Abstract

The study of collisions between excited atoms requires high-intensity atomic beams to achieve detector signals of sufficient strength. Producing large densities of excited rare gas atoms R^*(*) is especially difficult, since with conventional sources metastable atoms R^* make up a tiny fraction of ≈10⁻⁵ of the total beam flux. In such cases, "brightening" the beam is the only way to achieve a sufficiently large flux.

© 1994 IEEE