The HIE-ISOLDE Project and its Scientific Opportunities

The ISOLDE Facility at CERN produces pure and intense radioactive beams of 1300 different nuclei of 75 elements by the ISOL-method. Since more than a decade it offers the largest variety of post-accelerated radioactive beams in the world today. In order to broaden the scientific opportunities beyond the reach of the present facility, the on-going HIE-ISOLDE (High Intensity and Energy) project will provide major improvements in energy range, beam intensity and beam quality. A major element of the project will be an increase of the final energy of the post-accelerated beams to 10 MeV/u throughout the periodic table. The first stage will boost the energy of the current REX LINAC to 5.5 MeV/u where the Coulomb excitation cross sections are strongly increased with respect to the previous 3 MeV/u and many transfer reaction channels will be opened. The first phase of HIE-ISOLDE will start for Physics in the autumn of 2015. The physics cases approved expand over the wide range of post-accelerated beams available at ISOLDE with more than six hundred shifts approved for day one physics. In this contribution the HIE-ISOLDE project will be described together with a panorama of the physics cases addressed