HITRAP: A facility for experiments with trapped highly charged ions

HITRAP is a planned ion trap facility for capturing and cooling of highly c harged ions produced at GSI in the heavy-ion complex of the UNILAC-SIS acce lerators and the ESR storage ring. In this facility heavy highly charged io ns up to uranium will be available as bare nuclei, hydrogen-like ions or fe w-electron systems at low temperatures. The trap for receiving and studying these ions is designed for operation at extremely high vacuum by cooling t o cryogenic temperatures. The stored highly charged ions can be investigate d in the trap itself or can be extracted from the trap at energies up to ab out 10 keV/q. The proposed physics experiments are collision studies with h ighly charged ions at well-defined low energies (eV/u), high-accuracy measu rements to determine the g-factor of the electron bound in a hydrogen-like heavy ion and the atomic binding energies of few-electron systems, laser sp ectroscopy of HFS transitions and X-ray spectroscopy.