Detecting shake-off electron-ion coincidences to measure β-decay correlations in laser trapped 21Na Original Research Article

The properties of a neutral atom trap are nearly ideal for precise measurements of nuclear β-decay correlation coefficients. Following a radioactive decay, all particles emerge from the trap volume unperturbed and are available for study. However, for measurements online at existing accelerators, sufficient statistics will be difficult to acquire if precision significantly better than 0.01 in the correlation coefficients is desired. We have investigated the feasibility of detecting shake-off electrons in coincidence with the recoiling ions to decrease the statistical uncertainty of some measurements by nearly an order of magnitude.