Radioactive ion beams and penning traps

Penning traps are well known as high precision mass spectrometers mainly employed for the investigation of stable particles. For accurate mass measurements of short-lived radioactive isotopes one Penning trap system is operational today. It is the ISOLTRAP spectrometer installed at the ISOLDE facility at CERN/Geneva. Another Penning trap system is presently under construction at the TASCC facility in Chalk River. Beside the very accurate determination of nuclear masses Penning traps can play an important role in the preparation of ISOL-beams for their further post-acceleration, as it is planned in the REX-ISOLDE experiment at CERN.