The proposed Facility for Low-energy Antiproton and Heavy-Ion Research combines low energy antiproton beams and stable and instable highly-charged ions for atomic, nuclear and particle physics research. The key features of the facility will be the cooled, highly intense beams of antiprotons and bare and few-electron heavy ions. The combination of several decelerators – the Low-energy Storage Ring LSR, the Ultra-low energy Storage Ring USR, and the trap facility HITRAP – and different ion/anti­proton traps will provide beams of excellent emittance covering energies from 100 MeV/u down to few eV. Over 15 different experiments have been proposed to be located at FLAIR and use the provided beams. Details about the scientific goal and technical aspects of these experiments are presented in the FLAIR Technical Proposal. E. Widmann was chairman of the steering committee of FLAIR from the beginning and has been elected spokesman in the last collaboration meeting.

In 2005 the STI committee decided to include FLAIR into the core program of FAIR and the FLAIR building into the civil construction budget. The remainder of the facility, the storage rings, beam lines and experiments, are expected to be funded by the collaboration. To this end, the decision in spring of 2007 of the Austrian Ministry of Science to sign the memorandum of
understanding and to consider substantial contributions to FAIR will help significantly. In 2008 a formal evaluation of two possible solutions for the LSR rings was performed and it was decided to choose the existing CRYRING at the Manne Siegbahn Laboratory, Stockholm, which will be modified for its use of FLAIR by MSL and provided by Sweden as an in-kind contribution to FAIR. HITRAP is currently being commissioned for operation with highly charged ions at GSI and will later on be moved to FLAIR and modified for operation with both antiprotons and highly charged ions. The USR is a very challenging new development as no electrostatic ring with variable energy has ever been built. It is developed by a Helmholtz Young Investigators group at GSI and University of Heidelberg led by Dr. Carsten Welsch, who recently moved to the Cockcroft Institute in UK. A similar but even more challenging ring called CSR is being developed at Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, Heidelberg, and will serve as a prototype for the design of the USR.