This thesis reports results of precision mass spectrometry of exotic nuclides as a means of elucidating their structure. The work was performed with the ISOLTRAP spectrometer at CERN’s ISOLDE facility. The author furthermore offers an overview of existing techniques used in Penning-trap mass spectrometry and also reports on recent promising developments regarding ISOLTRAP. This eloquently written treatment covers both theory and experiment, and includes a general phenomenological introduction to the nuclear-structure intuition contained in the trends of nuclear binding energies.
Nuclear Observables.- Experimental Method and Data Analysis.- Nuclear-Theory Concepts.- Self-Consistent Mean-Field Calculations.- Conclusions and Outlook.
Vladimir Manea received his physics bachelor degree from the University of Bucharest in 2010. He then followed the master courses of Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, from which in 2011 he received a three-year PhD scholarship to work on mass spectrometry in the nuclear-structure group of Centre de Sciences Nucléaires et de Sciences de la Matière, Orsay. His PhD research took place at CERN in the ISOLDE laboratory, where he performed Penning-trap mass spectrometry of radioactive nuclides with the ISOLTRAP setup. Since his PhD graduation in 2014 he continues at ISOLTRAP as a postdoc of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, Heidelberg.
