A new procedure to prepare isomerically clean samples of ions with a mass resolving power of more than 100,000 has been developed at the JYFLTRAP tandem Penning trap system. The method utilises a dipolar rf-excitation of the ion motion with separated
oscillatory fields in the precision trap. During a subsequent retransfer to the purification trap, the contaminants are rejected and as a consequence, the remaining bunch is isomerically cleaned. This newly-developed method is suitable for very high-resolution cleaning and is at least a factor of five faster than the methods used so far in Penning trap mass spectrometry.
Using a new fast cleaning procedure to prepare isomerically pure ion samples, we have measured the beta-decay Q_EC values of the superallowed beta-emitters 50Mn and 54Co to be 7634.48(7) keV and 8244.54(10) keV, respectively, results which differ sig
nificantly from the previously accepted values. The corrected Ft values derived from our results strongly support new isospin-symmetry-breaking corrections that lead to a higher value of the up-down quark mixing element, Vud, and improved confirmation of the unitarity of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix.
