The proposed TITAN facility at ISAC for very precise mass measurements on highly charged short-lived isotopes

One of the necessary experimental quantities required for the test of unitarity of the fundamental Cabbibo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) quark mixing matrix can be gained from nuclear beta decay. However, the short-lived beta-decaying nuclei have to be produced on-line in order to provide a large enough sample to carry out the experiments. At the new ISAC (Isotope Separator and Accelerator) facility at the TRIUMF national laboratory in Vancouver, Canada, ideal conditions are provided for the production of some of the most interesting nuclides in that respect. The experimental information that is needed are branching ratio, half-life and Q-value of the specific beta decay. For the first two components experiments have already been carried out or are in preparation at ISAC (Ball et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 86 (2001) 1454, and experiments E823 and E909 approved at TRIUMF), for the third one, we are proposing to set up a unique facility capable of high accuracy mass measurements δm/m ≤ 1 × 10^-8 on very short-lived isotopes (T_1/2 ≤ 50 ms) employing a Penning trap spectrometer coupled to an electron beam ion trap (EBIT) for charge breeding. The main goal of TITAN is mass measurements, however, the unique combination of the systems will allow to carry out high precision measurements in other fields of nuclear and also atomic physics.