A special "50th anniversary edition" of the ISOLDE workshop concludes today with a series of talks to celebrate the approval of the experimental programme in 1964 and to discuss future ideas and projects.

ISOLDE, the Isotope Separator On Line Device, is the longest running Radioactive Ion Beam (RIB) research facility in the world. On 17 December 1964, Victor Frederick Weisskopf, then CERN’s Director-General, approved the ISOLDE project. Originally proposed at the 600 MeV Proton Synchrocyclotron, ISOLDE moved to the PS Booster in 1992. Among the existing facilities, ISOLDE offers worldwide a large variety of radioactive isotopes, and the installation of a post-accelerator at ISOLDE (REX-ISOLDE) has opened new fields of research with radioactive ion beams at higher energies.

The annual ISOLDE workshop brings together the previous, current and future ISOLDE user community to discuss future plans and ideas for the programme. This year’s special edition features a series of talks by previous group leaders and will follow a chronological thread. First to speak will be Torleif Ericson, who was the first group leader in 1964. He will talk about how a constellation of special circumstances made the approval of ISOLDE possible, in spite of CERN's main priority lying in elementary particle physics.

See the full timetable of talks.