Speaker
Description
The HITRAP decelerator facility has been designed to supply heavy, highly charged ions with low energy and momentum spread for use in physics experiments. It comprises several accelerator components for deceleration and a Penning trap for cooling ion bunches using electrons. The most exotic heavy, highly charged ions as for example bare Uranium ions are produced using the GSI accelerator complex by stripping at 100 MeV/nucleon and then decelerating and cooling them to 4 MeV/nucleon in the experimental storage ring (ESR). Finally, they are extracted in a single bunch towards the linear decelerator (HITRAP). Ions are decelerated in two steps from 4 MeV/nucleon to 500 keV/nucleon, and then to 6 keV/nucleon, in order to be injected into a Penning-Malmberg trap. Interacting with an electron cloud, which is also stored in this trap, reduces the momentum spread for efficient transfer at a few keV/q to the experiments.
Recently, the first signals of electron-ion interaction and energy transfer were observed using ions from a local test ion source (an EBIT). Progress towards cooling online ions will be presented, as well as the challenges involved, such as ion–electron plasma alignment, the detection and separation of incoming fast ions, the separation and suppression of charge exchange reactions during cooling, and the efficient transfer at low energy.
| Paper status | No proceeding expected for this contribution. |
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