Magneto-optical trap reaction microscope for photoionization of cold strontium atoms

Abstract

We developed a magneto-optical trap reaction microscope (MOTREMI) for strontium atoms by combining the multi-particle coincident detection with laser cooling technique. Present compact injection system can provide cold Sr atoms in three modes of 2D MOT, molasses and 3D MOT, delivering targets with adjustable densities and ratios of the ground state $5s^2$ ($^1S_{0}$) and the excited states $5s5p$ ($^{1}P_{1}$ and $^{3}P_{J}$ etc). The target profiles for the temperature, the density and the size of 3D MOT as well as cold atomic flux in 2D MOT model were characterized in details. With present state-of-the-art setup, we demonstrated the single photoionization of Sr atoms with molasses by absorption of few 800-nm photons, where Sr$^+$ and $e$ were detected in coincidence and most of ionization channels were identified taking into account photoelectron energy, laser-intensity dependence, and target dependence. The best momentum resolution of coincident Sr$^+$ and $e$ along time-of-flight are achieved up to 0.12 a.u. and 0.02 a.u., respectively. Present photoelectron momentum distributions ionized from the ground state and a few excited states illuminate unprecedentedly rich landscapes manifesting prominent features for multi-photon absorption. The full vector momenta of electrons and recoil ion in coincidence paves the way to further studying two-electron correlation dynamics and multi-electron effects in the multiple ionization of alkaline-earth atoms in the ultraviolet region.