The new Penning trap mass spectrometer SMILETRAP II has been set up at the AlbaNova Research Center, Stockholm. Based on the former spectrometer SMILETRAP I, it uses the merits of highly-charged ions to achieve high precision in the mass measurements. Various improvements over the SMILETRAP I setup will allow to routinely perform mass measurements with relative uncertainties of 10⁻¹⁰ and below. In this paper we will discuss the limitations of SMILETRAP I and present the corresponding improvements of SMILETRAP II. An overview on the SMILETRAP II setup is given.

In order to reach relative uncertainties in mass measurements with Penning traps of 10^-10 or better, the temperature variation of the trap and surrounding materials must be kept below 10 mK. Temperature variations induce a shift in the measured ion cyclotron frequency because of non-zero, temperature dependent magnetic susceptibilities of the construction materials. In this paper we report of a new temperature regulation system recently installed at SMILETRAP II that manages to keep the temperature fixed at the set point with a standard deviation of only 2.6 mK. −10 or better, the temperature variation of the trap and surrounding.

Externally, in an electron beam ion trap, generated Ar¹⁶⁺ ions were retrapped in a Penning trap and evaporatively cooled in their axial motion. The cooling was observed by a novel extraction technique based on the excitation of a coherent axial oscillation which yields short ion bunches of well-defined energies. The initial temperature of the ion cloud was decreased by a factor of more than 140 within 1 s, while the phase-space density of the coldest extracted ion pulses was increased by a factor of up to about 9.

We describe a refrigerated EBIT (R-EBIT) commissioned at the AlbaNova Research Center at Stockholm University. As an innovative solution, the superconducting magnet and the trapping drift tubes of the R-EBIT are cooled to a temperature of 4 K by a set of two cooling heads connected to helium compressors. This dry, i.e. liquid helium and liquid nitrogen free, system is easily operated and creates highly charged ions at a fraction of the cost of traditional liquid-cooled systems. A pulsed and continuous gas injection system was developed to feed neutral particles into the electron beam in the trap region. This improves significantly the highly charged ion production and R-EBIT performance. Fast extraction of ions from the R-EBIT yields very short ( < 100 ns), charge-separated ion bunches which can be either analysed using a straight time-of-flight section or sent to experimental beam lines following selection in a bending magnet. An emittance meter was used to measure the emittance of the ions extracted from the R-EBIT. The extracted ions were also re-trapped in a cylindrical Penning trap and properties of the re-trapped ions have been measured using the emittance meter. Results of these measurements are reported in this publication.

A new laboratory for highly charged ions is being built up at Stockholm University. A fully refrigerated electron beam ion trap (R-EBIT, 3 T magnet, 30 keV electron energy) was installed. It was used for spectroscopic studies, ion cooling experiments, electron ion collisions, and highly-charged ion surface studies. Here we report on an upgrade of this EBIT to a ``Super EBIT'' (S-EBIT, 4 T magnet, 260 keV electron energy). The high-voltage trapping system, the ion injection as well as the extraction scheme of S-EBIT and the LabView based operational system of S-EBIT are described.