State purification of a fast neon metastable beam by collinear optical pumping

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Abstract
An apparatus has been constructed to produce well‐characterized fast beams of rare gas metastable atoms for subsequent scattering experiments. Optical pumping by a collinear laser beam can be used to selectively remove either of the two metastable components from the beam. Laser‐induced‐fluorescence (LIF) techniques can be used to determine the original beam composition and to monitor composition changes resulting from optical absorption. These techniques have been successfully applied to a metastable neon beam produced by near‐resonant charge transfer of Ne+ in Na. A simple model has been developed which accurately reproduces the observed LIF lineshape generated by tuning the laser throught the optical transition frequency.