Heavy Element Research at Ship

This report summarizes achievements made at GSI in the field of heavy-element research using the velocity separator SHIP. The presentation of the current program together with the experiences obtained during the last 30 years of experiments clearly show that superheavy-element research was always based on efforts to extend the limits of technical possibilities. Of these the increase of beam intensity and of the overall detection efficiency are the major contributions. Therefore we present in this report technical information on possible upgrades of the present facility, which result in an overall increase of the experimental sensitivity by a factor of ten.