By Irene Hsiao
By shooting a beam of atoms at a crystalline lattice, graduate student Kevin Nihill, postdoctoral scholar Jacob Graham, and Professor Steven Sibener have developed a method of separating isotopes that Sibener compares to the way a prism diffracts white light into the visible spectrum. Published in Physical Review Letters this October, “Separation of Isotopes in Space and Time by Gas-Surface Atomic Diffraction” describes how a supersonic, monovelocity beam of neon isotopes is scattered by a methyl-coated silicon wafer, separating neon-22 and neon-20 at different angles. Their low-cost, energy-efficient method is expected to work on lightweight atoms, up to an atomic mass of 40, and is accomplished without the use of laser excitation or ionization.
Read more about their work at the American Physical Society, the Physics Central Physics Buzz Blog, UChicago News, and Lab Roots.