Professor Alexandre Obertelli receives ERC Advanced Grant worth €2.9 million

Unlike normal atomic nuclei, little is known about so-called hypernuclei, which belong to the category of ‘strange matter’. Prof. Alexandre Obertelli from the Institute for Nuclear Physics of TU Darmstadt wants to change that. His project, ‘When antimatter meets strangeness: a new era for precision hypernuclear physics’ (HYPER), is now being funded by the European Research Council (ERC) for five years with an Advanced Grant totalling €2.9 million.

TU Darmstadt honors renowned Swedish experimental physicist

On June 13, 2025, TU Darmstadt awarded the academic title of “Affiliate Professor” to an internationally renowned scientist for the first time. Professor Dr. Thomas Nilsson, professor at Chalmers University (Sweden) and Scientific Director of the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research and FAIR GmbH, is now officially affiliated with the Department of Physics.

Giacomo Ricigliano (SFB 1245, B07) defended his dissertation entitled „Probing the origin of heavy elements in extreme conditions: the message of kilonovae“ successfully. Congratulations.

At the nearly-monoenergetic, fully-polarized gamma beam at HIGS, the isotope Nd-150 was irradiated at energies up to the particle threshold (approx. 7 MeV). A new mode of the facility for high beam resolution was used. The surprising result: the decays do not follow the so-called Porter-Thomas distribution, but indicate structure in the chaos of the highly-excited nuclear states, which in turn may also have far-reaching implications for the description of astrophysical processes.

We have just published in Phys. Rev. Lett. the result of the first experimental test of the Ratio Method to study halo nuclei.

The annual workshop of SFB 1245 took place from May 5 to 9 in Bad Honnef. The latest physics results in the SFB 1245 and in related fields were discussed in overall 36 presentations, including a few invited speakers.

Our measurement of hydrogen-like Bi-208 has been published in Nature Physics . It is the first time that laser spectroscopy was performed at an accelerator-produced isotope in a storage ring.

Tim Stetz (SFB 1245, B02) defended his dissertation entitled „Evolution of isovector-quadrupole valence-shell excitations of heavy vibrational nuclei“ successfully. Congratulations.

Feierliches Jubiläum mit Vortrag und Ausstellung am Institut für Kernphysik

Am 03. Dezember 2024 war es endlich soweit: Das Institut für Kernphysik (IKP) der Technischen Universität Darmstadt blickte gemeinsam mit zahlreichen Gästen und Wissenschaftler:innen auf 70 Jahre CERN zurück und feierte in einer öffentlichen Abendveranstaltung mit über 300 angemeldeten Gästen die zentrale Rolle des europäischen Forschungszentrums für Kern- und Teilchenphysik in der Entwicklung unserer modernen Wissenschaft. Der Abend begann mit einem herausragenden Vortrag von Professor Klaus Blaum, der die Anwesenden mitnahm auf eine spannende Reise zu den Geheimnissen der „exotischen Materie“ und der Entstehung der Welt.