Darmstadt Researchers Improve Models for How Heavy Elements are Created

Where do gold, platinum, and uranium come from? This question has fascinated astrophysicists and nuclear physicists for decades. A research team from Technische Universität Darmstadt has now taken an important step toward understanding the origin of heavy elements. Their findings, published in Physical Review Letters, demonstrate for the first time how modern ab initio calculations of atomic nuclei can significantly improve predictions of r-process nucleosynthesis, the mechanism responsible for creating many of the Universe’s heaviest elements.

Jonas Stoll (SFB1245, B05) defended his dissertation entitled “Dense Strong-Interaction Matter from Functional Methods” successfully. Congratulations.

Prof. Achim Schwenk appointed as external scientific member at Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik

The Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik (MPIK) is delighted to welcome Prof. Dr Achim Schwenk from the Technische Universität Darmstadt as a new external scientific member. The appointment recognises Schwenks outstanding contributions to theoretical nuclear physics and strengthens cross-institutional collaboration in a key research field of modern physics.

Smaranika Banerjee will move to the Physics sub-department of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford and Marta Molero to the Konkoly Budapest Observatory. Congratulations to both award winners from the whole SFB 1245.

New SFB 1245 publication in Physical Review Letters

We measure the dipole response of 8He with an extended excitation-energy range, and including for the first time the four-neutron decay channel. We find that the dipole continuum is dominated, even at high excitation energies well above the 4n decay threshold, by two-neutron emission, pointing to a 6He+2n structure of the excited dipole mode. The dipole strength distribution is further compared to state-of-the-art theoretical calculations including coupled cluster approach within the SFB.

Prof. Takashi Nakamura was the lecturer of our Experimental Topical Lecture Week in Spring2026 and presented Lectures on “Neutron-rich nuclei and multi-neutron systems probed by experiments with rare-isotope beams” to the young researchers of the SFB.

Tobias Wolfgruber defended his dissertation entitled “Precision No-Core Shell Model Calculations with Artificial Neural Networks” successfully. Congratulations.

Challenges in effective field theory descriptions of nuclei

From January 18-24, 2026 the EMMI Hirschegg Workshop, co-organized by SFB 1245 project leaders, was held in Hirschegg on the topic “Challenges in effective field theory descriptions of nuclei”. Many excellent junior and senior speakers from different fields discussed new developments on new nuclear interactions and uncertainty quantification, universality in nuclei and multi-neutron systems, heavy nuclei and deformation, electroweak interactions in nuclei as well as collective phenomena.