Lifetime Measurement for 6snp Rydberg States of Barium

We present a simple and efficient method for measuring the atomic lifetimes in order of tens of microseconds and demonstrate it in the lifetime determination of barium Rydberg states. This method extracts the lifetime information from the time-of-flight spectrum directly, which is much more efficient than other methods such as the time-delayed field ionization and the traditional laser induced fluorescence. The lifetimes determined with our method for barium Rydberg 6snp (n=37–59) series are well coincident with the values deduced from the absolute oscillator strengths of barium which were given in the literature [J. Phys. B 14 (1981) 4489, 29 (1996) 655] on experiments.