NO₂ Excited State Properties Revisited: An Effect of Extra Compactified Dimensions

Abstract

Experiments on NO 2 reveal a substructure underlying the optically excited isolated hyperfine structure (hfs) levels of the molecule. This substructure is seen in a change of the symmetry of the excited molecule and is represented by the two “states” and of a hfs-level. Optical excitation induces a transition from the ground state of the molecule to the excited state . However, the molecule evolves from to in a time τ 0 ≈ 3 μ s. Both and have the radiative lifetime τ R ≈ 40 μ s, but and differ in the degree of polarization of the fluorescence light. Zeeman coherence in the magnetic sublevels is conserved in the transition → , and optical coherence of and is able to affect (inversion effect) the transition → . This substructure, which is not caused by collisions with baryonic matter or by intramolecular dynamics in the molecule, contradicts our knowledge on an isolated hfs-level. We describe the experimental results using the assumption of extra dimensions with a compactification space of the size of the molecule, in which dark matter affects the nuclei by gravity. In , all nuclei of NO 2 are confined in a single compactification space, and in , the two O nuclei of NO 2 are in two different compactification spaces. Whereas and represent stable configurations of the nuclei, represents an unstable configuration because the vibrational motion in shifts one of the two O nuclei periodically off the common compactification space, enabling dark matter interaction to stimulate the transition → with the rate ( τ 0 ) − 1 . We revisit experimental results, which were not understood before, and we give a consistent description of these results based on the above assumption.