Europium isotope enrichment by magnetic deflection of a polarized atomic beam

Polarized atomic beam has found many applications in studying atomic scattering processes, producing polarized nuclei, measuring surface parameters, verifying the parity violation principle and enriching isotopes. Previous researches, however, were all concentrated on alkali atoms, no work on the production and application of the polarized beam of the multivalence-electron atoms has been reported. As an effort to extend our method of isotope enrichment by magnetic deflection of a polarized atomic beam from alkali atoms to more complicated multivalence-electron atoms, recently we produced a partially polarized europium atomic beam by a single laser optical pumping and observed obvious isotope enrichment effect through the method.