Atomic and Molecular Physics at Storage Rings

In the talk, I presented recent results demonstrating the novel research opportunities in atomic and molecular physics at ion-cooler storage rings. For a spectroscopy of atomic and molecular data, it is the extended observation and interaction time of the stored ions that is exploited. Either one excites the ions inside the storage and detects the delayed decay or one inserts excited atomic, molecular, or cluster ions into the ring for measuring the decay of long lived metastable states, molecular and cluster excitations. Metastable levels in ions decay by weak forbidden radiative transitions and the corresponding atomic lifetimes can be ms instead of ns. A laser probing method has been developed to determine such lifetimes in CRYRING. The high spectral resolution of the method has opened possibilities to study ions for iron group elements and rare earths elements, for which no experimental studies had been possible previously