Dr. Gottipaty Rao and Dr. Eugene Hecht have led students in research using lasers to probe the hyperfine structure of atoms.

Atomic hyperfine structure studies employing high-resolution laser
The hyperfine structure of atomic levels can be described in terms of the interaction of atomic electrons with the nuclear multipole moments—nuclear charge, magnetic dipole, electric quadrupole, magnetic octupole, and higher order terms. Doppler free techniques such as saturation spectroscopy and its variants, intermodulated optogalvanic spectroscopy (IMOGS) and polarization intermodulated excitation (POLINEX) and Doppler limited spectroscopy techniques are employed for the measurement of the hyperfine structure of atomic states.