We report on the design, commissioning, and initial measurements of a Transition-edge Sensor (TES) x-ray spectrometer for the Electron Beam Ion Trap (EBIT) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Over the past few decades, the NIST EBIT has produced numerous studies of highly charged ions in diverse fields such as atomic physics, plasma spectroscopy, and laboratory astrophysics. The newly commissioned NIST EBIT TES Spectrometer (NETS) improves the measurement capabilities of the EBIT through a combination of high x-ray collection efficiency and resolving power. NETS utilizes 192 individual TES x-ray microcalorimeters (166/192 yield) to improve upon the collection area by a factor of ∼30 over the 4-pixel neutron transmutation doped germanium-based microcalorimeter spectrometer previously used at the NIST EBIT. The NETS microcalorimeters are optimized for the x-ray energies from roughly 500 eV to 8,000 eV and achieve an energy resolution of 3.7 eV to 5.0 eV over this range, a more modest (< 2×) improvement over the previous microcalorimeters. Beyond this energy range NETS can operate with various trade-offs, the most significant of which are reduced efficiency at lower energies and being limited to a subset of the pixels at higher energies. As an initial demonstration of the capabilities of NETS, we measured transitions in He-like and H-like O, Ne, and Ar as well as Ni-like W. We detail the energy calibration and data analysis techniques used to transform detector counts into x-ray spectra, a process that will be the basis for analyzing future data.

Accurate extreme ultraviolet spectra of open N-shell neodymium (Nd) ions were recorded at the electron beam ion trap facility of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The measurements were performed for nominal electron beam energies in the range of 0.90 keV to 2.31 keV. The measured spectra were then compared with the spectra simulated by a collisional-radiative model utilizing atomic data produced with a fully relativistic atomic structure code. Consequently, 59 lines from Br-like to Ni-like Nd ions were unambiguously identified, most of which were newly assigned in this study. The wavelengths of 9 known lines from Ni-, Cu- and Zn-like Nd ions were in excellent agreement with previous measurements.

No abstract