Resonant Ionization Laser Ion Source (RILIS) With Improved Selectivity Achieved By Ion Pulse Compression Using In-Source Time-of-flight Technique

This paper describes for the first time the improved selectivity of the RILIS made possible by the time-of-flight (TOF) ion bunch compression. Brief description of the compression principles and some preliminary experimental results are presented. In the off-line experiments short ion peaks of natural Li, Na, K, Tm and Yb are observed as ions leave the RILIS-TOF structure. For Tm the ion peaks of 5 μs half-height duration are detected and 1 μs peaks for Sn are predicted. In view of the repetition rate of the ISOLDE-RILIS lasers it is hoped that the selectivity of Sn isotopes production may be improved as much as 100 employing the RILIS with the TOF ion bunch compression and a gating technique.