The HITRAP facility for slow highly charged ions

At the GSI accelerator complex, behind the universal linear accelerator UNILAC and the synchrotron SIS, highly charged ions up to are produced at 400 MeV/nucleon. When this beam is sent through a copper foil all or nearly all remaining electrons are stripped. The HITRAP facility, a combination of a linear decelerator and a cryogenic Penning trap, is built to decelerate those ions to almost rest and to provide them for the experiments. In a number of commissioning beam times, the deceleration in the ESR, the extraction, bunching and, finally, deceleration to 6 keV/nucleon has been shown. The remaining steps, being capture and cooling in a cryogenic Penning trap, are presently tested off-line.