A polarized hydrogen/deuterium atomic beam source for internal target experiments

A high-brightness hydrogen/deuterium atomic beam source is presented. The apparatus, previously used in electron scattering experiments with tensor-polarized deuterium (Ferro-Luzzi et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 77 (1996) 2630; van den Brand et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 78 (1997) 1235; Zhou et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 82 (1998) 687; Bouwhuis et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 82 (1999) 3755), was configured as a source for internal target experiments to measure single- and double-polarization observables, with either polarized hydrogen or vector/tensor polarized deuterium. The atomic beam intensity was enhanced by a factor of ∼2.5 by optimizing the Stern–Gerlach focusing system using high tip-field (∼1.5 T) rare-earth permanent magnets, and by increasing the pumping speed in the beam-formation chamber. Fluxes of (5.9±0.2)×1016 1H/s were measured in a ∅12 mm×122 mm compression tube with its entrance at a distance of 27 cm from the last focusing element. The total output flux amounted to (7.6±0.2)×1016 1H/s.