Recent progress in laser spectroscopy of the actinides

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in laser spectroscopy of actinides, highlighting methodological progress, experimental challenges, and key findings on atomic and nuclear properties of heavy elements up to nobelium.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent experimental techniques and results in laser spectroscopy of actinides, emphasizing developments in accessing exotic nuclei and understanding their structure.

Findings

Successful application of buffer-gas-stopping techniques

Identification of atomic transitions in heavy actinides

New insights into nuclear properties of nobelium

Abstract

The interest to perform laser spectroscopy in the heaviest elements arises from the strong impact of relativistic effects, electron correlations and quantum electrodynamics on their atomic structure. Once this atomic structure is well understood, laser spectroscopy also provides access to nuclear properties such as spins, mean square charge radii and electromagnetic moments in a nuclear-model independent way. This is of particular interest for the heaviest actinides around $N = 152$, a region of shell stabilized deformed nuclei. The experimental progress of laser spectroscopy in this region benefitted from continuous methodological and technical developments such as the introduction of buffer-gas-stopping techniques that enabled the access to ever more exotic nuclei far-off stability. The key challenges faced in this endeavor are small yields, nuclides with rather short half-lives and the need to search for atomic transitions in a wide spectral range guided by theoretical predictions. This paper describes the basics of the most common experimental methods and discusses selected recent results on the atomic and nuclear properties of the actinides up to nobelium where pioneering experiments were performed at the GSI Helmholtzzentrum f\"ur Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, Germany.