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.

Daniela Tandara's poster “Analysis of the Composition of the Beam from a Penning Ion Source at COALA” won a poster prize at the DPG's Spring Meeting of the Section Hadrons and Nuclei in Cologne.

In the search for “dark forces”, physicists came across deformed nuclei

When world-leading teams join forces, new findings are bound to be made. This is what happened when quantum physicists from the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) and the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (MPIK) in Heidelberg combined atomic and nuclear physics with unprecedented accuracy using two different methods of measurement. Together with new calculations of the structure of atomic nuclei, theoretical physicists from the Technical University of Darmstadt and Leibniz University Hannover were able to show that measurements on the electron shell of an atom can provide information about the deformation of the atomic nucleus. At the same time, the precision measurements have set new limits regarding the strength of a potential dark force between neutrons and electrons. The results have been published in the current issue of the scientific journal “Physical Review Letters”.

Mithilfe von Röntgenpulsen im Attosekunden-Bereich konnten Wissenschaftler*innen die Helligkeit und Auflösung von Aufnahmen ultraschneller Prozesse in ihrer natürlichen Umgebung erhöhen.

TU-Forschungsteam gelingt präzise Bestimmung der Kernform

Wissenschaftler:innen der TU Darmstadt haben erstmals das komplexe Verhalten der sogenannten Dipol-Riesenresonanz in ungewöhnlich geformten Atomkernen detailliert untersucht. Die Ergebnisse der Arbeitsgruppe um Professor Norbert Pietralla am Institut für Kernphysik wurden kürzlich im renommierten Fachjournal „Physical Review Letters“ veröffentlicht.