Current status of the fair project

The idea of an Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) has been developed during the past years to provide the international community a world-leading infrastructure for nuclear and hadron research [1]. It is planned to realize the project within an international cooperation of 14 partner states: Austria, China, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britan, Greece, India, Italy, Poland, Romania, Russia, Spain and Sweden. Decision has been taken to start the project by end of 2007. The scientific case for FAIR is grouped around fascinating fields of research: (a) Nuclear structure and nuclear astrophysics with beams of stable and in particular short-lived radioactive nuclei far from stability. (b) Hadron structure, the theory of strong intraction primarily with beams of antiprotons. (c) Investigation of nuclear matter phase diagram and quark-gluon plasma with heavy ion beams at high energies. (d) Physics of dense plasmas in combination with petawatt LASER fields. (e) Atomic physics, quantum electro-dynamics and ultrahigh electromagnetic fields with beams of highly- charged heavy ions, and low energy antiprotons. (f) Applied research with ion beams for materials science and biology. To cope with this rich experimental program a unique concept for the FAIR accelerators was developed at GSI together with the international science community. This concept builds on and substancially expands developments made at GSI and other accelerator laboratories worldwide in the acceleration, accumulation, storage and phase space cooling of high-energy proton and heavy-ion beams. This paper describes the current state of preparation of the FAIR project, focussing on the R&D work performed on lattice layout and key components, i.e. pulsed superconducting magnets, beam cooling devices etc.