The original 1993 team included graduate students Gerald Gwinner, Sidney Cahn, Anindita Ghosh, and Fei Xu together with postdoctoral fellow John Behr. This group first developed a way to capture radioactive atoms in a trap using 79 rubidium. In 1995, for the francium trapping, the team included a third year graduate student Jesse Simsarian, Gerald Gwinner and postdoctoral fellow Paul Voytas. In 1996 postdoctoral fellows Wenzheng Zhao and Wei Shi joined the effort to study the spectroscopy of francium. The team has also included many undergraduates, most recently John Janis, Mary Ifferte and Christopher Freigang who built and tested key systems of the apparatus. Sarah Schauss, a high school student from East Islip High School, has developed a system to monitor the target temperature.
The support for this research has come from a Precision Measurement Grant from NIST and from NSF.
Some past members of the team: