Perspectives of low-energy antiproton physics at FLAIR
Prof. Dr. E. Widmann (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Wien)

The Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research FAIR at Darmstadt [1] will provide antipro-ton beams of intensities that are two orders of magnitude higher than currently available. Within the foreseen scheme of the full facility, antiprotons can be decelerated to 30 MeV using the NESR storage ring. The low-energy antiproton community has formed a users group to make use of this opportunity to create a next-generation low-energy antiproton facility called FLAIR. A letter of intent [2] and subsequent technical proposal [3] have been submitted and accepted for a new facility that goes far beyond the current Antiproton Decelerator at CERN by providing cooled antiproton beams using two storage rings of 300 keV and 20 keV minimum energy. The availability of low-emittance beams at these low energies will greatly enhance the density of antiprotons stopped in dilute gases or ion traps for precision spectroscopy. FLAIR will also provide slow extracted (i.e. continuous) beams of antiprotons, thereby enabling nu-clear and particle physics type experiments which need coincidence techniques. A further op-portunity will be the simultaneous availability of unstable nuclei at low energies, making it possible to use antiprotons as hadronic probes for nuclear structure by determining neutron ha-los or skins. The talk gives an overview on the technical capabilities and experimental oppor-tunities at FLAIR.