First Operational Experience of HIE-Isolde

The High Intensity and Energy ISOLDE project (HIE-ISOLDE)* is a major upgrade of the ISOLDE facility at CERN. The energy range of the post-accelerator will be extended from 2.85 MeV/u to 9.3 MeV/u for beams with A/q = 4.5 (and to 14.3 MeV/u for A/q = 2.5) once all the cryomodules of the superconducting accelerator are in place. The project has been divided into different phases, the first of which (phase 1a) finished in October 2015 after the hardware and beam commissioning were completed**. The physics campaign followed with the delivery of both radioactive and stable beams to two different experimental stations. The characteristics of the beams (energies, intensities, time structure and beam contaminants) and the plans for the next experimental campaign will be discussed in this paper.