High-resolution Doppler-reduced laser spectroscopic investigations on an atomic beam of 139 La were carried out to study hyperfine structure of 8 odd levels. The magnetic-dipole coupling constants A and the electric-quadrupole coupling constants B were determined and compared with the data from literature, if available.PACS numbers: 35.10.Fk
IntroductionThe first works concerning the electronic (fine and hyperfine) strncture of lanthanum atom were conducted already in the twenties and thirties of this century.Meggers [1] in 1932 performed first measurements of a large number of spectral lines of lanthanum atom; on the basis of those measurements Russell and Meggers [2] carried out identification of many electronic levels, mostly belonging to the low-lying configurations; this identification has in most cases been confirmed in later works.The first theoretical works, concerning the even configurations, were conducted by Stein [3]. The assignment of the theoretically determined electronic levels to the measured ones, for the even configurations, was performed by Wilson [4] and Ben Ahmed et al. [5,6], who used the least squares method.Anderson [7] was in 1934 the first to investigate the hyperfine stucture of the isotope 139 of lanthanum atom, using a combination of a spectrograph and a Fabry-Perot interferometer. The continuation of those measurements were the works of Murakawa and Kamei [8], Luhrs [9] and Fischer et al. [10], while Ben Ahmed [11] used Fourier spectroscopy. All of those investigations, performed by means of the classical optical spectroscopy, were of a rather limited accuracy.The first precise measurements of the hyperfine structure of the levels belonging to the ground term were performed by Ting in 1957 [12] with the use of the atomic beam magnetic resonance (ABMR) method. The magnetic-dipole (A), electric-quadupole (B) and magnetic-octupole (C) hyperfine splitting constants were obtained.