Electron scattering from 208 Pb and 132 Xe ions at the SCRIT facility

We constructed the SCRIT (Self-Confining Radioactive Ion Target) electron scattering facility to realize electron scattering off short-lived unstable nuclei at RIKEN in Japan. Electron scattering is one of the most powerful and reliable tools to study structures of atomic nuclei. However, it has been extremely difficult to apply electron scattering to unstable nuclei because of target preparation problems. SCRIT is a novel ion-trapping technique that achieves high luminosity of more than 10 27 cm -?2 s -?1 with a small amount of target ions. Following completion of the facility, a series of commissioning experiments of the entire facility with several stable nuclear targets, including 208 Pb and 132 Xe, were performed. Momentum transfer distributions of elastic scattering from those targets were successfully measured at several electron beam energies, and the charge density distribution of the 132 Xe nucleus was extracted for the first time.