Isotope Separation of Bromine Molecules: A Novel Method

Wave packets are spatially localized, mesoscopic object in quantum mechanics which are known to manifest interesting phenomena, like revival and fractional revivals, during their course of time evolution when the energy contains nonlinear dependency in the quantum number. Molecular isotope separation from a mixture is experimentally carried out in the literature through different methods: laser isotope separation, wave packet isotope separation, etc. However, the minimum evolution time required for such separation as given by the autocorrelation function is quite long \( ({ \sim }2T_{rev} ) \), which is not favorable for a quantum system due to its unavoidable interaction with the environment. We propose a novel method to separate isotopes of Bromine molecule, 79Br2 and 81Br2, in much smaller time compared to that in the existing literature by introducing an initial time delay between the two lasers while preparing the wave packets. The particular observation time is nothing but a chosen fractional revival instant, coincident for both the isotopes.