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PN1

Fission-product spectrometer

Sorting particles with PN1

The role of a recoil spectrometer is to sort and recognize the nuclei fragments ejected from the sample very soon after fission, because the lifetime of fission products is often short.

PN1-Lohengrin is the largest mass spectrometer in the world. The particles with the same speed (v) all arrive on the same parabola, each parabola point corresponding to a given charge/mass (q/m) ratio. As the detector is fixed, the nuclear fragments of the desired q/m ratio are collected by varying the deflection of the electric and magnetic fields until the corresponding parabola intersects the detector.