LASER ACCELERATION AND LASER COOLING FOR ION BEAMS

Cooling and acceleration of ions by lasers has gained increasing attention over the last years. The common interest is to further increase the luminosity of ion beams, either by shrinking the phase space occupied by the beam, or simply via increasing the number of particles. Recently, laser cooling has demonstrated ion beam crystallization as the ultimate reduction of the beam temperature. On the other hand, acceleration of ions by ultra-intense lasers resulted in the generation of ion beams of unprecedented quality, both in terms of beam power and beam emittance. LASER COOLING The cooling of stored heavy ion beams to high phase space densities is of general importance when low momentum spread is required for precision spectroscop