Possible options for the future physics program of HERA are electron
ion collisions, electron polarized proton collisions or an extension of
the current research program with improved quality of the proton beam. For
almost all of these options a bright hadron beam is required to achieve
a sufficiently high luminosity. To improve the brightness of the hadron
beam the application of electron
cooling is proposed. A two staged cooling scheme is foreseen. In
a first step the hadrons are cooled at medium energy (somewhere between 3
and 20 GeV) and in a second step cooled at the final energy (330 or
820 GeV) mainly to maintain the high beam quality. At such high energies
the application of a standard DC electron cooler is no longer possible and
new cooler concepts have to be developed. For the first step a linac
based cooler is used that supplies electron bunches of high beam quality to
cool the hadrons and for the second step a storage ring based cooler is
foreseen that makes use of the radiation damping of electrons to produce
a high quality electron beam. A status report on these two coolers will be
given.