Abstract
Traditional beam-foil methods for measuring lifetimes of low-lying atomic levels are generally impractical beyond because of the correspondingly shorter flight times when lifetimes become less than a few tens of picoseconds. We recently reported the results of an experiment using a novel two-foil method to measure the 9.5-psec lifetime of the level in heliumlike krypton. We describe here the results of an extension of that work in which we measured the time evolution of the excited state population between the foils by observing the dependence upon foil separation of the charge-state distributions emerging from the second foil. The results are consistent with the well-known power-law dependence of Rydberg-fed atomic transitions observed in beam-foil studies, but probe a much shorter time scale than has hitherto been accessible.
- Received 20 July 1999
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.61.042708
©2000 American Physical Society