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The Isotope Separator and Accelerator (ISAC) facility located at the
TRIUMF laboratory in Vancouver, Canada, is one of the world's most advanced
radioactive ion beam facilities. ISAC produces unprecedented quantities of
rare isotopes and delivers them to a variety of experimental groups in the
form of high-quality, low-energy ion beams. These unique beams currently
support a diverse program that includes nuclear astrophysics, nuclear structure,
fundamental particle physics, and condensed matter research. A major upgrade to
the ISAC facility, ISAC-II, is under construction and will extend both the range
of radioactive nuclei that can be accelerated and the maximum energy of the
accelerated beams.
Following an overview of the ISAC facility itself, this presentation will
focus on the gamma-ray program at ISAC-I. Recent experiments include a study
of the role of "halo neutrons" in the beta decay of the exotic nucleus 11Li,
and measurements to constrain isospin symmetry breaking effects in superallowed
Fermi beta decays, motivated by a possible discrepancy in the unitarity test
for the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) quark-mixing matrix. A program to
search for time-reversal violation through precision measurements of atomic
electric dipole moments at ISAC will be discussed. The presentation will
conclude with a brief introduction to ISAC-II and one of its key experimental
facilities - the TRIUMF-ISAC Gamma-Ray Escape Suppressed Spectrometer (TIGRESS). |