Electron cooling tames highly charged ions in Penning trap for first time
Researchers at Technical University of Darmstadt and the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research have succeeded for the first time in decelerating highly charged ions from the GSI accelerator to low energies and subsequently storing them in a Penning trap. They were also successful in performing the first electron cooling of highly charged ions in such a trap. The results have been published…
Researchers from the Technical University of Darmstadt and the GSI Helmholtz Center have achieved a groundbreaking first: decelerating and storing highly charged ions in a Penning trap. This breakthrough, reported in Physical Review X, enables experiments requiring slow, highly charged ions for atomic, nuclear and fundamental physics research.
GSI's HITRAP facility was key to this feat. Dr. Simon Rausch, the lead author, explains they decelerated fully stripped argon ions from near light speed by a factor of 10,000 before trapping them for several seconds. This marks the first time such ions were captured from the accelerator system to storage in a Penning trap. Electron cooling further reduced the ions' kinetic energy, a prerequisite for future precision experiments.
The results open new avenues for materials science and other studies using slow, highly charged ions at the HITRAP facility.
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