Laser-Cooling of Ion Beams at Relativistic Energies

Recent Experiments at the Experimental Storage Ring at GSI have seen the successful application of laser cooling of bunched C3+ ion beams at relativistic energies of 122 MeV per nucleon. Major results of these experiments include the attainment of space-charge dominated beams, evidence for collective ion motion, three-dimensional cold beams and precision laser spectroscopy in the deep UV spectral range. The talk will review these results, showing that measurements of important beam properties such as momentum spread and bunch length are currently limited by the beam diagnostics available. Several solutions to better resolve the beam momentum spread will be presented, which can be easily included in future experiments. These experimental efforts are supplemented by extensive computer simulations of laser-cooled bunched ion beams which can provide insight into the ion-dynamics on the single-particle level. The talk will conclude with an outlook to the exciting possibilities for laser cooling of ion beams at FAIR.