▣ Title : Highly Charged Ions for Industry and Fundamental Physics

▣ Speaker : Dr. Sung Nam Park(Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science)

▣ Date & Time : 2026. 9. 17(Thu) 16:30~17:40

▣ Venue : Research Bldg I, #310

▣ Language : Korean

▣ Abstract :

What happens when you strip away dozens of electrons from an atom? The result — a highly charged ion (HCI) — is not some exotic laboratory curiosity, but in fact the most common form of matter in the universe, found in stars, supernova remnants, and fusion plasmas. As our understanding of HCIs has deepened, they have steadily found their way into real-world technologies. Most notably, the extreme-ultraviolet light source at the heart of ASML's cutting-edge lithography machines is generated from highly charged tin ions. HCIs are also used in cancer therapy, in radiation-hardness testing of semiconductors for space applications, and in the nanostructuring of 2D materials. In fundamental physics, a different property of HCIs comes into play: their extreme insensitivity to external electric and magnetic field perturbations makes them promising candidates for next-generation atomic clocks — following the first HCI-based optical clock demonstrated in 2022 — and a powerful tool for isotope-shift spectroscopy via the so-called King plot, a technique used to search for new physics beyond the Standard Model. In this talk, I will introduce what highly charged ions are, and survey these applications spanning industry, precision timekeeping, and fundamental physics.