News

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

• Nuclear Astrophysics and Nuclear Structure
• Heavy Ion Physics
• Hadron Physics
• Particle Physics
• Applied Nuclear Physics
• Detectors and Future Projects

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.

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.

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.

Read on (German only)