Naoki Numadate

Hyperfine-structures of highly charged ions (HCIs) are favourable spectroscopic targets for exploring fundamental physics as well as nuclear properties. Recent proposals of HCI atomic clocks highlight their importance, especially for many-electron HCIs, and they have been theoretically investigated by refining atomic-structure calculations. Nonetheless, no established spectroscopic method is currently available to verify these theoretical calculations. Here, we demonstrate hyperfine-structure-resolved laser spectroscopy of HCIs in an electron beam ion trap plasma, employing the magnetic-dipole transition in 4$d^{9}$5$s$ of $^{127}$I$^{7+}$. Ion-state manipulation by controlled electron collisions in the well-defined laboratory plasma enables laser-induced fluorescence spectroscopy of trapped HCIs. The observed spectrum of evaporatively cooled ions under the low magnetic field shows remarkable features reflecting the hyperfine-structures. The present demonstration using the combined optical and plasma approach provides a new benchmark for state-of-the-art atomic calculations of hyperfine-structures in many-electron HCIs and offers possibilities for a variety of unexploited experiments.

The methods to measure the polarization of the x-rays from highly charged heavy ions with a significantly higher accuracy than the existing technology is needed to explore relativistic and quantum electrodynamics (QED) effects including the Breit interaction. We developed the Electron Beam Ion Trap Compton Camera (EBIT-CC), a new Compton polarimeter with pixelated multi-layer silicon and cadmium telluride counters. The EBIT-CC detects the three-dimensional position of Compton scattering and photoelectric absorption, and thus the degree of polarization of incoming x-rays can be evaluated. We attached the EBIT-CC on the Tokyo Electron Beam Ion Trap (Tokyo-EBIT) in the University of Electro-Communications. An experiment was performed to evaluate its polarimetric capability through an observation of radiative recombination x-rays emitted from highly charged krypton ions, which were generated by the Tokyo-EBIT. The Compton camera of the EBIT-CC was calibrated for the 75 keV x-rays. We developed event reconstruction and selection procedures and applied them to every registered event. As a result, we successfully obtained the polarization degree with an absolute uncertainty of 0.02. This uncertainty is small enough to probe the difference between the zero-frequency approximation and full-frequency-dependent calculation for the Breit interaction, which is expected for dielectronic recombination x-rays of highly charged heavy ions.