Lutz Schweikhard

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors describe the design, installation and characterization of a new Channeltron-detector setup in order to increase the detection efficiency by about a factor of 3.

Abstract: A number of methods are available for the purpose of extracting dissociation energies of polyatomic particles. Many of these techniques relate the rate of disintegration at a known excitation energy to the value of the dissociation energy. However, such a determination is susceptible to systematic uncertainties, mainly due to the unknown thermal properties of the particles and the potential existence of 'dark' channels, such as radiative cooling. These problems can be avoided with a recently developed procedure, which applies energy-dependent reactions of the decay products as an uncalibrated thermometer. Thus, it allows a direct measurement of dissociation energies, without any assumption on properties of the system or on details of the disintegration process. The experiments have been performed in a Penning trap, where both rate constants and branching ratios have been measured. The dissociation energies determined with different versions of the method yield identical values, within a small uncertainty.

TL;DR: In this article, a second-generation gas stopping cell, operating at cryogenic temperatures, was developed and recently integrated into the SHIPTRAP system to boost the overall efficiency, achieving a combined stopping and extraction efficiency of 33(5)%.

TL;DR: The ISOLTRAP experiment at the ISOLDE facility at CERN is a Penning trap mass spectrometer for on-line mass measurements on short-lived radionuclides.

TL;DR: The present findings suggest that this combination is the fingerprint of the decay of doubly charged lead clusters, and the dianion clusters have been traced down to Pb_{21}^{2-}, whereas the smallest size for the direct observation was as high as n=28.