Towards high precision in-trap laser spectroscopy of highly charged ions

The extremely strong fields that exist around the nuclei of few-electron heavy ions drastically change the properties of the electronic system such as energy level spacings, lifetimes and magnetic moments. In turn, the electrons serve as sensitive probes for nuclear properties such as size, magnetic moment and spatial distribution of charge and magnetization. The energies of their forbidden fine and hyperfine structure transitions strongly depend on the nuclear charge and shift from microwave domains in or close to the optical domain. Thus, they become accessible for laser spectroscopy and its potentially high precision. A number of such measurements have been performed in storage rings and electron beam ion traps, and have yielded results with relative accuracies in the permille region. We present here an experiment under development at GSI Darmstadt which aims to significantly increase the accuracy by employing charged particle traps which allow to slow the ion motion nearly to rest, thus reducing Doppler effects and increasing the possible accuracy to the more than ppm region.