Visiting Professorship for Yuri Litvinov

The Northwest Normal University in Lanzhou, Gansu, China appointed Dr. Yuri Litvinov visiting professor of the College of Physics and Electronic Engineering. Lanzhou has a storage ring similar to the ESR at GSI.

HGS-HIRe Excellence Award 2011 goes to Matthias Lochmann

Matthias Lochmann received one of the two Excellence Awards 2011 granted by the Helmholtz Graduate School HGS-HIRe for his outstanding scientific work. Matthias is a Doctoral Student of the Helmholtz Young Investigator Group LaserSpHERe and he observed the hyperfine transition in lithiumlike bismuth at the ESR.

The ground state hyperfine transition in lithium-like bismuth (209Bi80+) was the subject of intense research at GSI and at Livermore for many years. The hyperfine splitting was observed in 1998 at the Super-EBIT in Livermore in a spectrum of the 2s1/2 -> 2p3/2 x-ray transition and an energy splitting of 825±26 meV was reported. Within the last 13 years, various attempts to directly observe the transition either at the ESR using direct laser spectroscopy or at the Super-EBIT applying emission spectrometry failed. Now the E083 collaboration (LIBELLE) observed a direct signature of the hyperfine transition by pulsed laser excitation and fluorescence detection. The figure shows the first resonance that was observed in a coarse frequency scan around the region predicted by Shabaev and Volotka. The graph shows the accumulated background-subtracted fluorescence-photon counts as a function of laser wavelength. The red curve represents the spectrum obtained with a hardware gated analysis, whereas the black curve was obtained using the software-gated analysis procedure. The detailed analysis of the high-resolution scans taken during the beamtime will provide a test of QED in the extremely strong fields close to the nucleus. LaserSphere thanks all beamtime participants and those who helped in the preparatory phase.

A group unter participation of GSI succeeded in directly measuring the spin-flip of a single proton which had beed stored in an electromagnetic particle trap. The method used allows for high precision measurements of the magnetic properties of the proton as well as the antiproton. By comparing both, conclusions about matter-antimatter symmetry can be drawn.


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