GSI HITRAP team traps and electron-cools accelerator-made highly charged ions

Researchers at Technical University of Darmstadt and the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research report the first deceleration of accelerator-produced highly charged ions to low energies with subsequent storage in a Penning trap, plus the first electron cooling of highly charged ions in such a trap, phys.org said. Results appear in Physical Review X. Highly charged ions are usually made at high energy and speed, but many atomic, nuclear and fundamental physics experiments need them slowed, captured and cooled. HITRAP at GSI was built for that path. Lead author Simon Rausch, who earned his Ph.D. in Wilfried Nörtershäuser's group at TU Darmstadt, said the team used fully ionized argon nuclei produced at about 30% of the speed of light and reduced their kinetic energy by a factor of about 10,000 in the HITRAP decelerator before storing the ions in the HITRAP Cooling Trap for several seconds. Rausch said that completed the full path from accelerator-produced highly charged ions to Penning-trap storage for the first time. Electron cooling lowers the ions' kinetic energy and is described as a key prerequisite for future high-precision experiments. Phys.org said the milestones underpin a research platform for precision studies with heavy highly charged ions and noted a first user experiment already used slow highly charged gold ions for materials science. The paper is S. Rausch et al., DOI 10.1103/961c-j3p5. Precision atomic and nuclear labs gain a working decelerate-trap-cool chain for accelerator-made highly charged ions at HITRAP.