Dielectronic Recombination Experiments with Tungsten Ions at the Test Storage Ring and Development of a Single-Particle Detector at the Cryogenic Storage Ring

This work is about electron-ion collision experiments at the ion storage rings of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg. Absolute recombination rate coefficients of highly-charged tungsten ions featuring an open 4-f-shell structure have been measured at the heavy-ion storage ring TSR. The resulting plasma rate coefficients have been used to probe the significance of newly developed theoretical approaches. Plasma rate coefficients of highly-charged tungsten ions are in particular interesting for the development of plasma models for nuclear fusion reactors, since tungsten is a foreseeable impurity in the fusion plasma. In the relevant temperature range, the experimental results exceed the theoretical data used so far by up to a factor of 10, showing the need for more reliable theoretical calculations. Furthermore, based on the design of the detectors which have been used in the experiments at TSR, a movable single-particle detector for electron-ion recombination studies at the cryogenic storage ring CSR has been developed and installed within the scope of this work. The device has been designed specifically to meet the requirements of the CSR regarding low ion energies and cryogenic ambient temperature conditions. In a series of experiments, the detector was carefully characterised and successfully tested for its compatibility with these requirements. The detector was part of the infrastructure used for the room-temperature commissioning of CSR (2014) and is currently operated as a single-particle counter during the first cryogenic operation of CSR in 2015