The Canadian Penning Trap Mass Spectrometer (CPT) is one of the major pieces of experimental equipment that is installed on the
ATLAS superconducting heavy-ion linac facility at the Physics Division of the
Argonne National Laboratory
Argonne National Laboratory is a science and engineering research United States Department of Energy National Labs, national laboratory operated by University of Chicago, UChicago Argonne LLC for the United States Department of Energy. The facil ...
. It was developed and operated by physicist
Guy Savard
Guy or GUY may refer to:
Personal names
* Guy (given name)
* Guy (surname)
* That Guy (...), the New Zealand street performer Leigh Hart
Places
* Guy, Alberta, a Canadian hamlet
* Guy, Arkansas, US, a city
* Guy, Indiana, US, an unincorp ...
and a collaboration of other scientists at Argonne, the
University of Manitoba,
McGill University,
Texas A&M University and the
State University of New York
The State University of New York (SUNY, , ) is a system of public colleges and universities in the State of New York. It is one of the largest comprehensive system of universities, colleges, and community colleges in the United States. Led by c ...
.
Development
The CPT was originally built for the
Tandem Accelerator Superconducting Cyclotron (TASCC) facility at
Chalk River Laboratories in Chalk River, Ontario, Canada. However, it was transferred to Argonne National Laboratory when the TASCC accelerator was decommissioned in 1998 due to funding issues.
The CPT
spectrometer
A spectrometer () is a scientific instrument used to separate and measure spectral components of a physical phenomenon. Spectrometer is a broad term often used to describe instruments that measure a continuous variable of a phenomenon where the ...
is designed to provide high-precision mass measurements of
short-lived isotopes using
radio-frequency (RF) fields. Accurate mass measurements of particular isotopes such as
selenium-68 are important in the understanding of the detailed
reaction mechanism
In chemistry, a reaction mechanism is the step by step sequence of elementary reactions by which overall chemical change occurs.
A chemical mechanism is a theoretical conjecture that tries to describe in detail what takes place at each stage of ...
s involved in the
rapid-proton capture process, which occurs in astrophysical events like
supernovae explosions and
X-ray bursts. An X-ray burst is one possible site for the rp-process mechanism which involves the Accretion (astrophysics), accretion of hydrogen and helium from one star onto the surface of its neutron star binary companion. Mass measurements are required as key inputs to network calculations used to describe this process in terms of the abundances of the nuclides produced, the Light curve, light-curve profile of the X-ray bursts, and the energy produced. In the current configuration, more than 100 radiation, radioactive isotopes have been measured with half-lives much less than a second and with a precision (Δm/m) approaching 10
−9.
Recently, a novel injection system, the RFQ Beam Coolers, RF gas cooler, has been installed on the CPT to allow fast reaction products to be decelerated, thermalized and bunched for rapid and efficient injection. This enhances the investigative capabilities of the CPT on isotopes around the Isotope#Nuclear properties and stability, N=Z line with particular emphasis on isotopes of interest to low-energy tests of the electroweak interaction and the rp-process.
See also
* Gammasphere
* Helical Orbit Spectrometer (HELIOS)
* Mass Spectrometry
* Penning Trap
* RFQ Beam Coolers
References
External links
ANL site
Mass spectrometry
Spectrometers
Science and technology in Canada
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