|
ISAC is the premier North American isol-type radioactive beam facility. Operational now for over five years, many of the produced radioactive or so-called exotic nuclei, for example 11Li, are available in intensities higher than anywhere in the world. This opens the door to investigations on the forefront of nuclear and nuclear astrophysics, ranging from experiments to understand nucleosynthesis and abundances of the chemical elements in the universe to the determination of basic properties of atoms, like half-lives and masses.
The mass of an atom is a fundamental property and state-of-the-art mass determination of short-lived exotic isotopes can be done to a level of 10-9, or to a few ten electron volts (eV). This precision in the mass of the atom corresponds to the binding energies of electrons, but is needed for tests of the Standard Model in the context of the unitarity of the CKM matrix, or for neutrino-less double beta decay searches. The best method to achieve this high precision is a Penning-ion trap mass spectrometer, such as TITAN (TRIUMF’s Ion Trap for Atomic and Nuclear physics).
The talk will give an overview of the ISAC facility and recent experimental highlights. An introduction and motivation for high precision mass measurements, and the status of TITAN are also presented.
|
