Description
SPIRAL2 facility located at GANIL in Caen has recently been commissionned. Combined with the Super Separator Spectrometer (S$^3$), which is currently being prepared for commissionning, it will be able to produce high intensity beams of neutron-deficient isotopes close to the proton dripline [1]. Ions produced by SPIRAL2/S$^3$ will be studied with the experimental setup S$^3$ Low Energy Branch (S$^3$-LEB) [2, 3, 4] which is currently being installed at the focal plane of S$^3$. The ions will be first thermalized in a gas stopping cell and then guided out by the gas flow, neutralized and extracted in a supersonic gas-jet. The extracted species will then be studied using laser spectroscopy, mass spectrometry and decay spectroscopy.
The current S$^3$-LEB gas cell extraction time is on the order of a few hundred milliseconds. Thus, the most short-lived isotopes will be lost before being extracted. In order to improve the S$^3$-LEB gas cell, a test bench was designed at IJCLab in Orsay within the scope of FRIENDS$^3$ project [5]. This test bench will be dedicated to the development of a fast extraction gas cell as well as an improvement of the neutralization techniques in order to enable nuclear structure studies on the most short-lived isotopes.
The present contribution will focus on the simulations, design and construction of the new setup as well as the first tests performed with it and also with a simplified version operated during the design process.
References
[1] F. Déchery, et al., Nucl. Instrum. Meth. B 376 (2016).
[2] J. Romans, et al., Atoms 10 (2022).
[3] J. Romans, et al., Nucl. Instrum. Meth. B 536 (2023).
[4] A. Ajayakumar, et al., NIM B 539 (2023).
[5] V. Manea, et al., 'Fast radioactive ion extraction and neutralization device for S$^3$',
project ANR-21-CE31-0001 (2021).
