Ultrafast lasers can pull Uranium-235 out of a sample with 90% efficiency in a single step by targeting the spin of its nucleus.
Separating isotopes for nuclear power or medicine usually requires massive factories and hundreds of stages of processing. This new method uses lasers to exploit the differences in nuclear spin rather than the weight of the atoms. It achieves a level of enrichment in one pass that traditionally takes dozens of cycles. This makes the production of specialized nuclear materials significantly faster and cheaper. This technology could revolutionize how we handle nuclear fuel and medical tracers.
Separation of even-even from even-odd isotopes using ultrafast lasers
arXiv · 2605.00959
We propose a laser isotope separation mechanism in which selectivity arises from nuclear spin rather than isotope shifts, enabling the use of broadband ultrafast lasers. A Ramsey pulse sequence is applied to paramagnetic molecular isotopologues possessing two electronic states coupled by a dipole transition. For even-even isotopologues (nuclear spin $I = 0$), each electronic state is a single level and the time-reversed sequence returns all population to the ground state exactly. For even-odd is