10²-fold Improvement in Hyperpolarized ¹³¹Xe Production Using Spin Exchange Optical Pumping and the First Measurement of the Spin-Dependent Scattering Length in Polarized Neutron-Polarized ¹³¹Xe Using Pseudomagnetic Precession

¹³¹Xe (I=3/2) has a strong quadrupole moment which leads to very a fast nuclear spin relaxation and is extremely hard to polarize. We achieved ¹³¹Xe polarization-density product up to 7.6±1.5% in ~8.5×10²⁰ nuclei using a Spin Exchange Optical Pumping system optimized via an in situ NMR spectrometer. This is a two-order-of-magnitude improvement over previous attempts^a. It has since enabled our first measurement of spin-dependent forward scattering amplitudes in polarized neutron-polarized ¹³¹Xe interaction. We performed neutron pseudomagnetic precession experiments^b in polarized ¹³¹Xe and ¹²⁹Xe with the J-NSE Neutron Spin Echo spectrometer at FRM II reactor facility in Germany. The incoherent scattering lengths of Xe nuclei from pseudomagnetic precession measurements will help determine the sensitivity of envisioned Time Reversal Invariance Violation experiments on the 3.2 eV p-wave resonance of ¹³¹Xe^c.

a. K. F. Stupic, Z. I. Cleveland, G. E. Pavlovskaya, and T. Meersmann, J. Magn. Reson. 208, 58 (2011)

b. Zimmer, O., Ehlers, G., Farago, B. et al. EPJ direct 4, 1–28 (2002)

c. J. D. Bowman and V. Gudkov, Phys. Rev. C 90, 065503 (2014)