A novel vacuum ultra violet lamp for metastable rare gas experiments

Abstract

We report on a new design of a vacuum ultra violet (VUV) lamp for direct optical excitation of high laying atomic states e.g. for excitation of metastable rare gas atoms. The lamp can be directly mounted to ultra high vacuum vessels (p <= 10^(-10) mbar). It is driven by a 2.45 GHz microwave source. For optimum operation it requires powers of approximately 20 W. The VUV light is transmitted through a magnesium fluoride window, which is known to have a decreasing transmittance for VUV photons with time. In our special setup, after a run-time of the VUV lamp of 550 h the detected signal continuously decreased to 25 % of its initial value. This corresponds to a lifetime increase of two orders of magnitude compared to previous setups or commercial lamps.

References in corpus (3)

• One million year old groundwater in the Sahara revealed by krypton-81 and chlorine-36
• Tracing Noble Gas Radionuclides in the Environment
• A Thermal Beam of Metastable Krypton Atoms Produced by Optical Excitation

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Laser-based metastable krypton generation
• Optical Excitation and Trapping of ${}^{81}$Kr
• Optically enhanced production of metastable xenon
• Characterization of a metastable neon beam extracted from a commercial RF ion source
• All-optical production and trapping of metastable noble gas atoms down to the single atom regime
• Enhancement of the ${}^{81}\mathrm{Kr}$ and ${}^{85}\mathrm{Kr}$ count rates by optical pumping
• A VUV light source for enhanced production of metastable krypton and xenon beams