topic Research

Hadrons and Nuclear Physics - what makes life possible

The Smallest Building Blocks in the World

By searching for new elements, scientists hope to gain new, deeper insight into the structure of nuclear matter. Motivation is the ancient but still open question: what are the smallest constituents of our world. The heaviest recognized element was produced and proven by researchers at the "Gesellschaft für Schwerionforschung (GSI)" in Darmstadt in 1994. It has the periodic number 111 and was officially named "Roentgenium".by the German Federal Minister of Education and Research Annette Schavan on 17 November 2006.

Atomic nuclei consist of nucleons (in general hadrons), which in turn consist of even smaller particles, the quarks and gluons. The boundaries of the quarks and gluons to hadrons and then to cores are blurred and yet to be fully understood. Hadron and nuclear physics therefore have many questions to answer:

• Why can't isolated quarks be observed?
• What is the nature of the phase transition from a quark-gluon-plasma to hadrons?
• Where does the mass of nucleons come from?
• Why is the charge of a complex proton absolutely equal to the charge of an electron?
• Where does the spin of nucleons come from?
• What nuclear reactions take place during nucleosynthesis in cosmos?
• What characteristics does the matter of cores have under extreme conditions, for example, in neutron stars?
• What are the limits to the existence of atomic nuclei?
• What fundamental symmetries are realized in nature?
• How big is the absolute mass of a neutrino?
  
  

Funded large-scale equipment

• UNILAC: UNIversal Linear ACcelerator
• SIS18: Heavy Ion Synchrotron
• ESR: Experimental Storage Ring
• Cooled ion beams of all elements up to uranium, radioactive secondary beams, pion beam
• Experimental facilities: (HADES, FOPI, FRS, RISING, AGATA, SHIP, heavy ion cancer therapy)

Research Centre Jülich (FZJ)

• COSY: COol SYnchrotron, polarized, cooled proton and deuteron beams

DESY, Hamburg

• HERMES: HERa MEasurement of spin dependent structure functions to study the spin structure of nucleons

CERN, Geneva

• ALICE: A Large Ion Collider Experiment to study quark-gluon-plasmas
• COMPASS: COmmon Muon and Proton Apparatus for Structure and Spectroscopy to study the structure of hadrons
• REX-ISOLDE: Radioactive Beam EXperiment to study instable cores of atoms with a short lifespan

SLAC, Stanford (USA)

• BABAR: test of fundamental symmetries in nature

ILL, Grenoble

• Experiments on the structure of hadrons and cores with neutrons

Research Centre Karlsruhe (FZK)

• GridKA: Grid Computing Center Karlsruhe

Research Institutions (with BMBF funding)

FZJ, Jülich
FZK, Karlsruhe
GSI, Darmstadt
(CERN), Geneva
ILL, Grenoble