Heavy-ion beam pumping as a model for nuclear-pumped lasers

Abstract

Heavy-ion accelerators can provide various beams from protons to uranium ions with energies ranging from a few keV/u to more than 1 GeV/u. The Munich Tandem van de Graaff accelerator has been used for most of the experiments described in this article. It can provide continuous or pulsed beams of almost all elements with particle energies of about 3.5 MeV/u. The pulse width is typically 2 ns. Maximum DC-beam currents of the order of 10 μA can be obtained, for example, for 32S ions. When the beam is focused to a beam spot of about 3 mm diameter, the flux of the ions is comparable to the flux of fission fragments used for nuclear-pumped lasers. Ion beam pumping is therefore well suited for model experiments of nuclear-pumped lasers. Technical aspects of ion beam-pumped lasers are discussed and the results of the lasers that have thus far been pumped by this method aresummarized. As ion beams are available either continuous or at high-pulse repetition rates ranging from tens of kHz to MHz, detailed spectroscopic and time-resolved studies of the emission of light induced by heavy-ion excitation of the target material can easily be performed. Experiments in which the emission by rare gas excimers and line radiation from atoms and ions has been studied are described. Lifetime measurements of excited levels at different target densities were used to measure collisional rate constants.