Simulations on Resistive Cooling of Trapped Highly-Charged Particles

The increasing demand for high accuracies in atomic physics experiments requires intense beams of heavy and highly charged ions (HCI) which must be decelerated and cooled to extremely low energies. In the upcoming HITRAP (Highly charged Ion Trap) facility at GSI, Darmstadt HCI will be trapped and resistively cooled thanks to the electronic dissipation of kinetic energy on an external impedance. The cooling mechanism becomes highly nonlinear when applied to large ensembles of particles and due to the lack of thorough theoretical and experimental investigations the understanding of the process is still very limited. Our Particle-In-Cell simulations show the feasibility of this cooling mechanism and reveal some of its characteristic features.