Characterization of a new electrostatic storage ring for photofragmentation experiments.

We describe the design of and the first commissioning experiments with a newly constructed electrostatic storage ring named SAPHIRA (Storage Ring in Aarhus for PHoton-Ion Reaction Analysis). With an intense beam of Cu(-) at 4 keV, the storage ring is characterized in terms of the stored ion beam decay rate, the longitudinal spreading of an injected ion bunch, as well as the direct measurements of the transverse spatial distributions under different conditions of storage. The ion storage stability in SAPHIRA was investigated systematically in a selected region of its electrical configuration space.