Exploring the Western Shoreline of the Nuclear Chart: What Precision Mass Spectrometry with TITAN-TRIUMF Can Teach Us About Nuclear Existence

Isotopes at the limits of nuclear existence are of great interest for their critical role in nuclear astrophysical reactions and their exotic structure. Experimentally, exotic nuclides are challenging to address due to low production cross-sections, overwhelming amounts of contamination, and lifetimes typically less than a second. To this end, a Multiple-Reflection Time-of-Flight mass spectrometer at the TITAN-TRIUMF facility was built to determine atomic masses. This device is a preferred tool to work with exotic nuclides due to its ability to resolve the species of interest from contamination and short measurement cycle times enabling mass measurements of isotopes with millisecond half-lives. With a relative precision of order $10^{-7}$, we demonstrate why the TITAN MR-TOF MS is the tool of choice for precision mass surveys for nuclear structure and astrophysics. The capabilities of the device are showcased in this work including new mass measurements of short-lived tin isotopes ($^{104-107}$Sn) approaching the proton dripline as well as $^{89}$Zr, $^{90}$Y, and $^{91}$Y. The last three illustrate how the broadband surveys of MR-TOF MS reach beyond the species of immediate interest.