State purification of a fast neon metastable beam by collinear optical pumping

摘要

An apparatus has been constructed to produce wellhyphen;characterized fast beams of rare gas metastable atoms for subsequent scattering experiments. Optical pumping by a collinear laser beam can be used to selectively remove either of the two metastable components from the beam. Laserhyphen;inducedhyphen;fluorescence (LIF) techniques can be used to determine the original beam composition and to monitor composition changes resulting from optical absorption. These techniques have been successfully applied to a metastable neon beam produced by nearhyphen;resonant charge transfer of Ne+in Na. A simple model has been developed which accurately reproduces the observed LIF lineshape generated by tuning the laser throught the optical transition frequency.