Development of a super-fluid 4He target system for an experimental search for nuclear K¯ states

A super-fluid He4 target system has been successfully developed to experimentally search for deeply bound K¯ nuclei. From the experimental requirements, the amount of material around the liquid-helium target was drastically suppressed by using two approaches. One was to utilize the properties of super-fluid helium of extremely high thermal conductivity and low vapor pressure. The other was to develop a thin-walled CFRP vacuum chamber and a PET-based target cell. The wall thickness of the CFRP vacuum chamber was only 0.9 mm with the inner diameter of 310 mm. The dimensions of the target cell were 200 mm inner diameter and 150 mm length with the volume of 4.7 l, and it equipped 75μm thick beam windows made of a PET film. The present target system achieved a temperature of 1.3 K, and was stably operated throughout the experiment with the operational pressure below 40 mbar and a liquid-helium consumption rate of 45l/day.