Ramsey Method of Separated Oscillatory Fields for High-Precision Penning Trap Mass Spectrometry

S. George, S. Baruah, B. Blank, K. Blaum, M. Breitenfeldt, U. Hager, F. Herfurth, A. Herlert, A. Kellerbauer, H.-J. Kluge, M. Kretzschmar, D. Lunney, R. Savreux, S. Schwarz, L. Schweikhard, and C. Yazidjian
Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 162501 – Published 16 April 2007

Abstract

Ramsey’s method of separated oscillatory fields is applied to the excitation of the cyclotron motion of short-lived ions in a Penning trap to improve the precision of their measured mass values. The theoretical description of the extracted ion-cyclotron-resonance line shape is derived and its correctness demonstrated experimentally by measuring the mass of the short-lived Ca38 nuclide with an uncertainty of 1.1×108 using the Penning trap mass spectrometer ISOLTRAP at CERN. The mass of the superallowed beta emitter Ca38 contributes for testing the theoretical corrections of the conserved-vector-current hypothesis of the electroweak interaction. It is shown that the Ramsey method applied to Penning trap mass measurements yields a statistical uncertainty similar to that obtained by the conventional technique but 10 times faster. Thus the technique is a new powerful tool for high-precision mass measurements.

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  • Received 7 December 2006

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.98.162501

©2007 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

S. George1,2,*, S. Baruah3, B. Blank4, K. Blaum1,2, M. Breitenfeldt3, U. Hager5, F. Herfurth1, A. Herlert6, A. Kellerbauer7, H.-J. Kluge1,8, M. Kretzschmar2, D. Lunney9, R. Savreux1, S. Schwarz10, L. Schweikhard3, and C. Yazidjian1

  • 1GSI, Planckstraße 1, 64291 Darmstadt, Germany
  • 2Institut für Physik, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, 55099 Mainz, Germany
  • 3Institut für Physik, Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität, 17487 Greifswald, Germany
  • 4Centre d’Etudes Nucléaires de Bordeaux-Gradignan, 33175 Gradignan Cedex, France
  • 5Department of Physics, University of Jyväskylä, P.O. Box 35 (YFL), 40014 Jyväskylä, Finland
  • 6Physics Department, CERN, 1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland
  • 7Max-Planck Institut für Kernphysik, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany
  • 8Physikalisches Institut, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany
  • 9CSNSM-IN2P3-CNRS, 91405 Orsay-Campus, France
  • 10NSCL, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824-1321, USA

  • *Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. Email address: george@uni-mainz.de

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Vol. 98, Iss. 16 — 20 April 2007

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