Study for a 229Th Storage Ring at BNL
Oral-In-person
Abstract
229Th has a unique low lying energy state of just 8.4 eV, which has generated great interest as a nuclear clock. Recent studies have measured precisely this energy level in 229Th embedded in crystals such as CaF2. At BNL, fully ionized free 229Th could be accelerated to ~1.3 GeV/nucleon in the Booster and ~11 GeV/nucleon at the AGS. Both these energies allow for the excitation of the 8.4 eV isomer state of 229Th using readily available lasers from 225 nm to optical wavelength. Using such a Th229 storage ring, a laser to excite the ions, and photon detectors around the ring, it's possible that precision measurements of the free 229Th excitation energy, the excitation line shape, and half-life can be measured. We present a study evaluating how well these measurements could be achieved in these properties of 229Th using the existing accelerators at BNL.
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Presenters
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Mickey Chiu
- Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL)