Takahiko Masuda, Tsukasa Watanabe, Kjeld Beeks, Hiroyuki Fujimoto, Takahiro Hiraki, Hiroyuki Kaino, Shinji Kitao, Yuki Miyamoto, Koichi Okai, Noboru Sasao, Makoto Seto, Thorsten Schumm, Yudai Shigekawa, Kenji Tamasaku, Satoshi Uetake, Atsushi Yamaguchi, Yoshitaka Yoda, Akihiro Yoshimi, Koji Yoshimura
This paper presents an absolute X-ray photon energy measurement method that uses a Bond diffractometer. The proposed system enables the prompt and rapid in-situ measurement of photon energies in a wide energy range. The diffractometer uses a reference silicon single crystal plate and a highly accurate angle encoder called SelfA. We evaluate the performance of the system by repeatedly measuring the energy of the first excited state of the potassium-40 nuclide. The excitation energy is determined as 29829.39(6) eV. It is one order of magnitude more precise than the previous measurement. The estimated uncertainty of the photon energy measurement was 0.7 ppm as a standard deviation and the maximum observed deviation was 2 ppm.
Takahiko Masuda, Akihiro Yoshimi, Akira Fujieda, Hiroyuki Fujimoto, Hiromitsu Haba, Hideaki Hara, Takahiro Hiraki, Hiroyuki Kaino, Yoshitaka Kasamatsu, Shinji Kitao, Kenji Konashi, Yuki Miyamoto, Koichi Okai, Sho Okubo, Noboru Sasao, Makoto Seto, Thorsten Schumm, Yudai Shigekawa, Kenta Suzuki, Simon Stellmer, Kenji Tamasaku, Satoshi Uetake, Makoto Watanabe, Tsukasa Watanabe, Yuki Yasuda, Atsushi Yamaguchi, Yoshitaka Yoda, Takuya Yokokita, Motohiko Yoshimura, Koji Yoshimura
Thorium-229 is a unique case in nuclear physics: it presents a metastable first excited state Th-229m, just a few electronvolts above the nuclear ground state. This so-called isomer is accessible by VUV lasers, which allows transferring the amazing precision of atomic laser spectroscopy to nuclear physics. Being able to manipulate the Th-229 nuclear states at will opens up a multitude of prospects, from studies of the fundamental interactions in physics to applications as a compact and robust nuclear clock. However, direct optical excitation of the isomer or its radiative decay back to the ground state has not yet been observed, and a series of key nuclear structure parameters such as the exact energies and half-lives of the low-lying nuclear levels of Th-229 are yet unknown. Here we present the first active optical pumping into Th-229m. Our scheme employs narrow-band 29 keV synchrotron radiation to resonantly excite the second excited state, which then predominantly decays into the isomer. We determine the resonance energy with 0.07 eV accuracy, measure a half-life of 82.2 ps, an excitation linewidth of 1.70 neV, and extract the branching ratio of the second excited state into the ground and isomeric state respectively. These measurements allow us to re-evaluate gamma spectroscopy data that have been collected over 40~years.