Measurements of polarization effects: A pseudorandom polarization switching time‐of‐flight spectrometer

A new method is presented to measure the polarization dependence of double‐differential cross sections for the scattering of laser‐excited atoms. This allows us to study these polarization effects separated for different scattering processes, which contribute to the total differential cross section at one laboratory angle. A first application demonstrates that the new technique allows us to study the polarization dependence of the reactive and the nonreactive cross sections for collisions of Na(32 P 3 / 2) with HF molecules even though, in this example, the polarization dependence of the total differential cross section is only 0.5%.