WITCH:: a recoil spectrometer for β-decay

The WITCH experiment will measure the recoil energy spectrum of the daughter ions in beta-decay. The main parts of the experiment are two Penning traps and a subsequent retardation spectrometer. The beta-decays take place in the ion cloud in the decay trap. Since the ion cloud is in vacuum and due to the cylindrical structure of the trap, the recoiling daughter ions can leave the cloud and the trap without any significant energy loss and can be energy analyzed in the retardation spectrometer. The WITCH experiment is set up foremost to study the electroweak interaction by measuring the beta-v angular correlation in nuclear beta-decay which can be inferred from the shape of the energy spectrum of the recoil ions. In the beginning the experiment will focus on pure Fermi decays which will allow to search for additional scalar coupling in the weak interaction. Since Penning traps have no restrictions regarding the element to be trapped the most suitable isotope can be picked for this purpose. The WITCH experiment is presently being set up at ISOLDE. Status and perspectives of the experiment will be presented in the following. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.