Current news

New CRC 1660: Hadrons and Nuclei as Discovery Tools

Collaborative Research Centre at JGU's Institute for Nuclear Physics seeks new physical phenomena through a better understanding of strong interaction processes

31 May 2024

The German Research Foundation (DFG) today approved the establishment of a new Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). The CRC 1660 "Hadrons and Nuclei as Discovery Tools" aims to understand the strong interaction that leads to processes involving hadrons, nuclei, and atoms. The goal is to answer fundamental questions: What physical phenomena occur beyond the Standard Model of particle physics (SM) and how can we measure and describe them? The spokespersons of the new Collaborative Research Centre are Professor Concettina Sfienti (experiment) and Professor Marc Vanderhaeghen (theory) from the Institute for Nuclear Physics at JGU.

Workshop "Strange hadrons as precision tool for strongly interacting systems (SPICE)"

24.05.24
From 13th to 17th may the workshop for Strange hadrons as precision tool for strongly interacting systems (SPICE) took place in Trento. “With 52 international participants and 39 keynote speakers, the conference offered a perfect platform to assess the present status of the field, to identify potential synergies within the community and to define experimental objectives for new cutting-edge research activities” Prof. Josef Pochodzalla, one of the organizers, resumes. To cover the field as broadly as possible a variety of topics were addressed during the five days workshop, including hypernuclei, exotic atoms, femtoscopy, extreme neutron rich nuclei, the kaon-nucleus interaction and the strangeness in neutron stars.

The workshop was supported by the EU Strong 2020 project and ECT*.

DAAD prize for Francesca Bonaiti

Francesca Bonaiti is receiving the 2024 DAAD prize for international students

Francesca Bonaiti from the group of Sonia Bacca stands out as one of the top physics PhD students at JGU. Consistently achieving exceptional results in her theoretical research, she has published several papers in peer-reviewed journals. Recognized for her strong potential, she also has collected several invitations to international conferences and has recently secured the prestigious 5-year FRIB theory fellow position in the USA.

Francesca Bonaiti's research lies in the field of theoretical nuclear physics. Employing complex computational tools, she studies the behaviour of atomic nuclei immersed in electric and magnetic fields, starting from the strong force binding protons and neutrons together in the nucleus. Her work, deepening our knowledge of nuclear structure, helps in advancing our understanding of the nature of neutron stars.

New physics in parity violation: From the Thomson limit to the energy frontier / Funding worth EUR 3.2 million

11 April 2024

Professor Maarten Boonekamp, Professor Frank Maas, Professor Jens Erler (photo/©: private / Sabrina Hopp)

The consortium of Professor Maarten Boonekamp from Université Paris-Saclay as spokesperson and Professor Jens Erler and Professor Frank Maas of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for their project Zeptometry. This project aims to combine new precision measurements at the highest LHC energies at the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN with challenging new precision measurements at very low energies with the upcoming MESA accelerator in Mainz in connection with the theory interpretation of the experimental results. The funding will be dedicated to the study of interactions between the Z boson and the fermions, i.e., the quarks and leptons constituting ordinary matter, to which end the upcoming experiment P2 at the Mainz electron accelerator MESA will be crucial.

Quelle: 2003-2024 CERN / Herwig Schopper, CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed

The founding director of our Institute turns 100 today

28 Feb 2024

Herwig Schopper, a pioneer in experimental particle physics in Germany and Europe and the founding director of the Institute of Nuclear Physics at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz celebrates his 100th birthday today.

MENU conference 2023

27.10.2023

The "International Conference on Meson-Nucleon Physics and the Structure of the Nucleon (MENU 2023)" took place in the historic building of the Erbacher Hof in the old town of Mainz from October 16 to 20, 2023. More than 140 participants from 15 countries discussed their research results on topics in the field of hadron physics and related areas in 26 plenary and 77 parallel lectures sessions. Future developments in this field of research, such as the Electron-Ion-Collider in the USA and the Mainz Energy Recovering Accelerator MESA in Mainz, as well as new forward-looking developments in theory, also played a major role.

The next big component for MESA is installed

26.10.2023

In order to operate the new electron accelerator MESA, an extensive technical infrastructure is required in addition to the actual accelerator components: for example, a cryogenic system based on liquid helium for cooling the superconducting accelerator units. This cryosystem was designed by the scientists and technicians of the Institute of Nuclear Physics to be recoverable, i.e. the part of the liquid helium that evaporates during the cooling process is subsequently fed back into a liquefaction plant and can thus be reused. A central component for this is the so-called sub-atmospheric compressor, which has now been successfully installed by the staff of our technical operating unit "Vacuum" together with the manufacturing company. This large compressor with a footprint of about three by six meters is used to first compress the helium vaporized in the system from a pressure of around 16 mbar back to atmospheric pressure (~1 bar) before it is then furher increased to the liquefier's working pressure of around 10 bar via another group of compressors.

The construction of MESA and the experiments is progressing

11.10.2023

Powerful magnets for MAGIX

Core components for the upcoming MESA experiment MAGIX have arrived in Mainz

One of the key projects of the Mainz Cluster of Excellence PRISMA+ is the construction of the new energy-recovering particle accelerator MESA, which will enable experiments with unprecedented precision in the future. One of these experiments is called MAGIX. It is a sophisticated spectrometer setup with which scientists hope to answer some of the most fundamental questions in modern physics: How big is the proton? Can we find evidence for dark photons? Can we understand more precisely the fusion of carbon and helium into oxygen inside stars? Now, with two magnet systems weighing 18 tons each, very crucial components for MAGIX have arrived in Mainz.

25th European Conference on Few-Body Problems (EFB25) at JGU

07.08.2023

The "25th European Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics" took place this year on the campus of JGU Mainz. In 13 sessions over 5 days more than 150 scientists from all over the world discussed current issues in the fields of hadrons, (hyper-)nuclear physics, cold atoms and molecular physics. Ukrainian researchers were connected online, as they were unable to attend on site due to the war in Ukraine.

Pixel Vertex Detector Installed in Belle II Experiment

01.08.2023

After years of development work, the new Pixel Vertex Detector (PXD2) was successfully installed in the international Belle-II experiment at the SuperKEKB electron-positron accelerator in Japan. Concettina Sfienti's group at the Institute of Nuclear Physics was also involved in the design and construction. Under Mainz leadership, real-time monitoring of data quality was implemented and key sections of the software controlling the PXD2 were programmed. In addition, sensor modules were tested at MAMI for their radiation hardness.