Towards in-jet resonance ionization spectroscopy: An injection-locked Titanium:Sapphire laser system for the PALIS-facility

This article presents a pulsed narrowband injection-locked Titanium:Sapphire laser aimed for high-resolution in-jet resonance ionization spectroscopy at the SLOWRI/PALIS at RIKEN. The laser has been integrated into the PALIS laser laboratory enabling it to be utilized with the existing broadband Titanium:Sapphire and dye lasers. The seed efficiency has been evaluated to be close to unity over the master laser wavelength range ∼ 753 to 791 nm, and the slope efficiency, namely the ratio of the pump power to the output power, was determined to be ∼ 30 % at 780 nm. A two-step ionization scheme with 386.4016 nm first step and 286.731 nm second step into an autoionizing state was developed for resonance ionization spectroscopy of 93Nb. Magnetic hyperfine coupling constants of 1866±8 MHz and 1536±7 MHz were measured for the ground and excited state, respectively, in a good agreement with the literature values. A Gaussian dominated Voigt linewidth of 434.5 ± 7.4 MHz was extracted from the hyperfine spectra measured for niobium. In addition, the resolution of the in-jet resonance ionization in PALIS is estimated through numerical methods.