Proposed ion-atom collision facility at Kansas State University

We are planning the construction of an ion-atom collision facility in the James R. Macdonald Laboratory at Kansas State University to be used for investigations of collisions and spectroscopy involving highly charged ions over a wide velocity range. This facility will be comprised of two major parts: (1) a superconducting linear accelerator following our EN tandem Van de Graaff will roughly triple the energies of our present heavy-ion beams for atomic masses up to approximately 100, and can also be used in a decelerating mode to produce highly charged beams at energies lower than those for the primary stripping; (2) a cryogenic electron-beam ion source will provide low energy beams of highly charged ions. Physics opportunities offered by these facilities include the study of slow collisions involving inner-shell electron transfer and excitation on a time scale slow compared to inner-shell relaxation time, the spectroscopy of selectively populated multiply-excited and -charged ions, the investigation of collisions at velocities where the quasi-free target electrons participate actively in creating deep vacancies in the projectiles, and merged electron-ion beam experiments. The facility will be available to the atom-collision community on a user basis. General features of the proposed facility and physics opportunities, as well as recent results on the use of such a LINAC as a decelerator, will be discussed. (orig.)