Production of highly charged ions of rare species by laser-induced desorption inside an electron beam ion trap

Abstract

This paper reports on the development and testing of a novel, highly efficient technique for the injection of very rare species into electron beam ion traps (EBITs) for the production of highly charged ions (HCI). It relies on in-trap laser-induced desorption of atoms from a sample brought very close to the electron beam resulting in a very high capture efficiency in the EBIT. We have demonstrated a steady production of HCI of the stable isotope ${}^{165}\mathrm{Ho}$ from samples of only $10^{12}$ atoms ($\sim$ 300 pg) in charge states up to 45+. HCI of these species can be subsequently extracted for use in other experiments or stored in the trapping volume of the EBIT for spectroscopic measurements. The high efficiency of this technique expands the range of rare isotope HCIs available for high-precision nuclear mass and spectroscopic measurements. A first application of this technique is the production of HCI of the synthetic radioisotope ${}^{163}\mathrm{Ho}$ for a high-precision measurement of the $Q_{\mathrm{EC}}$-value of the electron capture in ${}^{163}\mathrm{Ho}$ within the Electron Capture in Holmium experiment (ECHo collaboration) ultimately leading to a measurement of the electron neutrino mass with an uncertainty on the sub-eV level.

References in corpus (1)

• The Heidelberg compact electron beam ion traps

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Electronic bridge excitation in highly charged Th-229 ions
• Probing new bosons and nuclear structure with ytterbium isotope shifts
• Perspectives on testing fundamental physics with highly charged ions in Penning traps
• High-precision mass measurement of doubly magic ${}^{208}$Pb
• Fast Silicon Carbide MOSFET based high-voltage push-pull switch for charge state separation of highly charged ions with a Bradbury-Nielsen Gate