A research team was able to generate polarized X-rays with unprecedented purity at the European XFEL in Hamburg. The experiments involved scientists from the Helmholtz Institute Jena, a branch of GSI, Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the Helmholtz Center Dresden-Rossendorf. The method is supposed to be used in the coming years to show that even vacuum behaves like a material under certain circumstances — a prediction from quantum electrodynamics.

The Secretary of State in the Hessian Ministry of the Environment, Climate Protection, Agriculture and Consumer Protection, Oliver Conz, and the District President of the Regional Council Darmstadt, Brigitte Lindscheid, recently visited GSI and FAIR to learn about the progress of the FAIR project and the current scientific activities. The guests were welcomed by Professor Paolo Giubellino, Scientific Managing Director of GSI and FAIR, Dr. Ulrich Breuer, Administrative Managing Director of GSI…

The nationwide day of action Girls'Day could take place on site on the campus of GSI and FAIR again this year. Due to the Corona situation, the capacity available was still slightly reduced compared to previous years, but nevertheless a total of 35 girls between the ages of eleven and fifteen took part in the event and informed themselves about the accelerator facilities and experiments, about research and infrastructure, and especially about the career opportunities at GSI and FAIR.

The joint supercomputing center Green IT Cube of GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung and the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Darmstadt will be expanded into a research and transfer center focusing on "Water Cooling of Mainframe Computer Systems". For this purpose, GSI receives project funding of 5.5 million Euros from the REACT-EU program.

The future cooperation between Georgia and GSI/FAIR was the focus of the visit of a high-ranking delegation with the Georgian Minister of Education and Science, Professor Mikheil Chkhenkeli, to GSI and FAIR. The visitors were received by the management of GSI and FAIR and various leading scientists.

The state of North Rhine-Westphalia is supporting five outstanding research networks in pioneering research fields with a total of around 81.2 million euros. The particle accelerator centre FAIR also benefits from this, as one of the funded networks is the NRW-FAIR network, which is actively involved in FAIR's research projects and experiments.

The construction for the FAIR Control Center (FCC) has begun. The start of work is an important step in the construction of the international accelerator center FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research) and marks a decisive moment for one of the largest construction projects for research worldwide. On March 29, 2022, the symbolic laying of the foundation stone for the new building took place on the construction site directly at the western entrance to the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für…

Large research infrastructures like FAIR are built to answer fundamental questions about the nature of physics and the formation of the universe. They often are international projects, and their job is to carry out world class, excellent science. But they don’t operate in a vacuum. Their activities have impact on their regions and countries well beyond the science they do. The new CASEIA project has now received EU funding to measure this socio-economic influence.

In the scientific journal Nature, the BASE collaboration at CERN reports on the world's most accurate comparison between protons and antiprotons: The charge-to-mass ratios of antiprotons and protons are identical to eleven digits. This new measurement improves the accuracy of the previous best value by more than a factor of four. The data-set, collected over a period of 1.5 years, also enables a test of the weak equivalence principle, which says that matter and antimatter behave the same under…