The LPCTrap facility: A novel transparent Paul trap for high-precision experiments

A trap system has been built to perform high-precision ββ-decay experiments. The system is coupled to the low-energy beam line of the SPIRAL source at GANIL. The continuous ion beam from SPIRAL with energies between 10 and 20 keV is slowed down by means of a buffer-gas-filled RFQ trap and ejected thereafter as short ion bunches into a novel transparent Paul trap. Two pulsed cavities located downstream from the RFQ reduce the energy of the ion bunch down to about a hundred eV for an efficient capture in the Paul trap. We describe here the complete system along with the first results obtained with stable He+4, Cl+35 and Ar+36,40 ions from the SPIRAL ECR source. An overall efficiency of 8.7(8)×10-48.7(8)×10-4 is achieved for 4He+4He+ ions under specific conditions.