G. Kornakov

We report a proof-of-principle study demonstrating the first capture and time-of-flight spectrometry of highly charged ions (HCIs) produced following antiproton annihilations in a Penning-Malmberg trap. A multi-step nested-trap technique was developed using the \aegis\ experiment to identify annihilation-linked captured ions. The trapping and spectrometry of helium and argon ions demonstrates the approach. This work establishes a foundation for the in-trap synthesis of radioactive HCIs and the study of cold nuclear annihilation fragments, with the long-term goal of enabling a sensitive tool for probing the outer nuclear periphery.

Femtoscopy studies of pion radiation in heavy-ion collisions have been conducted extensively at all available collider energies, both theoretically and experimentally. In all these studies a special interest is given to $m_{T}$ dependency of pion femtoscopy radii, usually approximated by a power-law function at transverse momenta above 200 MeV/$c$. However, the radii behaviour has been much less explored for the ultra-soft pions, possessing the transverse momentum comparable to or lower than the pion mass. For many experimental setups this region is difficult to measure. In this work we present theoretical calculations of pion emission in the ultra-soft region in the two hybrid models -- iHKM and LHYQUID+THERMINATOR2. Along with the particle transverse momentum spectra, we present the calculated femtoscopy radii, both in one-dimensional and three-dimensional representations. We investigate the radii dependence on pair $m_{T}$ and observe, in particular, a departure from the power-law behaviour at ultra-soft momenta, potentially reflecting a decoupling of such slow pions from the rest of collectively expanding system. We provide the theoretical interpretation of this result and discuss its significance, in particular, for the ongoing non-identical particle femtoscopy analysis for pairs consisting of a pion and a baryon (or of a pion and a charmed meson).

The study of radioisotopes as well as of highly charged ions is a very active and dynamic field. In both cases, the most sensitive probes involve species trapped in Penning or Paul traps after a lengthy series of production and separation steps that limit the types and lifetimes of species that can be investigated. We propose a novel production scheme that forms fully (or almost fully) stripped radionuclei in form of highly charged ions (HCI's) directly in the trapping environment. The method extends the range of species, among them radioisotopes such as $^{21}$F, $^{100}$Sn or $^{229}$Th, that can be readily produced and investigated and is complementary to existing techniques.