Bunched laser cooling of a stored weak 7Li+ ion beam in a pure triplet state

A preparation scheme for a 7Li+ ion beam in a storage ring is presented which provides ions in the metastable triplet states with well controlled longitudinal phase space properties. For both state selective preparation and beam cooling, laser- and electron-cooler forces are applied. The spatial- and momentum distributions of the ions are directly detected by a time resolved measurement of the fluorescence light. At low beam intensities, the remaining heating rate of such a beam is completely determined by residual gas scattering. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.