Sebastian Klammes
GSI/FAIR department SIS100/SIS18
Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany

Dr. Sebastian Klammes received this year's PhD Award of the SPARC Collaboration for his work on laser cooling of ions in storage rings. The SPARC PhD Award was presented at the 19th SPARC Collaboration Workshop at the Helmholtz Institute Jena by head of the SPARC Award Committe Professor Andrey Surzhykov of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt and the Technische Universität Braunschweig. Klammes’s doctoral thesis, which he conducted at the GSI/FAIR department SIS100/SIS18, was supervised by Professor Thomas Walther of Technical University of Darmstadt and Dr. Danyal Winters of GSI/FAIR.

In his PhD thesis titled „Application of pulsed UV laser systems for cooling of high-relativistic ion beams and laser spectroscopy of Be-like krypton ions” Dr. Sebastian Klammes focused on ion beam cooling at particle accelerator facilities. Ion beam cooling with lasers is one of the indispensable techniques for the production of high-quality ion beams with a narrow velocity distribution and of a particular importance to the SIS100 ring accelerator at the international accelerator facility FAIR. During his research, the storage ring ESR served as a pilot and test facility for laser cooling of high-energy and intense ion beams.

In his work, Klammes used a pulsed UV laser system to successfully demonstrate broadband laser cooling of relativistic and bunched carbon ions (C³⁺). The laser system was converted to a transportable version and enhanced with a state-of-the-art data acquisition system. For the precise examination of theoretical models for the description of the atmic structure of complex many-electron systems, experiments on laser spectroscopy of krypton (Kr³²⁺; a krypton atom with four electrons) were performed at ESR. The scope of the thesis also comprised participation in the laser cooling of oxygen ions (O⁵⁺) at the storage ring CSRe in Lanzhou, China.

The SPARC PhD Award has been presented annually since 2018 and comes with a prize money of 300 euros. The award honors the best PhD thesis within the collaboration concerning atomic physics with heavy ions at the research facilities of GSI and FAIR. SPARC stands for Stored Particles Atomic Physics Research Collaboration. Currently, more than 400 members from 26 countries belong to the collaboration. They experiment with the existing atomic physics facilities at GSI and prepare new experiments and setups at the future FAIR accelerator. (CP)