The laser physicist Dr. Jan Rothhardt from the Helmholtz Institute Jena (HI Jena), an institute of the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung, located on the campus of the Friedrich Schiller University (FSU) Jena, receives the renowned Röntgen Prize. The prize will be awarded during the digital academic ceremony of the Justus-Liebig-University Gießen. The 39-year-old leader of a Helmholtz Young Investigator Group, who works at HI Jena and the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena,…

Bringing huge amounts of protons up to speed in the shortest distance in fractions of a second — that's what laser acceleration technology, greatly improved in recent years, can do. An international research team has succeeded in using protons accelerated with the GSI high-power laser PHELIX to split other nuclei and to analyze them. The results could provide new insights into astrophysical processes.

It is still a glance into the future: The combination of carbon ion and immune therapy could become an effective tool in the fight against cancer. Promising results for the potential benefit of this treatment combination have now been published in the renowned radiation therapy journal "International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Biology, Physics" of the American Society for Therapeutic Radiation Oncology (ASTRO). The authors are an international team of researchers, led by the Department of…

A new study lead by GSI scientists and international colleagues investigates black-hole formation in neutron star mergers. Computer simulations show that the properties of dense nuclear matter play a crucial role, which directly links the astrophysical merger event to heavy-ion collision experiments at GSI and FAIR. These properties will be studied more precisely at the future FAIR facility. With the award of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics the topic currently also receives a lot of attention.

Gaining a better understanding of the limiting factors for the existence of stable, superheavy elements is a decade-old quest of chemistry and physics. Superheavy elements, as are called the chemical elements with atomic numbers greater than 103, do not occur in nature and are produced artificially with particle accelerators. They vanish within seconds. A team of scientists from GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung Darmstadt, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU),…

Nuclear clocks could make our time measurement even more accurate than atomic clocks. The key to this lies in thorium-229, an atomic nucleus whose lowest excited state has very low energy. A research team from the Kirchhoff Institute for Physics at the University of Heidelberg, TU Wien, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), the Helmholtz Institute Mainz (HIM), and GSI Helmholtzzentrum in Darmstadt has now succeeded in measuring this low energy. Using an extremely accurate detector, it was…

High-precision measurements of the mass of the deuteron, the nucleus of heavy hydrogen, provide new insights into the reliability of fundamental quantities in atomic and nuclear physics. This is reported in the journal "Nature" by a collaboration led by the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics Heidelberg, Germany, and partners from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research Darmstadt and the Helmholtz Institute Mainz, Germany.

The high-performance data center of GSI and FAIR, the Green IT Cube, was awarded the “Blue Angel” as a label of special environmental friendliness. Currently, this makes it the only data center to receive the eco label of the German government. Thanks to a special cooling system, it is particularly energy efficient and conserves resources. The Green IT Cube is one of the most powerful scientific data centers in the world.