Visit of the EPS Nuclear Physics Division Board at GSI/FAIR
The Nuclear Physics Board of the European Physical Society met in Frankfurt at the end of September 2019. The first day of the two-days meeting took place in the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, where a mini-workshop was held (Fig. 1), followed by a visit of the facility.
Karlheinz Langanke, former member of the Board, gave an introductory talk presenting GSI, one of the main German national laboratories for subatomic physics. It employs roughly 1300 staff, 300 of which are scientists and engineers with a PhD, and welcomes more than 1200 users from all over the world. Its scientific program comprises research on Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), nucleon structure, nuclear and atomic physics, crystals, materials, and biophysics. GSI is the second laboratory in the world for the discovery of new elements, isotopes, and decay modes. The pioneering studies in hadron therapy, clinical studies, and medical applications at GSI, where more than 450 patients were treated with a tumour success rate of roughly 85%, spurred the construction of a hadron-therapy center in Heidelberg (Ion Beam Therapy Center, HIT). The theorists of GSI also contributed to predicting gravitational waves induced by neutron-stars mergers, with several years of advance with respect to the first observations.
FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research), the future accelerator facility of GSI currently under construction, is expected to reach completion in 2025. It is the top priority of the European nuclear-physics community, and has owners and partners all over the world. It will provide a gain factor in intensity, relative to GSI, between 100 and 1000. The FAIR science program will revolve around 4 experimental pillars: APPA, CBM, PANDA, and NUSTAR. The Phase-0 of the FAIR program is already ongoing, and it includes, among others, experiments to test the new detectors. Phase-1 will begin in 2025 as soon as the accelerator is completed.
The two following presentations, by Haik Simon and Yuri Litvinov, provided details on the technical progress of the construction of FAIR, on the NUSTAR scientific program and, more in general, on the nuclear physics program carried out using storage rings at GSI/FAIR.
The workshop ended with the presentation of three local universities (Goethe University Frankfurt, TU Darmstadt, and University of Heidelberg, represented by Owe Philipsen, Norbert Pietralla, and Kai Schweda, respectively), involved in all aspects of the GSI scientific program : from astrophysics to QGP, from accelerators technical developments to lattice QCD.
The talks presented at the Darmstadt mini-workshop can be found here.
After the workshop, the members of the Board took part in a visit of GSI, which started on a panoramic terrace overlooking the impressive FAIR construction site (Fig. 2). Here, Emmanuel Rosi, head of the FAIR Project Management Office, explained that the tunnel construction is on schedule, while the transfer and facility buildings await for further funding assignments. The visit proceeded, under the guidance of Y. Litvinov, to the machine Control Room and then to the ESR and CRYRING storage rings, where several new elements were discovered. Marco Durante, director of the Biophysics Division of GSI, showed the room where cancer-therapy treatments, as well as pioneering heart microsurgeries on pigs, were performed using the SIS18 beam (Fig. 3). It is now mainly employed in studies of the effects of radiation on astronauts and space electronic equipment, in collaboration with the European Space Agency. Finally, the board visited the large-acceptance detector HADES (Fig. 4), guided by Tetyana Galatyuk. HADES is currently carrying out measurements as part of the Phase-0 of FAIR, in conditions, on the QCD phase diagram, similar to those expected in neutron stars mergers.
In the second day, the NPD board met in the Giersch Science Centre of the Goethe University in Frankfurt.
