6533b833fe1ef96bd129c297

RESEARCH PRODUCT

High-frequency Ramsey excitation in a Penning trap

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The Ramsey excitation method for high-precision mass-measurements of highly-charged ions has been investigated and benchmarked using H2+ ions in the Penning-trap mass-spectrometer SMILETRAP. The reason for using H2+ ions are their high cyclotron frequency which is typical for the highly-charged ions usually used at SMILETRAP. Two-, three- and four-pulse Ramsey excitation data are analyzed with the help of recent theoretical work and are compared with the previously used single-pulse excitation data. An improvement factor of 2.9 in the statistical uncertainty is achieved. Furthermore the mass of 76Se, included in the previous Q-value measurement of the 76Ge neutrinoless double beta decay, is checked using 76Se25+ ions and a three-pulse Ramsey excitation. The results show a convincing agreement with the measurement when using single-pulse excitation and therefore our Q-value of 2039.006(50) keV, performed with single-pulse excitation, is confirmed.