George S, Baruah S, Blank B, Blaum K, Breitenfeldt M, Hager U, Herfurth F, Herlert A, Kellerbauer A, Kluge HJ, Kretzschmar M, Lunney D, Savreux R, Schwarz S, Schweikhard L, Yazidjian C. Ramsey method of separated oscillatory fields for high-precision penning trap mass spectrometry.
Phys Rev Lett 2007;
98:162501. [PMID:
17501414 DOI:
10.1103/physrevlett.98.162501]
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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 38Ca nuclide with an uncertainty of 1.1 x 10(-8) using the Penning trap mass spectrometer ISOLTRAP at CERN. The mass of the superallowed beta emitter 38Ca 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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