Preparing isomerically pure beams of short-lived nuclei at JYFLTRAP

A new procedure to prepare isomerically clean samples of short-lived ions with a mass resolving power of more than 1 × 105 has been developed at the JYFLTRAP tandem Penning trap system. The method utilises a dipolar rf-excitation of the ion motion with separated oscillatory fields in the precision trap. During a subsequent retransfer to the purification trap, the contaminants are rejected and as a consequence, the remaining bunch is isomerically cleaned. This newly-developed method is suitable for very high-resolution cleaning and is at least a factor of five faster than the methods used so far in Penning trap mass spectrometry.