ISOLDE success culminates in three Nature publications

In the middle of 2013 the success of combined technical and physical efforts was demonstrated in three papers published in Nature within the space of one month.

  1. The acceleration of the hitherto heaviest post-accelerated beams, 220Rn and 224Rn and detection of gamma rays from Coulomb excitation in the MINIBALL Germanium detector array showed octupole deformed (pear-like) shapes of the nuclei (Nature 497 (2013) 199).
  2. With the very successful mass spectrometer ISOLTRAP the mass of the exotic nuclide 54Ca was determined. The mass systematics confirmed the existence of a new magic number N=32 and provides a validation of three-body forces using chiral perturbation theory (Nature 498 (2013) 346).
  3. In a high-precision study via Rydberg states with the laser ion-source (RILIS), the ionisation potential for the element Astatine, the least abundant chemical element on earth, was determined (Nature Communications 4 (2013) 1835).
Timeline