Invited article: development of high-field superconducting Ioffe magnetic traps.

We describe the design, construction, and performance of three generations of superconducting Ioffe magnetic traps. The first two are low current traps, built from four racetrack shaped quadrupole coils and two solenoid assemblies. Coils are wet wound with multifilament NbTi superconducting wires embedded in epoxy matrices.

Chaotic Scattering and Escape Times of Marginally Trapped Ultracold Neutrons.

We compute classical trajectories of Ultracold neutrons (UCNs) in a superconducting Ioffe-type magnetic trap using a symplectic integration method. We find that the computed escape time for a particular set of initial conditions (momentum and position) does not generally stabilize as the time step parameter is reduced unless the escape time is short (less than approximately 10 s). For energy intervals where more than half of the escape times computed for UCN realizations are numerically well determined, we predict the median escape time as a function of the midpoint of the interval.

Determination of the Neutron Lifetime Using Magnetically Trapped Neutrons.

We report progress on an experiment to measure the neutron lifetime using magnetically trapped neutrons. Neutrons are loaded into a 1.1 T deep superconducting Ioffe-type trap by scattering 0.

Magnetic trapping of neutrons.

Accurate measurement of the lifetime of the neutron (which is unstable to beta decay) is important for understanding the weak nuclear force and the creation of matter during the Big Bang. Previous measurements of the neutron lifetime have mainly been limited by certain systematic errors; however, these could in principle be avoided by performing measurements on neutrons stored in a magnetic trap. Neutral-particle and charged-particle traps are widely used for studying both composite and elementary particles, because they allow long interaction times and isolation of particles from perturbing environments.