Laser cooling taken to the extreme: cold relativistic intense beams of highly-charged heavy ions

Recent storage ring experiments have demonstrated the power and the potential of laser cooling of bunched relativistic ion beams. Encouraged by this, the heavy-ion synchrotron SIS100 at FAIR (Darmstadt, Germany) will be equipped with a truly unique laser cooling facility. A sophisticated combination of 3 newly developed UV (257 nm) laser systems and modest rf-bunching will allow for fast cooling of injected intense heavy-ion beams. There will be two powerful pulsed laser systems with MHz repetition rates and variable pulse duration (10-100 ps and 50-740 ps) and one powerful tunable cw laser system. The picosecond laser pulses are broad in frequency and will enable fast cooling of injected ion beams with a large initial longitudinal momentum spread. The cw laser can be quickly tuned over a large range and has high spectral power, forcing the ion beams to remain cold during storage. This combination of 3 UV laser beams should be up for the challenge of suppressing intra-beam scattering and space charge effects.

I will present an overview and the status of the SIS100 laser cooling facility and will also show results from laser cooling experiments at the ESR storage ring of GSI.