Laser Cooling of Ion Beams at Relativistic Energies

Laser cooling of ion beams can achieve unprecedented low momentum spreads and is strong enough to overcome intra-beam scattering and induce beam crystallization. When compared to stochastic cooling and electron cooling, laser cooling promises to show better performance than the latter two in cooling highly relativistic ion beams.

Thus, laser cooling at future facilities such as FAIR and HIAF has come into the focus of ion accelerator research.
This work is intended to give the reader a comprehensive overview of laser cooling at relativistic energies and related experiments at the storage rings ESR at GSI Darmstadt, S-LSR at ICR Kyoto and CSRe at IMP Lanzhou.