International Highly Charged Ions Conference (HCI)
From September 2nd until 6th, ARCNL organized the 21st HCI conference in Egmond aan Zee. It was the second time for HCI conference to visit the Netherlands.
HCI conference
As captured by its name, the biennial international HCI (Highly Charged Ions) conference series is the international platform to present and discuss advancements in the field HCI physics, with topics ranging from fundamental structure, via interactions with photons, electrons, ions, atoms, molecules and solids to applications in astrophysical, fusion and industrial plasma. The conference series started in 1982 with Anders Bárány as its initiator and first chair.
The role of highly charged ions in research
Highly charged ions present a cornerstone of contemporary atomic and plasma physics research. Advances in this field have had (and will continue to have) far-reaching consequences for numerous fundamental and applied scientific disciplines. Their unique structures serve as a testbed for today’s most advanced bound-state quantum electrodynamics (QED) calculations, and may be exploited in the future as frequency standards for future atomic clocks as well as searches for variations of fundamental constants and physics beyond the standard model. Moreover, HCIs are encountered in practically every high-temperature plasma environment, from stellar objects and black-hole accretion disks, to terrestrial plasmas developed for fusion and semiconductor manufacturing purposes. The diagnosis of these extreme environments requires extensive knowledge of the structures, collisional and radiative properties of HCIs, information which is largely lacking.
The generation of fundamental atomic data, both structural and collisional, is a core component of HCI physics involving the close interplay of theory and experiment. On the theoretical front, HCI research extends from the development of many-body effects in QED calculations, to the accurate modeling of energy transfer in strongly radiating, HCI-dominated plasmas. The development of experimental facilities and advanced instrumentation for HCI production (accelerators, electron-cyclotron resonance sources, free-electron lasers) as well as the development of methods to interrogate the structures and dynamics of HCIs in complex environments (clusters, surfaces), is key for future developments in HCI physics.
