Development of the novel transportable online mass-spectrometer PILOT-Trap with dynamic buffer-gas cooling for stored ions

The novel transportable PILOT-Trap experiment set up in the framework of this thesis aims to measure masses of short-lived nuclides with low production rates and half-lives > 100 ms with relative uncertainties of about 10-8. Applications for these precision mass measurements include atomic, nuclear and neutrino physics. The setup of the experiment includes a 6T superconducting coldhead-cooled magnet, which ensures transportability to different radioactive beam facilities. There, this setup enables mass measurements of, for example, heavy or superheavy nuclides that are produced only in tiny quantities of a few ions per hour. To deal with these low production rates a single trap is planned to be used for cooling the ion’s motions with a modified dynamic buffer-gas cooling technique as well as for measuring the ion’s motional frequencies. To make such a combination of two techniques in one trap feasible, a fast piezo valve is being developed, which enables a rapid and precisely timed helium injection into the Penning trap, followed by a fast helium release to be directly able to measure in the same trap. The latter is going to be realized by the developed rotating-disc approach. The cooling of the ion’s motions and the measurement of its motional frequencies in the same trap increases the overall efficiency by avoiding the ion transport stage between different traps. In addition to the development of the dynamic cooling method, the setup and initial test measurements of the PILOT-Trap mass spectrometer developed in this work are presented. These range from the initial detection of ions at the detector, through the storage and cooling of ions, to the performance of phase-sensitive measurements