PRECISION LASER SPECTROSCOPY OF HIGHLY-CHARGED IONS

Recently, intense beams of highly charged ions have become available a t heavy ion cooler rings. The obstacle for producing these highly inte resting candidates is the large binding energy of K-shell electrons in heavy systems in excess of LOD keV. One way to remove these electrons is to strip them off by passing the ion through material. In the cool er ring, the ions are cooled to a well defined velocity. At the SIS/ES R complex it is possible to produce, store, and cool highly charged io ns up to bare uranium with intensities exceeding 10(8) atoms in the ri ng. This opens the door for precision laser spectroscopy of hydrogenli ke-heavy ions, e.g. Bi-209(82+), and allows to examine the interaction of the single electron with the large fields of the heavy nucleus, ex ceeding any artificially produced electric and magnetic fields by orde rs of magnitude. In the electron cooler the interaction of electrons a nd highly charged ions otherwise only present in the hottest plasmas c an be studied.