title: Production of negative osmium ions by laser desorption and ionization.
abstract: The interest to produce negative osmium ions is manifold in the realm of high-accuracy ion trap experiments: high-resolution nearly Doppler-free laser spectroscopy, antihydrogen formation in its ground state, and contributions to neutrino mass spectrometry. Production of these ions is generally accomplished by sputtering an Os sample with Cs(+) ions at tens of keV. Though this is a well-established method commonly used at accelerators, these kind of sources are quite demanding and tricky to operate. Therefore, the development of a more straightforward and cost effective production scheme will be of benefit for ion trap and other experiments. Such a scheme makes use of desorption and ionization with pulsed lasers and identification of the ions by time-of-flight mass spectrometry. First investigations of negative osmium ion production using a pulsed laser for desorption and ionization and a commercial matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight system for identification has demonstrated the suitability of this technique. More than 10(3) negative osmium ions per shot were registered after bombarding pure osmium powder with a 5 ns pulse width Nd:yttrium aluminum garnet laser. The limitation in the ion number was imposed by the detection limit of the microchannel plate detector.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Física Atómica Molecular y Nuclear, Universidad de Granada, 18071 Granada, Spain. danielrodriguez@ugr.es
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Rodríguez
authors.forename: V
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Sonnenschein
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Blaum
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Block
authors.forename: H-J
authors.initials: HJ
authors.lastname: Kluge
authors.forename: A M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Lallena
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Raeder
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Wendt