CRYRING@ESR - Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research

Professor H. Stöcker
GSI, Darmstadt
4 th May 2012
Dear Professor Stöcker,
On behalf of the ILIMA collaboration, I would like to express strong support for the
CRYRING@ESR project, with the future option of a connection to the Super-FRS.
One of the main facilities for the ILIMA experimental program is the New
Experimental Storage Ring (NESR), which is however outside the start-up version of
FAIR. As has often been stressed, this significantly delays the realisation of the
planned storage-ring experimental programs, and it could also cause irreversible
negative consequences for the associated experimental communities.
A novel possibility is now under consideration. Installation of the CRYRING coupled
to the present ESR will extend the physics capabilities by enabling the production, in
the near future, of highly ionized heavy ions at the lowest kinetic energies. This
project has very high experimental discovery potential, including for ILIMA-related
experiments. For instance, searching for the Nuclear Excitation by Electron Capture
(NEEC) and the Nuclear Excitation by Electron Transition (NEET) phenomena will
become possible. Therefore, we support an early construction of the CRYRING
coupled to the ESR.
It is important to emphasise that there is a future option which foresees the connection
of the present ESR to the Super-FRS. This is extremely attractive for the ILIMA
collaboration. It will enable the possibility of performing ILIMA experiments with
cooled exotic ions in the ESR, with the highest secondary-beam intensities which will
be available from the Super-FRS. This transitional arrangement would enable us to
cover part of the ILIMA experimental program prior to the realisation of the NESR.
Furthermore, the novel detector setups, which are foreseen for the NESR experiments,
can be built and implemented for real physics experiments in the ESR under FAIR