Mass Determination of ^20,22Ne, ^36,40Ar, and ⁸⁶Kr for Tests of the Performance of a Penning Trap when Using Highly Charged Ions

Atomic mass values are used in various fields of physics as indispensable parameters often requiring a very high accuracy. Until recently the mass measurements were performed in classical mass spectrometers reaching in the best cases a mass uncertainty of about 10 ppb. Penning traps are now able to determine atomic masses at an accuracy several orders of magnitude better. The Penning trap mass spectrometer SMILETRAP at the Manne Siegbahn Laboratory has been used to determine the masses of a number of isotopes with mass numbers in the region 1–204 and charges from 1+ to 52+, making use of the fact that the precision increases linearly with the charge state of the ion. In this paper we present mass measurements on ^20,22Ne, ^36,40Ar, and ⁸⁶Kr at an uncertainty about 1 ppb. The masses of the five isotopes are 19.992 440 175 9(20) u, 21.991 385 115(19) u, 35.967 545 105(29) u, 39.962 383 123 2(30) u and 85.910 610 730(110) u respectively. These mass determinstions have been used to determine several properties of the SMILETRAP mass spectrometer.