Experimental study of bound and autoionizing Rydberg states of the europium atom

An isolated-core-excitation (ICE) scheme and stepwise excitation are employed to study the highly excited states of the europium atom. The bound europium spectrum with odd parity in a region of 42400--43500~cm^ - 1 is measured, from which spectral information on 38 transitions, such as level position and relative intensity, can be deduced. Combined with information about excitation calibration and the error estimation process, the selection rules enable us to determine the possible values of total angular momentum J for the observed states. The autoionization spectra of atomic europium, belonging to the 4f^76pnl (l = 0, 2) configurations, are systematically investigated by using the three-step laser resonance ionization spectroscopy (RIS) approach. With the ICE scheme, all the experimental spectra of the autoionizing states have nearly symmetric profiles whose peak positions and widths can be easily obtained. A comparison between our results and those from the relevant literature shows that our work not only confirms many reported states, but also discovers 14 bound states and 16 autoionizing states.