Further development of a Lamb-shift polarimeter

Abstract

The Lamb-shift polarimeter (LSP) is a useful detection apparatus to verify nuclear spin polarizationfor atoms, molecules and ions consisting of hydrogen and/or its isotopes. Its functionality relieson the creation of metastable hydrogen atoms via a charge exchange reaction that preserves thenuclear polarization in a strong magnetic field. The nuclear polarization is then determinedby analyzing the relative occupation numbers between different metastable hyperfine states withdifferent nuclear spin projection . This makes the LSP a very rapid and cost efficient detectionmethod for beams with a beam energy in the keV range as no pre-acceleration is needed. In thepast it was shown that many of the above mentioned candidates like $^+$, $^+$, $$ etc. could bemeasured with success, and in this work an additional ion, i.e. $^−$ , adds up to the list. Furthermore,the measurements of polarized $^−$ ions have been performed for pulsed beams as it was in usefor long times at the cooler synchrotron COSY in Jülich. In the second part, a theoretical outlookfor possible adaptations to the spin filter is given, which is an important component of the LSP.This paves the way to realize experiments investigating the bound beta decay or parity violation inmetastable hydrogen atoms. In addition, a short outlook for possible applications of $^3$ beamsis given