The department of Atomic, Quantum and Fundamental Physics strives to advance our knowledge of strong-field processes to deepen our understanding of matter under extreme conditions. The research activities comprise precision experiments on:

• fundamental tests of QED in the regime of strong coupling
• tests of fundamental constants
• super-critical systems
• ion-electron, ion-atom, ion-ion collisions
• experiments at the border between atomic and nuclear physics

Most of the experiments are performed at our storage and rapping facilities - the ion storage rings ESR and CRYRING@ESR as well as the trapping facility HITRAP. All the activities mentioned are embedded in the research topic „Matter“ of the Helmholtz research program „From Matter to Materials and Life“ and performed in close cooperation with the SPARC/APPA collaboration of the international FAIR project.

For the years to come, the particular focus is the exploitation of the worldwide unique research capabilities of the ESR and the CRYRING@ESR cooler and storage rings as well as the trapping facility for highly-charged ions HITRAP by utilizing dedicated FAIR instrumentation already developed by the SPARC collaboration. For the years to come, a clear priority is given to key experiments (see link). At the same time, we plan to maintain and upgrade the facilities which are essential for our mid-term research program, promoting our open user facilities as well as novel physics projects and ideas.

In future, we expect further extensive activities with relativistic FAIR beams at the SIS100 (laser cooling and spectroscopy) and at the APPA cave. At later stage, a particular focus will be on experiments at the High Energy Storage Ring (HESR), where cooled relativistic heavy ion beams will be available for precision experiments, a unique premiere.