Working Principle
The ion bunch from REXTRAP is slowed down in a pulsed drift cavity in the vertical beamline. After this the bunch is injected into the 9 T magnetic field. Here the ion cloud is trapped in the first Penning trap (for cooling). Its purpose is to cool down the ions with buffer gas. In this trap, it is possible to apply different excitation modes (dipolar, quadrupolar and octupolar). The ions are then transferred to the second Penning trap (in which decays are studied).
When an ion decays, it can escape the decay trap into the spectrometer. The spectrometer consists out of a set of electrodes to create an electrical potential barrier. If the decayed ion's energy is high enough, it will be able to overcome this barrier to be detected at the top of the setup.
Read more about this topic: WITCH Experiment
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