Exploiting the potential of ISOLDE at CERN (the EPIC project)

The ISOLDE Facility at CERN is the world’s leading facility for the production of radioactive ion beams (RIBs) using the ISOL (Isotope Separation On-Line) method, providing RIBs at energies from 30 keV to 10 MeV/u for a wide variety of experiments. To improve on its capacity to deliver RIBs further from stability, the EPIC project takes full advantage of recent investments by CERN to upgrade the LHC injectors. In particular, the higher proton-beam intensity and energy from the new Linac4 and the PS-Booster upgrade would inevitably produce higher radioactive ion beam intensities further from stability. Sharing the proton-beam between two target stations that simultaneously feed the low-energy and high-energy beamlines will more than double the annual available beam time for experiments. To take further advantage of enhanced beam time, ISOLDE also aims to install a storage ring behind the HIE- ISOLDE post-accelerator to allow the storage of cooled exotic ion beams and thus opening up new possibilities in the fields of astrophysics, fundamental symmetry studies, atomic physics and nuclear physics. This paper outlines the EPIC proposal covering the essential requests for a complete upgrade of the ISOLDE Facility.