The Canadian Penning Trap Mass Spectrometer (CPT) is one of the major pieces of experimental equipment that is installed on the ATLAS superconducting heavy-ion linac facility at the Physics Division of the Argonne National Laboratory.
However, it was transferred to Argonne National Laboratory when the TASCC accelerator was decommissioned in 1998 due to funding issues.
[1] The CPT spectrometer is designed to provide high-precision mass measurements of short-lived isotopes using radio-frequency (RF) fields.
Accurate mass measurements of particular isotopes such as selenium-68 are important in the understanding of the detailed reaction mechanisms involved in the rapid-proton capture process, which occurs in astrophysical events like supernovae explosions and X-ray bursts.
In the current configuration, more than 100 radioactive isotopes have been measured with half-lives much less than a second and with a precision (Δm/m) approaching 10−9.