurement of CP-Violation in YbOH

Precision measurements of heavy molecular systems have proven to be a powerful probe of high energy scales in the search for New Physics Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) due to their high sensitivity to charge parity (CP) violating electromagnetic moments. The polyatomic molecule YbOH is a promising platform to probe BSM physics in both the leptonic sector, through the measurement of the electron’s electric dipole moment (eEDM) in the ¹⁷⁴YbOH isotopologue, and the hadronic sector, through the measurement of the nuclear magnetic quadrupole moment (nMQM) in the ¹⁷³YbOH isotopologue. The localized electron around the Yb nucleus offers the ability to cycle photons while its mechanical bending mode provides parity doublets in the electronic ground state which enables full polarization and robust systematic error rejection. We give an update on experimental progress toward these goals, including observation and study of spin precession, high resolution spectroscopy on new states relevant to photon cycling and CP-violation searches, and new schemes for photon cycling.