High-Precision Mass Measurements of Radionuclides with Penning Traps

Abstract

The mass of an atom is directly related to the binding energy of all its constituents. Thus, it provides information about all the interactions inside the atom. High-precision mass measurements hence allow studies of fundamental interactions and are of great importance in many different fields in physics. The masses of radionuclides provide information on their stability and their structure and are therefore of particular interest for nuclear structure investigations and as input for nucleosynthesis models in nuclear astrophysics. Penning trap mass spectrometry provides masses of radionuclides with unprecedented accuracies on the order of \(10^{-8}\) and can nowadays be applied even to nuclides with short half-lives and low production rates. Utilizing advanced ion manipulation techniques radionuclides from essentially all elements produced in a broad range of nuclear reactions can be accessed. In this chapter the standard procedures of on-line Penning trap mass spectrometry are introduced and some representative examples of recent mass measurements are given.