ISOLDE Workshop and Users meeting 2014 "50th Anniversary Edition"

A constellation of special circumstances made the approval of ISOLDE possible, in spite of the main priority of CERN as an elementary particle physics laboratory. I have personally experienced some of these as a post-doc at CERN as will be briefly discussed.

On December 17, 1964 the CERN DG, Victor Weisskopf, sent a letter to the ISOLDE Collaboration giving green light to perform experiments at CERN. An underground hall was built close to the SC, which accelerated protons to 600MeV energy. The first experiment at ISOLDE was preformed on September 17, 1967. In my talk I shall cover the first years of experiments at ISOLDE at CERN, the SC...

This report describes my time at CERN from 1985 to 1987. Only very briefly before, ISOLDE was recognized by the CERN Management as a CERN facility and not only as a collaboration performing experiments at the synchrocyclotron (SC). Due to LEP construction the human resources were extremely restricted and I acted in one person as ISOLDE Group Leader, as Coordinator of the Synchrocyclotron, and...

In 1987 the very successful operation of ISOLDE-2 could be continued with an ever increasing number of users. The ISOLDE-3 facility was finished in 1988 and made available too, even in high-resolution mode. As it was evident that post-acceleration of the radioactive beams would be needed in the future, a first project with a series of linacs was forwarded. It had been clear, however, that...

Soon after the commissioning of ISOLDE at the PS-Booster facility, first experiments took place. This contribution will discuss highlights from the 1993-1995 period with a special focus on the preparatory work for the proposal to post-accelerate the ISOLDE beams. This lead eventually to the approval of the "Radioactive beam EXperiments at ISOLDE: Coulomb excitation and neutron transfer...

1996-1999 was a time in which ISOLDE saw important changes. In order to make space for REX-ISOLDE the experimental hall saw its first extension and first equipment for REX-ISOLDE was installed and commissioned.

At the transition to the twenty first century ISOLDE was undergoing a major upgrade from a very successful low-energy radioactive ion beam facility towards a new era of nuclear structure studies employing accelerated radioactive beams [1]. The first accelerated beam was obtained in November 2001 when REX-ISOLDE produced a 2.2 MeV/u beam of 26Na ions. Additionally, the ISOLDE complex was made...

This presentation summarises the highlights at ISOLDE during my time as group leader 2002-2005

In the years leading up to the first beams in LHC in the autumn 2008 most CERN efforts were focussed on finishing the LHC. Still, ISOLDE managed to evolve and broaden its physics scope. I shall give a brief overview of the main events taking place at ISOLDE in the period 2005-2008, including the consolidation of the existing infrastructure and the preparations for the HIE-ISOLDE project, and...

I will give some highlights about my time as ISOLDE Physics Group Leader from 2008 to 2012.