High-precision mass spectrometer for light ions

Abstract

The precise knowledge of the atomic masses of light atomic nuclei, e.g. the proton, deuteron, triton and helion, is of great importance for several fundamental tests in physics. However, the latest high-precision measurements of these masses carried out at different mass spectrometers indicate an inconsistency of five standard deviations. To determine the masses of the lightest ions with a relative precision of a few parts per trillion and investigate this mass problem a cryogenic multi-Penning trap setup, LIONTRAP (Light ION TRAP), was constructed. This allows an independent and more precise determination of the relevant atomic masses by measuring the cyclotron frequency of single trapped ions in comparison to that of a single carbon ion. In this paper the measurement concept and the first doubly compensated cylindrical electrode Penning trap, are presented. Moreover, the analysis of the first measurement campaigns of the proton's and oxygen's atomic mass is described in detail, resulting in mp = 1.007 276 466 598 (33) u and m(16O)= 15.994 914 619 37 (87) u. The results on these data sets have already been presented in [F. Heisse et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 033001 (2017)]. For the proton's atomic mass, the uncertainty was improved by a factor of three compared to the 2014 CODATA value.

23 pages, 16 figures

References in corpus (11)

• Search for New Physics with Atoms and Molecules
• CODATA Recommended Values of the Fundamental Physical Constants: 2014
• High-precision measurement of the atomic mass of the electron
• High-precision measurement of the proton's atomic mass
• g factor of lithiumlike silicon 28Si11+
• PENTATRAP: A novel cryogenic multi-Penning trap experiment for high-precision mass measurements on highly charged ions
• The electron mass from $g$-factor measurements on hydrogen-like carbon ${}^{12}$C${}^{5+}$
• Rotational spectroscopy of cold, trapped molecular ions in the Lamb-Dicke regime
• Critically Evaluated Spectral Data for Neutral Carbon (C I)
• First-order perturbative calculation of the frequency-shifts caused by static cylindrically-symmetric electric and magnetic imperfections of a Penning trap
• Highly-sensitive superconducting circuits at ~700 kHz with tunable quality factors for image-current detection of single trapped antiprotons

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Proton-Electron Mass Ratio from Laser Spectroscopy of HD${}^{+}$ at the Part-Per-Trillion Level
• Proton-electron mass ratio by high-resolution optical spectroscopy of ion ensembles in the resolved-carrier regime
• The proton structure in and out of muonic hydrogen
• Penning-trap mass measurements of the deuteron and the HD+ molecular ion
• Perspectives on testing fundamental physics with highly charged ions in Penning traps
• Hadron and light nucleus radii from electron scattering
• Self-consistent extraction of spectroscopic bounds on light new physics
• Penning-Trap Mass Measurement of Helium-4
• Prospects for the determination of fundamental constants with beyond-state-of-the-art uncertainty using molecular hydrogen ion spectroscopy
• Ro-vibrational spin-averaged transitions in the hydrogen molecular ions
• Sympathetic cooling of charged particles in Penning traps using electron cyclotron radiation