Improvement of RDM plunger for nuclear lifetime

After two years' delay, the machining and adjustment of the Recoil Distance Method 'plunger' facility is nearly done. So far the authors have improved the stability and disturbing-resistance of the laser interferometer used for measuring stopper displacement, but there is still some problem with the capacitance transducer for absolute distance calibration. The authors are waiting for proper accelerator beam to test the accuracy of the whole system in the real experiment, at present, a mere instrumental estimate of the lower measurable limit is about 10-11 s. In the passed year the authors have tried successfully a preliminary nonlinear least square algorithm for recoil distance experimental data analysis. As to DSAM part of this work, the authors have compiled a program for centroid shift analysis on IBM-286 microcomputer, and started to 'transplant' a complicated program for line shape analysis