Expert Support for Experiments at ISAC

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This Major Resources Support (MRS) grant application requests funding for two skilled, experienced technicians to assist experimenters exploiting the ISAC facilities at TRIUMF.******Until 2016, we held an MRS grant funding one expert technician. Due to an administrative error, our effort to apply for a renewal of the grant did not succeed. On account of this error, TRIUMF agreed to pay the salary of this technician for one year. We now seek to re-establish the grant and expand its scope by adding a second expert technician who would help support a number of new experiments. This grant would enable increased access to technical assistance to help a wide variety of current and potential future users of ISAC. The budget request is for the salaries of both technicians and a SolidWorks licence seat dedicated to the second technician, as well as the associated annual software maintenance and support costs.******Funding provided by this grant would allow both technicians to focus completely on the research efforts and technical challenges arising from the experimental programs of the NSERC grantees and minimize time spent on technical tasks assigned by TRIUMF not associated with these important research programs. The experiments are performed by the co-applicants, inside and outside of TRIUMF, along with a number of other experimenters primarily from Canada, the U.K., Japan, the U.S.A., and Mexico. These experiments address a wide variety of scientific goals including the measurement of reaction cross sections, lifetimes, partial decay widths, and energies of excited nuclear states needed for nuclear astrophysics; the structure of exotic nuclei investigated via nuclear reactions and laser spectroscopy; and searches for new interactions and particles in beta decay and atomic parity violation.******The previously supported technician possesses a number of unique skills required to make experiments work in a timely fashion and often on very short notice. We will document in the proposal the specific activities of this technician over the duration of the previous 3 year grant from 2013-2016, how this directly supported the ISAC programme, and to what extent scientific output has been limited by the lack of a second technician. If this application were to succeed, we would seek to hire a second technician with the additional, complementary skills needed to carry out the new experiments.******Our proposed management structure (a rotating supervisor chosen from any co-applicant resident at TRIUMF for one academic term or more, combined with the knowledge of TRIUMF facility coordinators who are familiar with the technicians' skill sets) would ensure that outside users are aware and can make the best use of the available help.