Schemes for radiative polarization of ion beams in storage rings

Abstract

It is argued that in storage rings hydrogen-like ions can be polarized due to their large magnetic moment and the existence of hyperfine ground-state levels. While spontaneous spin-flip transitions between the Zeeman sublevels in magnetic fields of the order of a few T lead to unacceptable building-up times of the polarization, this time is drastically reduced by radiative transitions between selectively laser-excited sublevels of different hyperfine states. Model calculations for 151 63Eu with nuclear spin 5/2 show that under realistic experimental conditions the electron and the nucleus will be polarized close to 100% within several minutes. The proposed scheme can easily be applied to other ions with nuclear spin >1/2.