SPARC PhD Award for Dr. Jonas Sommerfeldt
29.11.2023 |
Dr. Jonas Sommerfeldt of the Technical University of Braunschweig received this year's PhD Award of the SPARC Collaboration for his work on the Delbrück scattering. The SPARC PhD Award was presented at the SPARC Collaboration Workshop by co-organizer Dr. Carlo Bruno.
Sommerfeldt was honored for his thesis, titled “All-Order Calculations of Delbrück Scattering” and the extraordinary achievement of solving the longstanding discrepancy between experiment and theory for the case of Delbrück scattering, a strong field QED effect related to the elastic scattering of hard x- and g-rays by virtual electron-positron pairs in the strong Coulomb field of heavy nuclei. His work has just been published in Physical Review Letters (Phys. Rev. Lett. 131, 061601) and has attracted a lot of attention, e.g. in the article “Physics — Quantum Deflection Unraveled” of the APS.
The SPARC PhD Award has been presented annually and comes with a prize money of 300 euros. The award honors the best PhD thesis within the collaboration concerning atomic physics with heavy ions at the research facilities of GSI and FAIR. SPARC stands for Stored Particles Atomic Physics Research Collaboration. Currently, more than 400 members from 26 countries belong to the collaboration. They experiment with the existing atomic physics facilities at GSI and prepare new experiments and setups at the future FAIR accelerator. (CP)
