Development and application of laser-based techniques for SPARC

The "Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research" (FAIR) which is currently under construction at the "GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion research" at Darmstadt will offer a broad cutting-edge research spectrum for laser spectroscopic experiments with highly-charged heavy ions and relativistic ion beams. we are interested in experiments that cover the tests of fundamental interactions (strong-field QED of bound states) and symmetries (Lorentz-invariance), the extraction of nuclear ground-state properties from spectroscopy of few-electron systems (precise spectroscopic quadrupole moments from laser spectroscopy at D2 transitions of Li-like ions and magnetic moments without diamagnetic corrections from D1 transitions of Li-like ions), the comprehension of correlations in few-electron systems in strong fields (e.g. spectroscopy of beryllium-like ions) and applications of laser spectroscopy for cooling and preparation of ion beams. For these endeavors ion beams with kinetic energies from meV to several GeV/u will be availiable at the different storage rings and ion-trap setups. Within the scope of the BMBF collaborative research we are closely cooperating with our collaborators in Dresden, Jena and Münster to develop new techniques in the field of ion-beam production, detection of fluorescence photons and eventually alternative particle-sensitive detection methods which will be optimized to the conditions at the new storage rings and will exploit their scientific potential in an optimum way. Beside our own scientific goals and experiments we also focus on the preparation of ions for and with laser spectroscopy. Laser-cooled brilliant ion beams and the preparation of polarized ion beams will offer new possibilites for experiments.