Andreas Geißel (SFB 1245, B05) defended his dissertation entitled „Phase structure and Thermodynamics of cold and dense quark matter“ successfully. Congratulations.

TU researchers set a new benchmark

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.

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.

Prof. Iain Moore was the lecturer of our Experimental Topical Lecture Week in Spring 2025 and presented 6 Lectures on “Nuclear Ground-State Properties” to the young Researchers of the SFB.

Our paper on charge radii of scandium isotopes has been published in Phys. Rev. Letters today. By measuring the isotopes 47-49 Sc we could establish the charge radii across the f 7/2 shell.

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