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Experiments addressing the beta decay of stored and cooled highly-charged ions will be presented and discussed. They have been conducted during the last decade at the facilities of GSI. There, the combination of a fragment separator (FRS) and of an ion storage-cooler ring (ESR) provided the very first opportunity to produce beta-unstable ions in-flight, to store and cool them over many hours in the ion ring by preserving their atomic charge state, and, finally, to observe time-resolved their beta decay. The astrophysical impact of those experiments is obvious: Stellar nucleosynthesis proceeds beyond iron via the interplay of neutron- or proton-capture and beta decay, at typical temperatures of 30–100 keV and, thus, at high atomic charge states. In particular, in this talk experiments concerning two-body beta decay (bound-state beta decay sc. orbital electron capture) of stored and cooled single ions at well-defined atomic charge states will be addressed, where for the first time the decay characteristics could be precisely investigated.
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