Currently, the world's only source of low-energy antiprotons is the AD/ELENA facility located at CERN. To date, all precision measurements on single antiprotons have been conducted at this facility and provide stringent tests of fundamental interactions and their symmetries. However, magnetic field fluctuations from the facility operation limit the precision of upcoming measurements. To overcome this limitation, we have designed the transportable antiproton trap system BASE-STEP to relocate antiprotons to laboratories with a calm magnetic environment. We anticipate that the transportable antiproton trap will facilitate enhanced tests of charge, parity, and time-reversal invariance with antiprotons and provide new experimental possibilities of using transported antiprotons and other accelerator-produced exotic ions. We present here the technical design of the transportable trap system. This includes the transportable superconducting magnet, the cryogenic inlay consisting of the trap stack and detection systems, and the differential pumping section to suppress the residual gas flow into the cryogenic trap chamber.

We have conceived and built the HILITE (High-Intensity Laser-Ion Trap Experiment) Penning-trap setup for the production, confinement and preparation of pure ensembles of highly charged ions in a defined quantum state as a target for various high-intensity lasers. This enables a broad suite of laser-ion interaction studies at high photon energies and/or intensities, such as non-linear photo-ionisation studies. The setup has now been used to perform experiments at one such laser facility, namely the FLASH Free-Electron Laser at DESY in Hamburg, Germany. We describe the experimental possibilities of the apparatus, the results of the first measurements and future experiments at other laser facilities.

We present a Penning-trap-based setup for the study of light-matter interactions in the high-power and/or high-intensity laser regime, such as multi-photon ionization and field ionization. The setup applies ion-cloud formation techniques to highly charged ions to the end of specific target preparation, as well as non-destructive detection techniques to identify and quantify the interaction educts and products.

Synopsis We present non-destructive single-pass ion bunch detection and characterisation by measuring the induced image charge in a detection electrode. The presented technique allows direct determination of ion kinetic energy, absolute ion number and spatial ion bunch length. We will show the results of corresponding measurements with bunches of low-energy highly charged ions and discuss the minimum detectable number of charges.

Detailed investigations of laser–ion interactions require well‐defined ion targets and detection techniques for high‐sensitivity measurements of reaction educts and products. To this end, we have designed and built the High‐Intensity Laser‐Ion Trap Experiment Penning trap setup, which features various ion‐target preparation techniques including selection, cooling, compression, and positioning as well as destructive and non‐destructive measurement techniques to determine the number of stored ions for all charge states individually and simultaneously. We have recently performed first commissioning experiments of ion deceleration and dynamic ion capture with highly charged ion bunches from an electron beam ion source. We have characterized our single‐pass non‐destructive ion counter in detail and were able to determine the ion velocity as well as the number of ions from the signals acquired.