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  • Letter
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Atomic mass determination of uranium-238

Kathrin Kromer1,*, Chunhai Lyu1, Jacek Bieroń2, Menno Door1, Lucia Enzmann1,3, Pavel Filianin1, Gediminas Gaigalas4, Zoltán Harman1, Jost Herkenhoff1 et al.

Wenjia Huang5, Christoph H. Keitel1, Sergey Eliseev1, and Klaus Blaum1

  • 1Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany
  • 2Institute of Theoretical Physics, Jagiellonian University, 30-348 Kraków, Poland
  • 3Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany
  • 4Institute of Theoretical Physics and Astronomy, Vilnius University, 10222 Vilnius, Lithuania
  • 5Advanced Energy Science and Technology Guangdong Laboratory, Huizhou 516007, China

  • *Corresponding author: kromer@mpi-hd.mpg.de
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Phys. Rev. C 109, L021301 – Published 6 February, 2024

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.109.L021301

Abstract

The atomic mass of uranium-238 has been determined to be 238.050787618(15) u, improving the literature uncertainty by two orders of magnitude. It is obtained from a measurement of the mass ratio of U47+238 and Xe26+132 ions with an uncertainty of 3.5×10−12. The measurement was carried out with the Penning-trap mass spectrometer Pentatrap and was accompanied by a calculation of the binding energies EU and EXe of the 47 and 26 missing electrons of the two highly charged ions, respectively. These binding energies were determined using an ab initio multiconfiguration Dirac-Hartree-Fock method to be EU=39927(10) eV and EXe=8971.2(21) eV. The new mass value will serve as a reference for high-precision mass measurements in the heavy mass region of the nuclear chart up to transuranium nuclides.

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Phys. Rev. C 109, L021301– Published 6 February, 2024
  • Received 27 November 2023
  • Accepted 8 January 2024
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Open access publication funded by the Max Planck Society.

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