Ultrasensitive laser isotope analysis in an ion-storage ring

Abstract

We propose a novel method for ultrasensitive isotope analysis that combines magnetic mass selection, resonant charge-exchange neutralization, and resonant laser ionization. Our method attains high isotopic abundance selectivity by means of continuous multistage separation of ions stored in a small ring. For the environmentally interesting case of 90Sr versus 88Sr we estimate that sensitivity better than 10−15 for a throughput of 1013 atoms/sec and an efficiency (after the ion source) greater than 10% are readily achievable.