Expert Support for Experiments at ISAC

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This Major Resources Support (MRS) grant application requests funding for an experienced technician to continue assisting experimenters exploiting the Isotope Separator and Accelerator (ISAC) facilities at TRIUMF. This grant would enable continued access to technical assistance to help a wide variety of current and potential future users of ISAC. The budget request is solely for the salary and benefits of the expert technician. Funding provided by this grant would allow the technician 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 coapplicants, 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 nuclear 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 currently supported technician possesses a number of unique skills required to make experiments work in a timely fashion and often on very short notice. We document in the proposal the specific activities of this technician over the duration of the previous 3 year grant from 2017-2020 and how they directly supported the ISAC programme. Our proposed management structure (a rotating supervisor chosen from any co-applicant resident at TRIUMF for one academic term or more, advised by the ISAC User Liaison, who is familiar with the technician's skill set) would ensure that outside users are aware and can make the best use of the available help.