Possibilities of investigations of the temporal variation of the α constant in the holmium atom

The present work reports the new experimental results concerning the hyperfine structure in the holmium atom. The transitions and particular electronic levels were selected from the point of view of their possible application for the experimental investigations of the temporal variation of the fine structure constant α. For the suitable nearly degenerate level pairs already proposed in the literature, preliminary excitation and detection schemes were proposed in the present work. As a result of the targeted search for alternative excitation or detection possibilities, 5 new odd-parity electronic levels were found, and their energies and hyperfine structure constants A and B were determined. On this basis, alternative excitation and detection schemes for α variation studies in the holmium atom could be proposed.