The solid state physics programme at ISOLDE: recent developments and perspectives

Karl Johnston,Juliana Schell,H P Gunnlaugsson,M Deicher,A R G Costa,Doru C Lupascu,E David-Bosne,A S Fenta,J G Correia

doi:10.1088/1361-6471/aa81ac

Abstract

Solid state physics (SSP) research at ISOLDE has been running since the mid-1970s and accounts for about 10%–15% of the overall physics programme. ISOLDE is the world flagship for the on-line production of exotic radioactive isotopes, with high yields, high elemental selectivity and isotopic purity. Consequently, it hosts a panoply of state-of-the-art nuclear techniques which apply nuclear methods to research on life sciences, material science and bio-chemical physics. The ease of detecting radioactivity—<1 ppm concentrations—is one of the features which distinguishes the use of radioisotopes for materials science research. The manner in which nuclear momenta of excited nuclear states interact with their local electronic and magnetic environment, or how charged emitted particles interact with the crystalline lattices allow the determination of the location, its action and the role of the selected impurity element at the nanoscopic state. ISOLDE offers an unrivalled range of available radioactive elements and this is attracting an increasing user community in the field of nuclear SSP research and brings together a community of materials scientists and specialists in nuclear solid state techniques. This article describes the current status of this programme along with recent illustrative results, predicting a bright future for these unique research methods and collaborations.

Highlights

The applied programme at ISOLDE embraces biology, medicine and Solid state physics (SSP) and typically accounts for about 15%–20% of the annual physics schedule, as seen in figure 1; the overall percentage has remained relatively constant over the years, increased intensities of beams has allowed for an increase in the number of experiments in this domain, which accounts for about 20%–25% of the overall number of running experiments at ISOLDE
Referring again to figure 1 we see that the solid state programme is a considerable percentage of the programme, a feature which is unique to ISOLDE among the large scale nuclear facilities in Europe
Perturbed angular correlation (PAC) experiments emerged from nuclear physics to be applied to SSP in the early 1970s [5] and channelling experiments—where the location of implanted isotopes can be described to high precision in the host lattice—were first performed with α-particles and electrons in the mid1960s [6, 7]