SPARC PhD Award for Dr. Jan Richter
06.10.2026 |
This year's SPARC collaboration PhD Prize was awarded to Dr. Jan Richter from Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) and the Leibniz University Hannover, Germany, for his thesis entitled “Highly charged ions as a tool for fundamental physics and tests of the Standard Model”. The ceremony took place during the 23rd SPARC Topical Workshop at the Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Huizhou, China, where the award was handed over by Professor Reinhold Schuch from Stockholm University and spokesperson of the SPARC collaboration.
The award recognizes Dr. Richter’s excellent theoretical work on the interaction of highly charged ions with electromagnetic radiation, in particular his QED-based studies of resonant photon scattering and their applications to atomic spectroscopy, as well as his studies of isotope shifts and King-plot nonlinearities in searches for physics beyond the Standard Model. His PhD thesis was supervised by Professor Elina Fuchs from Leibniz University Hannover and Professor Andrey Surzhykov from Technical University of Braunschweig.
The SPARC PhD Award has been presented annually since 2018 and carries a prize of 300 euros. The award honors the best PhD thesis within the collaboration concerning atomic physics with heavy ions at the research facilities of GSI and FAIR. SPARC stands for Stored Particles Atomic Physics Research Collaboration and currently brings together more than 400 members from 26 countries. Its members conduct experiments at the existing atomic-physics facilities at GSI and prepare new experiments and setups for the future FAIR accelerator. (CP)
