Th. Walther

Laser cooling of relativistic heavy-ion beams for FAIR

Laser cooling is a powerful technique to reduce the longitudinal momentum spread of stored relativistic ion beams. Based on successful experiments at the experimental storage ring at GSI in Darmstadt, of which we show some important results in this paper, we present our plans for laser cooling of relativistic ion beams in the future heavy-ion synchrotron SIS100 at the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research in Darmstadt.

Precision Measurement of the First Ionization Potential of Nobelium

One of the most important atomic properties governing an elements chemical behavior is the energy required to remove its least-bound electron, referred to as the first ionization potential. For the heaviest elements, this fundamental quantity is strongly influenced by relativistic effects which lead to unique chemical properties. Laser spectroscopy on an atom-at-a-time scale was developed and applied to probe the optical spectrum of neutral nobelium near the ionization threshold. The first ionization potential of nobelium is determined here with a very high precision from the convergence of measured Rydberg series to be 6.626 21±0.000 05  eV. This work provides a stringent benchmark for state-of-the-art many-body atomic modeling that considers relativistic and quantum electrodynamic effects and paves the way for high-precision measurements of atomic properties of elements only available from heavy-ion accelerator facilities.

Progress of laser cooling of 12C3+ ions at the CSRe

We have performed a test run for laser cooling experiments with 12C3+ ion beams at an energy of 122 MeV/u at the CSRe with a pulsed laser. During this beamtime a lot of progress have been made. This was the first time we could successfully separate the 12C3+ ions and 16O4+ ions in the Schottky spectrum with the help of electron cooling. And our newly installed CPM detector worked well during the experiment. We tried to see effects from the interaction of the pulsed laser light with the stored 12C3+ ion beams, but no cooling effects could yet be observed.

Spontaneous Parametric Down‐Conversion in Waveguide Chips for Quantum Information

We implement spontaneous parametric down‐conversion in temperature‐stabilized PP‐KTP with detection rates up to 103 photon pairs per second and μW pump power at 404 nm as a source for single photons. In this contribution we describe two applications: While in a first experiment the photon pairs will be used to implement a free‐space QKD‐setup based on the BB84 protocol without the need of active polarization switching, the second setup focusses on a two‐photon setup based on feedback.