Time-of-flight mass spectrometry of very exotic systems

•We present a review of time-of-flight atomic mass spectrometry and its achievements.•We compare time-of-flight mass spectrometry to other available mass spectrometry methods.•An overview and outlook on time-of-flight mass spectrometry is shown.

Mass measurements of exotic nuclei provide critical information about their nuclear structure. Furthermore mass values are important input parameters to model various stellar processes. Though tremendous efforts in the production and mass spectrometry of nuclides far away from β-stability have been made over the past decades, most of the nuclei involved e.g. in the rapid neutron-capture process or in neutron star crust processes are not yet investigated. Moreover the general nuclear structure towards the edges of the nuclear chart remains unknown. Mass models cannot solve the ambiguity due to their diverging predictions. The time-of-flight-magnetic-rigidity (TOF-Bρ) technique discussed in this article offers the opportunity to measure the masses of nuclei in exotic regions of the nuclear chart. The precision of this experimental technique is sufficient to investigate nuclear structure, address questions of stellar nucleosynthesis, and test the predictive power of mass models.

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