[en] A Penning trap uses a strong and uniform magnetic field and an electrostatic quadrupole potential to confine and manipulate charged particles. Penning traps with cylindrical electrodes have the advantage of machining to better surface finish and also provides the accessibility for particle loading and rejection, laser beams and microwaves. A set of compensation electrodes can be introduced to tune out the anharmonicity of a Penning trap to first order. The concept of an orthogonalized Penning trap was introduced for a trap with special geometries such that the trapping well depth and the trapped particle axial oscillation frequency were independent of the tuning of anharmonicity. In our present work, a design technique of a double compensated cylindrical Penning ion trap is presented which includes the effect of realistic gap. By varying the length of the electrodes, the study has been able to make the trap orthogonal and tuned out anharmonicity to a higher degree for a wide range of radius of the trap and gap length which was previously possible only for certain special geometries

[en] The electron capture nuclear decay rate is proportional to the electron density at the nucleus and affected by the chemical environment, particularly in the case of electron capturing ⁷Be. In the case of higher Z elements, such effect is expected to be negligible as the valence electrons contribute very insignificant percentage of electron density at the nucleus. The change of electron capture nuclear decay rate of ⁷Be in different chemical environments has been observed experimentally and density functional calculations calculating the change of electron density at the nucleus generally give a reasonable explanation of the effect

[en] The non-destructive detection of image charge induced by oscillating charged particles has wide spread applications ranging from Schottky-type electronic pick-ups used in storage rings to electronic detection in particle traps such as Penning traps, with the detection sensitivity reaching to the single-ion level. For the Penning Trap applications, the image charge induced by the trapped particles is picked up by a high Q resonant circuit and the signal so obtained contains all the information about the confined particles like its temperature, the number of trapped particles etc. This high Q resonant circuit is a parallel LCR circuit characterized by its resonance frequency and the presence of stored charged particles in the Penning trap can produce a dip symmetrically splitting the resonance peak under appropriate conditions. Using this noise dip technique, the presence of single and a few electrons in the trap was observed earlier at 4 °K. In this work, a new technique has been presented to count the number of stored particles by observing the shift in the resonance frequency of the tank circuit at room temperature and the result obtained by this method agrees well with that obtained by a standard earlier method

[en] The development of the Cryogenic Penning Ion trap poses several challenges for its high precision fabrication and its operation at cryogenic temperature. The mechanical fabrications of all the components of the trap setup have been completed as per drawing and assembled

[en] Penning ion trap is a versatile tool which serves as a storage device for sub-atomic particles using a combination of quadrupolar electric potential for axial confinement and a strong magnetic field for radial confinement. Trapped particles have three oscillatory motions: 1) axial motion, along the direction of the magnetic field with frequency ω_z, 2) the trap modified cyclotron motion at a higher frequency ω₊, 3) slow magnetron motion with frequency ω₊ , where ω_- < ω_z < ω₊ . The cryogenic Penning trap has so far been used for various precision measurements like the measurement of (g-2) parameter of electron and positron and several other similar studies. In this work, a new method of measuring the shape of a beta spectrum by high precision measurement of the relativistic kinetic energy of the electrons using a cryogenic Penning trap is proposed. Using this method, it might be possible to measure the shape of the end-point of a beta spectrum with a high precision enabling the mass measurement of electron-neutrino

[en] An electron cloud was trapped in a Penning trap under the application of a strong magnetic field of 0.2T produced by annular permanent magnets and a weak quadrupolar electrostatic potential ∼10V. The trapped electron cloud underwent a complicated motion in 3D comprising axial, cyclotron and magnetron oscillations. The axial oscillation was about 62 MHz and the corresponding induced voltage on the end-cap electrode was picked by a resonant LCR circuit, amplified by an amplifier and mixed with a suitable frequency to observe as a beat signal. The details of the experimental arrangement have been described

[en] The India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) is a project aimed at building a large underground laboratory to explore the Earth's mater effects on the atmospheric neutrinos in multi-GeV range. INO will host a 50 kton magnetized iron calorimeter detector (ICAL) in which Resistive Plate Chambers(RPCs) will be the active detector elements. In ICAL, 28,800 glass RPCs of $2\text{m}\times <!--\; ??\; -->2$ m size will be operated in the avalanche mode. A small variation in the compositions of ionizing gaseous medium in the RPC affects its performance. Study of the charge distribution of the RPC at different gas compositions is necessary to optimize the gas mixture. An RPC made with glass plates of dimension $30\text{cm}\times <!--\; ??\; -->30$ cm was operated in avalanche mode with a gas mixture of C${}_2$H${}_2$F${}_4$/iC${}_4$H${}_{10}$/SF${}_6$. We have studied the performance of these RPCs at the same ambient conditions. The percentages of the iC${}_4$H${}_{10}$ or SF${}_6$ were varied and its effect on the performance of RPC were studied. The study of the charge distribution and time resolution of the RPC signals at different gas compositions is presented in this paper.

[en] The theories of these processes predict fission and quasifission time scales of the order of 10^-20 sec to 10^-21 sec for the highly excited trans-uranium or uranium-like complexes. Model-dependent nuclear measurements of fission timescales based on prescission neutron emission and the giant dipole resonance agreed with the calculations within an order of magnitude, but always got somewhat higher mean values for the timescales. This discrepancy has been explained as the effect of the viscosity of the nuclear matter slowing down the fission process

[en] We have developed a novel technique to measure the confinement time of an electron plasma trapped in a Penning trap and the corresponding residual air pressure inside the trap. In this work, an electron plasma was produced by bombarding an energetic electron beam with the background neutral gas and it was trapped in a Penning trap using a static quadrupolar electrostatic potential and a homogeneous magnetic field. the technique described in this work provide a single shot determination of the confinement time and could be utilized effectively in ion-atom / ion-ion collisions and recombination rate studies. Since the confinement time is directly related to the ambient pressure, the method additionally provides a new technique to measure the background pressure inside the Penning trap

[en] The Penning trap is a device where the charged particles could be stored in 3D by means of a static quadrupolar electrostatic potential and a homogeneous magnetic field. In this combined field, a charged particle exhibits bounded motions associated with three oscillation frequencies related to the axial, cyclotron and magnetron motions. The cryogenic Penning trap facility at VECC has a sophisticated magnet cryostat where the trap along with its detection electronics were immersed in the liquid helium filled bore of a 5T superconducting magnet. The detailed descriptions of the magnet and mechanical assembly for immersing the trap assembly could be found in references of the article. Recently, we observed the signal of a trapped electron cloud for the first time at 4K and it will be described in this work