First laser cooling of relativistic ions in a storage ring

The first successful laser cooling of ions at relativistic energies was observed at the Heidelberg TSR storage ring. A ⁷Li⁺-ion beam of 13.3 MeV was oberlapped with resonant copropagating and counterpropagating laser beams. The metastable ions were cooled from 260 K to a longitudinal temperature of below 3 K and decelerated by several keV. The longitudinal velocity distribution was determined by a fluorescence method. After laser cooling a strongly enhanced narrow peak appeared in the Schottky noise spectrum in addition to the uncooled ion distribution.