Precision measurement of the branching fractions of the 4p 2P3/2 decay of Ca II (original) (raw)

We perform precision measurements of the branching ratios of the 4p 2 P 3/2 level decay of a single 40 Ca + ion suspended in a linear Paul trap. High precision is achieved by a novel technique based on monitoring the population transfer when repeatedly pumping the ion between different internal states. The branching fractions into the 4s 2 S 1/2 , 3d 2 D 5/2 and 3d 2 D 3/2 levels are found to be 0.9347(3), 0.0587(2) and 0.00661(4), respectively. For the branching ratio A(P 3/2 −S 1/2 )/ J A(P 3/2 −DJ ) = 14.31(5), we find a forty-fold improvement in accuracy as compared to the best previous measurement.