Improving the Selectivity of the ISOLDE Resonance Ionization Laser Ion Source and In-Source Laser Spectroscopy of Polonium

Exotic atomic nuclei far away from stability are fascinating objects to be studied in many scientic elds such as atomic-, nuclear-, and astrophysics. Since these are often short-lived isotopes, it is necessary to couple their production with immediate extraction and delivery to an experiment. This is the purpose of the on-line isotope separator facility, ISOLDE, at CERN. An essential aspect of this laboratory is the Resonance Ionization Laser Ion Source (RILIS) because it provides a fast and highly selective means of ionizing the reaction products. This technique is also a sensitive laser-spectroscopy tool for the development and improvement of electron excitation schemes for the resonant laser photoionization and the study of the nuclear structure or fundamental atomic physics. Each of these aspects of the RILIS applications are subjects of this thesis work: a new device for the suppression of unwanted surface ionized contaminants in RILIS ion beams, known as the Laser Ion Source and Trap (LIST), was implemented into the ISOLDE framework, further developed and characterized; a new electron-excitation scheme for the laser ionization of calcium was developed; the ionization energy of polonium was determined by high-precision Rydberg spectroscopy; and nally, the rst ever on-line physics operation of the highly selective LIST enabled the study of nuclear structure properties of 217Po by in-source resonance ionization spectroscopy.