Laser resonance ionization for ultra-trace analysis on long-lived radioactive isotopes

Benefiting from the continuous laser developments, resonance ionization can be applied for a variety of experiments on radioactive isotopes, e.g. as a laser ion source for producing pure beams of short-lived isotopes at on-line facilities. In this paper the application of a compact set-up for resonance ionization mass spectrometry for ultra-trace analysis of the long-lived isotope Ca-41 is described. With this set-up a purely optical selectivity of 3×10⁹ and an overall detection efficiency of 1.2(4)×10⁻⁵ are demonstrated.