ISOLDE looks forward

The original ISOLDE on-line isotope separator at the CERN 600 MeV Synchro-Cyclotron (SC) was commissioned in 1967 and worked successfully until being essentially rebuilt in 1973/74 at the same time as the SC was upgraded to give higher extracted intensities. Since then there have been continual improvements to practically every aspect of the facility, but two fundamental limitations appeared; the lack of running time for experiments and the lack of space to house those experiments. At the end of the 1970s and the early 1980s, ISOLDE-2 used close to 250 shifts per year but it became clear that this was the maximum the facility could handle. At about this time the CERN management decided the SC should become more and more an accelerator dedicated to ISOLDE experiments, with the aim of doubling the time allocation to 500 shifts per year