A capacitance servo control plunger for accurate lifetime measurement

The recoil distance Doppler shift method has been widely used in the study of nuclear structure to determine the level lifetime and absolute transition probabilities. A capacitance servo control plunger based on this method has been successfully developed by the Nuclear Structure Group of the China Institute of Atomic Energy. Three microscopes were employed to check the parallelism and can therefore guarantee a delicate measurement of the distance between the target and the stopper. This new plunger made a successful performance in the test experiment and the measured lifetime of the 2⁺→0⁺ transition in ⁷⁸Kr is in agreement with the previous value. (authors)