Uranium isotope separation by nonlinear excitation process

Abstract

Laser Isotope Separation of uranium is one of major applications of laser in a large scale in near future. There are many different ways to separate uranium isotope by laser, e.g. A VLIS and MOLIS. In all these methods, several consequent excitation steps must be applied to pump the desired isotope atoms or molecules to the excited state with high energy at which they can be ionized or dissociated, then separated from other unexcited isotope species. One of the common problems in these methods is that only the first excitation step is selective, other excitation steps have no contribution to the selectivity of the whole excitation process. Therefore, the selectivity of these methods is limited to a certain extent.Laser Isotope Separation of uranium is one of major applications of laser in a large scale in near future. There are many different ways to separate uranium isotope by laser, e.g. A VLIS and MOLIS. In all these methods, several consequent excitation steps must be applied to pump the desired isotope atoms or molecules to the excited state with high energy at which they can be ionized or dissociated, then separated from other unexcited isotope species. One of the common problems in these methods is that only the first excitation step is selective, other excitation steps have no contribution to the selectivity of the whole excitation process. Therefore, the selectivity of these methods is limited to a certain extent.