Highlights of the ISOLDE Facility and the HIE-ISOLDE Project

Abstract

The ISOLDE Radioactive Beam Facility is the dedicated CERN installation for the production and acceleration of radioactive nuclei far from stability. Exotic nuclei of most chemical elements are available for the study of nuclear structure, nuclear astrophysics, fundamental symmetries and atomic physics, as well as for applications in condensed-matter and life sciences. Since more than a decade it offers the largest variety of post-accelerated radioactive beams in the world today. In order to broaden the scientific opportunities beyond the reach of the present facility, the on-going HIE-ISOLDE (High Intensity and Energy) project will provide major improvements in energy range, beam intensity and beam quality. Post-accelerated beams will be available already this year boosting the beam energy of the current REX LINAC to 4.3 MeV/u reaching 5.5 MeV/u next spring. In this new energy regime the Coulomb excitation cross sections are strongly increased with respect to the previous energy of bearly 3 MeV/u and many transfer reaction channels will open. The second stage of the energy upgrade will allow energies of the beam up to 10 MeV/u for the worst scenario of A/q = 4.5. The funds are already secured and it is expected to be completed in 2017. In this contribution the present status of the ISOLDE facility will be discussed, some highlights will be briefly described to illustrate the advances of the facility. The HIEISOLDE project will be described together with a panorama of the physics cases to be addressed in the near future with emphasis in the day-one experiment to be done this year.