The decade of 1965–1975 saw a revolution in optical spectroscopy, culminating in the introduction of lasers into high‐resolution spectroscopy. Several laboratories immediately put the dye laser to good use for nuclear physics, by using it to measure hyperfine structures and isotope shifts. These developments have produced new, interesting, and at times unexpected, results. Currently, the main motivation of these studies is to understand the behavior of the nuclear charge distribution as the number of neutrons is varied. The required data on isotope shifts for long chains of stable and radioactive species, which until recently existed only for mercury and thallium, are now becoming available for other elements. Experiments are now extending the isotope‐shift measurements by “off‐line” techniques to nuclei with half lives greater than about 10 minutes, and by “on‐line” techniques with accelerators and isotope separators to nuclei with half‐lives in the second and sometimes millisecond ranges. The following article by Hans Schuessler concentrates on on‐line techniques applied to nuclei far from the region of stability.
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February 1981
February 01 1981
New techniques of hyperfine spectroscopy
High‐resolution atomic spectra can give us detailed information about unstable nuclei, including angular momenta, electric and magnetic multipole moments and variation in charge radii as a function of neutron number
Physics Today 34 (2), 26–33 (1981);