Exploring the Western Shoreline of the Nuclear Chart: What Precision Mass Spectrometry with TITAN-TRIUMF Can Teach Us About Nuclear Existence (2024)

Preprint Article Version 1 This version is not peer-reviewed

Version 1 : Received: 5 September 2024 / Approved: 5 September 2024 / Online: 5 September 2024 (14:58:54 CEST)

How to cite: Czihaly, A.; Beck, S.; Bergmann, J.; Brown, C. L.; Brunner, T.; Dickel, T.; Dilling, J.; Dunling, E.; Flowerdew, J.; Hockenbery, Z.; Jacobs, A.; Kootte, B.; Malbrunot-Ettenauer, S.; Maldonado Millán, F.; Mollaebrahimi, A.; Leistenschneider, E.; Lykiardopoulou, E. M.; Mukul, I.; Paul, S. F.; Plaß, W. R.; Reiter, M. P.; Scheidenberger, C.; Tracy, Jr., J. L.; Kwiatkowski, A. A. Exploring the Western Shoreline of the Nuclear Chart: What Precision Mass Spectrometry with TITAN-TRIUMF Can Teach Us About Nuclear Existence. Preprints 2024, 2024090472. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202409.0472.v1 Czihaly, A.; Beck, S.; Bergmann, J.; Brown, C. L.; Brunner, T.; Dickel, T.; Dilling, J.; Dunling, E.; Flowerdew, J.; Hockenbery, Z.; Jacobs, A.; Kootte, B.; Malbrunot-Ettenauer, S.; Maldonado Millán, F.; Mollaebrahimi, A.; Leistenschneider, E.; Lykiardopoulou, E. M.; Mukul, I.; Paul, S. F.; Plaß, W. R.; Reiter, M. P.; Scheidenberger, C.; Tracy, Jr., J. L.; Kwiatkowski, A. A. Exploring the Western Shoreline of the Nuclear Chart: What Precision Mass Spectrometry with TITAN-TRIUMF Can Teach Us About Nuclear Existence. Preprints 2024, 2024090472. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202409.0472.v1

Abstract

Isotopes at the limits of nuclear existence are of great interest for their critical role in nuclear astrophysical reactions and their exotic structure. Experimentally, exotic nuclides are challenging to address due to low production cross-sections, overwhelming amounts of contamination, and lifetimes typically less than a second. To this end, a Multiple-Reflection Time-of-Flight mass spectrometer at the TITAN-TRIUMF facility was built to determine atomic masses. This device is a preferred tool to work with exotic nuclides due to its ability to resolve the species of interest from contamination and short measurement cycle times enabling mass measurements of isotopes with millisecond half-lives. With a relative precision of order $10^{-7}$, we demonstrate why the TITAN MR-TOF MS is the tool of choice for precision mass surveys for nuclear structure and astrophysics. The capabilities of the device are showcased in this work including new mass measurements of short-lived tin isotopes ($^{104-107}$Sn) approaching the proton dripline as well as $^{89}$Zr, $^{90}$Y, and $^{91}$Y. The last three illustrate how the broadband surveys of MR-TOF MS reach beyond the species of immediate interest.

Keywords

Mass spectrometry; proton dripline; time-of-flight mass spectrometry; ion traps; radioactive ion beams; experimental nuclear physics

Subject

Physical Sciences, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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