Ground-based optical telescopes suffer degraded image quality due to turbulence in Earth's atmosphere. Without any correction, the angular resolution of a 20 meter telescope is no better than that of a 20 cm telescope (the larger telescope can resolve much dimmer objects, but not smaller objects).

Introduction

Spin-Exchange Optical Pumping (SEOP) is the process of transferring angular momentum (polarization) from an optically pumped alkali metal vapor to the nuclei in a substance of interest. The most commonly used targets for SEOP are gases like $^3$He or $^{129}$Xe, which both have spin-$\tfrac{1}{2}$ nuclei. These gases, under certain favorable conditions, can maintain their polarization for hundreds of hours (this is the longitudinal relaxation time $T_1$). In a magnetic field, these gases have an equilibrium polarization of about 2 ppm (about 499,999 spins are aligned with the field, and about 500,001 anti-aligned out of each million), but once hyperpolarized using SEOP, they can achieve up to ~50% polarization (about 250,000 aligned and 750,000 anti-aligned out of each million spins). These 'hyperpolarized' gases can then be used in many applications, including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).