Conveners
Session 6 - Ion traps and laser techniques
- Georg Bollen (Michigan State University)
Today’s most precise time and frequency measurements are performed with optical atomic clocks. However, it has been proposed that they could potentially be outperformed by a nuclear clock, which employs a nuclear transition instead of an atomic shell transition. There is only one known nuclear state that could serve as a nuclear frequency standard using currently available technology, namely,...
The studies of short-lived nuclides,far from the valley of stability, require fast and precise mass measurements to elucidate fundamental nuclear properties related to the nuclear mass and binding energy. Many exotic nuclides have isomeric states, therefore, it is necessary to have a high resolving power, sufficient for their separation. The Phase-Imaging Ion-Cyclotron-Resonance (PI-ICR)...
TRIUMF’s Ion Trap for Atomic and Nuclear science (TITAN) located at the Isotope Separator and Accelerator (ISAC) facility, TRIUMF, Vancouver, Canada is a multiple ion trap system capable of performing high-precision mass measurements and in-trap decay spectroscopy. In particular TITAN has specialised in fast Penning trap mass spectrometry of singly-charged, short-lived exotic nuclei using its...
The quest for the heaviest element is at the forefront of nuclear physics. Superheavy elements (SHE), with 104 protons (Z) or more, owe their very existence to an enhanced stability resulting from nuclear shell effects. High-precision Penning-trap mass spectrometry (PTMS) is an established tool for investigations of nuclear structure-related properties, reflected in binding energy...
The ISOL facility ALTO, located at Orsay in France, provides stable ion beams from a 15 MV tandem accelerator and neutron-rich radioactive ion beams from the interaction of a γ-flux induced by a 50 MeV 10 µA electron beam in a uranium carbide target. A magnetic dipole mass separator and a resonance ionization laser ion source allow selecting the ions of interest. New setups are under...
Nuclear masses provide a direct probe of nuclear structure effects and are necessary inputs for studies of nuclear astrophysics. Measuring the masses of neutron-rich nuclei far from stability, which are relevant to heavy element nucleosynthesis, is difficult due to low production rates in the laboratory, and short lifetimes. Over the past three decades, Penning trap mass spectrometry has been...
