After approximately 18 months, the SuperKEKB electron-positron collider was ready to restart its work. The long shutdown (LS1) provided ample time to upgrade the collider and the Belle II detector. Since 20 February Belle II is recording collision data again.
Björn Spruck from AG Sfienti is currently in Japan making sure the new Pixel Vertex Detector (PXD2), which was installed last year during LS1, is operational for successful data collection.
AG Sfienti is currently in Bormio, Italy, participating in the International Winter Meeting on Nuclear Physics
(22-26 January 2024).
It is the 60th jubilee of this long-standing conference, which has been bringing together researchers and students from various fields of subatomic physics for decades.
A great reason to celebrate!
There are overview talks on the on the various fields covered by the conference
Special attention is also given to their interplay with and impact on other major fields of fundamental physics.
Prof. Dr. Concettina Sfienti has acted as an organizer and co-chair of this meeting for years.
For further information, please visit
https://bormiomeeting.com/
https://indico.mitp.uni-mainz.de/event/380/
Prof. Dr. Concettina Sfienti was awarded the Academy Prize of Rhineland-Palatinate to honour her outstanding and exemplary achievements in teaching and research.
The award ceremony took place at the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz
on 30 November 2023.
The welcome addresses by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Reiner Anderl, President of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz and Clemens Hoch, Minister of Science and Health of the Federal State of Rhineland-Palatinate were followed by a laudation by Prof. Dr. Margret Wintermantel, Chairperson of the jury for the Academy Prize.
The award winner, Prof. Sfienti, contributed to the evening with her talk on "Sternenstaub im Bauch: Kosmische Rezepte für Erdlinge" giving an overview of the origin of the elements found in the universe.
Music by Zih-En Wei (violoncello) and André Dolabella (piano) provided a festive backdrop to the evening.
Our next transverse asymmetry beam time at A1 has just started (07. to 20. November). We will take data with the precious 208Pb target this time!
And we are also testing the radiation tolerance of an improved version of the Belle II PXD power supply.
After years of development work, the new Pixel Vertex Detector (PXD2) was successfully installed in the international Belle-II experiment at the SuperKEKB electron-positron accelerator in Japan. Under our leadership, real-time monitoring of data quality was implemented and key sections of the software controlling the PXD2 were programmed. In addition, sensor modules were tested at MAMI for their radiation hardness.
Read the full press release here
The results reported on the excitation of the nucleus of 4He atoms measured with the A1 spectrometer setup at Mainz have made it into Physics Today, one of the leading physics magazines in the world.
The entire article is available in Physics Today.
Starting on Monday, 22 May, we will be having our beam time at A1 until Monday 5 June 2023.
Goal of this beam time is to test our new readout electronics for PV experiments for the first time with a natural lead target.
For further information, please visit the experiment website PV@A1
Theoretical predictions and new experimental data on 4He measured with great accuracy diverge
At the Mainz particle accelerator MAMI, the A1 collaboration has systematically measured the excitation of an α-particle, the nucleus of a 4He atom, from its ground state to the first excited state in a new way and with unprecedented accuracy as part of Dr. Simon Kegel's PhD thesis. The comparison of experiment and current calculations from the associated low-energy theory shows that the excitation of α-particles is not correctly described based on the current understanding of nuclear forces - and thus raises many questions. The scientific article was published as a recommendation of the editors in the renowned journal Physical Review Letters.
The Belle II detector in Japan is getting a new pixel detector. After long preparations and an exciting journey in the passenger cabin of an aircraft, the new pixel detector PXD2 has now arrived safely in Japan and can replace its not fully instrumented predecessor.
At the moment, the SuperKEKB accelerator in Japan is at a standstill. One of the main reasons for this is the planned installation of the new two-layer Belle II Pixel Vertex Detector (PXD2). The greatly improved small detector, which is responsible for measuring the shortest-lived particle decays in the Belle II detector, is to replace the current PXD1. This is necessary in view of future data-taking periods with higher luminosity and the associated greater hit density on the sensors, which are only a few millimetres away from the beam axis, in order to avoid performance losses for physics analyses.
Continue reading "Belle II gets a new centrepiece: The new pixel detector PXD2 has arrived in Japan"
