High Efficiency Noble Gas Trace Analysis employing a magneto-optical trap for Earth Sciences and Non-proliferation Studies

这个项目的想法是实现一个具有单原子探测能力的高效激光原子陷阱，用于稀有气体痕量分析，在地球科学和核不扩散方面有几个开创性的应用。与其他稀有气体分析方法相比，样本量可以减少两个数量级，从而允许现有标准方法无法实现的新应用。我们将专注于稀有的氪同位素，因为它具有广泛的重要应用领域，并且可以相对较好地利用激光冷却技术。在这里提出的第一个三年资助期内，我们将专注于仪器的开发和初步研究，展示小样本量和高时间分辨率在不同科学领域的适用性，包括地下水研究、核不扩散验证和气象模式验证。所提议的系统的高效率将基于二维和三维磁光原子陷阱与稀有气体原子的直接光激发的独特组合。我们将通过测量其与已知浓度的同位素的比率来确定感兴趣的同位素的浓度。为了减少系统误差和测量时间，该系统专门为同时计数两种同位素而设计。将特别注意原封不动地提取测量的样品，以供更好的统计、实验室比对、样品校准、与其他分析技术一起使用和档案储存。

The idea of this project is to realize a high efficient laser atom trap with single atom detection capability for rare gas trace analysis with several groundbreaking applications in Earth sciences and nuclear non-proliferation. Compared to other methods of rare gas analysis the sample size can be reduced by two orders of magnitude allowing for new applications not accessible to current standard methods. We will concentrate on rare krypton isotopes for its wide area of important applications and its relatively good accessibility to laser cooling techniques. In the first 3-year funding period proposed here, we will concentrate on the instrumental development and first pilot studies demonstrating the applicability of small sample sizes and high temporal resolution in different fields of science as diverse as groundwater research, nuclear non-proliferation verification and meteorological model validation.The high efficiency of the proposed system will be based on a unique combination of a 2- and 3-dimensional magneto-optical atom trap with direct optical excitation of the noble gas atoms. We will determine the concentration of the isotope of interest by measuring its ratio with respect to an isotope with known concentration. To reduce systematic errors and measurement time, the system is especially designed for counting both isotopes simultaneously. Special care will be taken to extract the measured sample unaltered for reuse for better statistics, laboratory intercomparison exercises, calibration of samples, use with other analyzing techniques and archival storage.