Narrow Results

On October 4th, 2010, nine countries signed the international agreement on the construction of the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research FAIR. The new facility is going to be constructed within the next eight years adjacent to the existing accelerator complex of the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research at Darmstadt/Germany, expanding the research goals and technical possibilities substantially. Providing a broad spectrum of unprecedented fore-front research at worldwide unique accelerator and experimental facilities, FAIR will open the way for a large variety of experiments in hadron, nuclear, atomic and plasma physics as well as applied sciences which will be briefly described in this article.

NUSTAR comprises the current nuclear structure, astrophysics and reactions programme at GSI and its proposed continuation and extension at FAIR. NUSTAR relies on the availability of exotic rare-isotope beams produced by fragmentation reactions and fission of relativistic heavy ions. The fragment separator FRS and a versatile set of instruments, including gamma arrays, particle spectrometers and a storage ring, enable unique experiments at GSI. The Super-FRS at the FAIR facility will provide several orders of magnitude stronger beams, providing access to the extremes of nuclear stability. To exploit these opportunities novel experimental set-ups are in preparation. R&D efforts have already resulted in improved detectors and enable the NUSTAR collaboration to steadily enhance the sensitivity and selectivity limits of their experiments. Current NUSTAR physics highlights, as well as development projects and activities, will be discussed.

The superconducting fragment separator (Super-FRS) will be one of the main scientific instruments of the future FAIR facility. This versatile high-resolution spectrometer allows for a variety of exciting experiments in atomic, nuclear and hadron physics. Future directions are presented in this contribution.