More than three decades of ISOLDE physics

It is now more than 30 years since the first experiments were performed at the ISOLDE facility at CERN. ISOLDE, which is an acronym for Isotope Separator On Line, started at CERN as a relatively small experiment aiming at the production of short-lived radioactive atomic nuclei. It immediately turned out, however, that the on-line production of radioactive nuclei offered enormous new opportunities for physicists to perform experiments on nuclei that were not accessible earlier. From the start of the ISOLDE operation at CERN, parallel with the physics experiments, a very intense beam-development programme has been conducted, so that the facility has grown in size and performance. Today ISOLDE is a major CERN installation with a user community of about 300 physicists from 80 institutions in 21 countries. The scientific programme is broad and includes experiments in low-energy nuclear physics, nuclear solid-state physics, atomic physics, nuclear astrophysics, particle physics and nuclear medicine. Since 1990 the ISOLDE programme is viewed by the ISOLDE Scientific Committee, which is one of the four experimental committees that advise the CERN Research Board. In this contribution we shall give a rather personal view of some of the milestones in the development of ISOLDE and its experimental programme and also some future trends and perspectives.