Coulomb clusters in RETRAP

Storage rings and Penning traps are being used to study ions in their highest charge states. Both devices must have the capability for ion cooling in order to perform high precision measurements such as mass spectrometry and laser spectroscopy. This is accomplished in storage rings in a merged beam arrangement where a cold electron beam moves at the speed of the ions. In RETRAP, a Penning trap located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a sympathetic laser/ion cooling scheme has been implemented. In a first step, singly charged beryllium ions are cooled electronically by a tuned circuit and optically by a laser. Then hot, highly charged ions are merged into the cold Be plasma. By collisions, their kinetic energy is reduced to the temperature of the Be plasma. First experiments indicate that the highly charged ions form a strongly coupled plasma with a Coulomb coupling parameter exceeding 1000.