Speaker
Description
Atomic mass measurements of short-live radioactive isotopes are useful to determine the nuclear structure and deviations from the existing nuclear models, to explore the nuclear astrophysics reaction paths that are responsible for creating visible matter and to test predictions of fundamental physics beyond Standard model. Electron beam ion source/trap (EBIST) can charge breed these exotic isotopes, making them highly charged, hence improving the precision of atomic mass measurement as the precision scales linearly with the charge of the species. TRIUMF’s Ion Trap for Atomic and Nuclear science (TITAN) facility has the only online mass measurement Penning trap (MPET) in a radioactive beam facility using an EBIT to enhance mass measurement resolution by using highly charged ions (HCI).
HCIs bred in an EBIT can have larger energy spread creating challenges to mass measurements. A cooler Penning trap (CPET) has been developed at TITAN to sympathetically cool the HCI via Coulomb collisions with simultaneously trapped plasma of self-cooled electrons, prior their transport to the MPET. Combined with the EBIT and MPET, CPET will result in more precise mass measurements of short-lived radioactive nuclides, as well as improve our understanding of the ion-electron beam dynamics. To evaluate the integration of CPET to the MPET in the radioactive beam line setup and to optimize the beam transport, electron and ion trajectory simulations were performed. Hardware upgrades motivated by these simulations and previous challenges were conducted to the off-line CPET setup. Successful co-trapping of ions and electrons was achieved for the first time with the CPET. The progress and challenges towards HCI cooling and integration with the on-line beam facility will be discussed in this presentation.