Abstract

Jet-cooled gaseous UF₆ is dissociated iso- tope-selectively by intense pulses from multifrequency 16 µm laser system developed by our group at RIKEN. One advantage of our process lies in the fact that it requires very low fluence for dissociation thanks to the very high vibrational state density of UF₆. On the other hand, relatively low vibrational frequencies of UF₆ necessitates the reduction of gas temperature below 100 K in order to populate UF₆ in the ground state, which is the prerequisite for high separation factors. Our group has reported that sufficiently high separation factors were observed by our method.

© 1995 IEEE