Our group will focus on using rare (radioactive) neon, helium, lithium, and nitrogen isotopes and studying their decay properties.

The choice on neon isotopes was based on several interesting properties of those isotopes which will allow for multiple (and interesting) measurements. Since the trap lifetime is on the order of less than a minute the isotopes selected for study must be short lived enough to decay in the trap (also, with long lived isotopes the statistics would be terrible), they must also be long lived enough to be trappable, since they have to transit from the production area to the target. This limits the usable range of lifetimes to between a few hundred ms to a few tens of seconds. The neon isotopes we are interested in have half-lives ranging from ~100ms (for ¹⁷Ne) to ~20s (for ¹⁹Ne).

The short life times of the isotopes we will use means that they must be produced shortly before they are trapped, i.e., produced “online” near the experiment. Clearly, this is impossible to do at the university lab. We plan to design and build the trap setup at the Hebrew University and then move the entire setup to the facility where we will produce the rare isotopes. Production of these isotopes takes place by bombarding an appropriate target with a particle beam. The first isotope we will attempt to trap will be ²³Ne which we will produced using the proton induced reaction ²³Na(n,p)²³Ne.

We are collaborating with the scientists at the newly built Soreq Applied Research Accelerator Facility (SARAF) to design and test a production scheme for neon isotopes. Initially we plan to use a LiF (lithium fluoride) target which was designed by a SARAF/Weizmann Institute collaboration to withstand the high beam intensities at SARAF.

We are also working on the production of ⁶He, for use in our electrostatic trap.

Two other isotopes of interest to us are ¹⁶N and ⁸Li, both also to be used in our BSM searches. <16>N will be used in a search for tensor currents by measuring the energy spectrum of the beta decay (see our recent paper). ⁸Li will be used in our novel OLIVIA (Optical Lithium V mInus A) experiment, which is a collaborative effort between our group, the Hen and Conrad groups at MIT, and the Spitz group at MSU.