We were at the inauguration of the new scientific director of FAIR and GSI

On April 24, Professor Thomas Nilsson was inaugurated as the new scientific director of the Facility for Antiproton and Iont Research in Europe GmbH (FAIR GmbH) and the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung GmbH in Darmstadt.

The ceremony, which took place on the premises of GSI and the international accelerator center FAIR, was attended by representatives of the Nuclear Physic Institute – Director Dr. Ondřej Svoboda and Dr. Andrej Kugler, who is the main coordinator of the FAIR-CZ project.

The Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) GmbH is a newly constructed European large research infrastructure included in the ESFRI Roadmap. 

It covers activities in four scientific pillars: Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM and HADES); antiProton ANnihilation at DArmstadt (PANDA); Nuclear STructure, Astrophysics and Reactions (NuSTAR) and Atomic, Plasma Physics and Applications (APPA).

The FAIR laboratory, the core of which is the SIS100 heavy ion accelerator, will be unique in par-ticular due to the production of very intense beams of relativistic heavy ions, which will enable the study of very rare reactions leading to the subthreshold emission of so-called charm particles in nuclei-to-nuclei collisions (CBM pillar) and thus make a substantial contribution to verify the nuclear-physics model of gravitational wave-generating neutron star fusion, for the discovery of which the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded in 2017. Furthermore, these very intense beams from SIS100 will enable the production of intense beams of radioactive nuclei (NuSTAR pillar) and thus the study of leading reactions in the laboratory to the production of elements inside stars, the so-called nucleogenesis. It will be also possible to produce unique bundles of antiprotons in accumulation rings (PANDA pillar), which will enable the study of exotic, otherwise hard-to-reach particles, so-called glueballs or tetraquarks. For future fusion reactors, the study of the conditions for the creation of highly compressed plasma and the subsequent fusion reaction (APPA pillar), requiring very intense beams of heavy ions, which will be provided by the SIS100 accelerator, is of fundamental importance. FAIR will also be a test site for the European Space Agency (ESA) to study the effects of cosmic radiation on astronauts during the upcoming mission to Mars (APPA pillar).

Photo: T. Silz, GSI/FAIR

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