Abstract
Laser ablation opens a material-independent method to produce ions from transition metals for laser spectroscopy. To overcome some drawbacks of this process, an ion source is under development at TU Darmstadt. A distinctive feature of this source is that ions are produced via laser ablation in presence of helium buffer gas where they stop and cool in the process of their collisions with the buffer gas atoms and are then extracted by the gas flow into low-pressure conditions through the supersonic nozzle. The compact RF-only funnel ion guide placed on the axis behind the nozzle exit allows for effective extraction of high-quality ion beams into a pressure region below 10− 4 mbar. The extraction is realized by using the gas flow trough a supersonic nozzle and an RF-only funnel ion guide, followed by a second nozzle and an RF+DC funnel representing two differential pumping stages. The technical details of this laser ablation ion source are described and the results of the first tests with the RF-only funnel are presented.
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Open Access funding provided by Projekt DEAL. We acknowledge financial support from the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) under Contract No. 05P19RDFN1 and from HIC for FAIR. T.R. acknowledges support from HGS-HIRe.
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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Proceedings of PLATAN 2019, 1st International Conference, Merger of the Poznan Meeting on Lasers and Trapping Devices in Atomic Nuclei Research and the International Conference on Laser Probing, Mainz, Germany 19-24 May 2019
Edited by Krassimira Marinova, Michael Block, Klaus D.A. Wendt and Magdalena Kowalska
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Ratajczyk, T., Bollinger, P., Lellinger, T. et al. Towards a He-buffered laser ablation ion source for collinear laser spectroscopy. Hyperfine Interact 241, 52 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10751-020-1698-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10751-020-1698-0
Keywords
- Ion source
- Laser ablation
- RF funnel
- Gas dynamic and ion trajectory simulations
- Collinear laser spectroscopy