Development of the St. Benedict Paul trap for tests of the Standard Model*

Nuclear beta decays provide a unique avenue for testing the electroweak part of the Standard Model through precision measurements. Physics beyond the Standard Model would manifest itself in these transitions through a variety of possible effects including a non-unitarity of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa quark mixing matrix, scalar or tensor currents, and interactions involving right-handed neutrinos. Probing these various effects in superallowed mixed beta decay transitions can be done through precision measurements of the beta-neutrino angular correlation parameter. As such, we are currently constructing at the Notre Dame Nuclear Science Laboratory the Superallowed Transition Beta-Neutrino Decay Ion Coincidence Trap (St. Benedict). St. Benedict will take radioactive a ion beam produced by TwinSol, thermalize it in a large volume gas cell, then transport it into two separate differentially-pumped volumes using a radio-frequency (RF) carpet and a radio-frequency quadrupole (RFQ) ion guide before injecting it in an RFQ trap to create cool ion bunches for injection in the measurement Paul trap. The St. Benedict scientific program and the development of the Paul trap will be presented.