A high-temperature laser ion source for trace analysis and other applications

We report here on the development of a high-temperature laser ion source useful for trace analysis and other applications. It consists of a high temperature ionization chamber, three tunable dye lasers pumped by copper vapor lasers for stepwise resonant ionization and a Mattauch-Herzog mass spectrometer for the analysis of photo-ions. The principle of the laser ion source and its theoretical efficiency are discussed, where the efficiency of a laser ion source is the ratio of photo-ions extracted out to the number of atoms introduced into the cavity. Experimentally, an efficiency of 2×10−3 has been achieved for technetium. The scheme of gated detection is described which is used for suppress…