idw – Informationsdienst Wissenschaft
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
The GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt and the future FAIR accelerator facility continue to attract world-leading scientists. This year, two winners of the prestigious Humboldt Research Award are conducting research at the Darmstadt site: Professor Yong-Zhong Qian (University of Minnesota, USA) was already on site, and Dr. Peter Jacobs (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA) is expected to arrive in the second half of 2026.
With their presence, the two award winners not only strengthen GSI/FAIR’s international network but also make a significant contribution to research in the fields of nuclear astrophysics and quark-gluon plasma—two key areas that are being investigated at GSI and FAIR through unique combination of experiments and theory.
“We are extremely pleased that two outstanding Humboldt Research Award winners are joining us this year. This underscores GSI/FAIR’s attractiveness as an international research hub. The FAIR accelerator facility will further expand the diverse opportunities for exploring the building blocks of matter and the evolution of the universe. Collaborating with scientists such as Professor Yong-Zhong Qian and Dr. Peter Jacobs is an important step toward realizing this vision. Such collaborations strengthen scientific exchange and continue to push the boundaries of our knowledge;” said Professor Thomas Nilsson, Scientific Managing Director of GSI and FAIR.
Professor Yong-Zhong Qian is a leading theorist on nuclear astrophysics in the world. His groundbreaking work has opened up new fields of research time and again, which later became established standards. His expertise includes flavor oscillations of astrophysical neutrinos, nucleosynthesis, and the chemical evolution of galaxies. For his contributions to theoretical nuclear astrophysics, including the production of heavy elements via the r-process, and to theoretical studies of collective neutrino flavor transformations in supernovae, he was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2008. He received the prestigious Chang Jiang Scholar Award from the Ministry of Education of China in 2012, a rare honor granted to renowned international scientists. During his stay at GSI/FAIR, Professor Yong-Zhong Qian will be hosted on site by Professor Gabriel Martínez-Pinedo, Head of Nuclear Astrophysics & Structure department.
Among other achievements, Qian was the first to demonstrate the connection between flavor oscillations of massive neutrinos and supernova nucleosynthesis. His work on nucleosynthesis in supernovae and on galactic chemical evolution has shaped our understanding that diverse astrophysical sources are required for the formation of heavy elements. In addition, he has made fundamental contributions to the phenomena of collective neutrino oscillations of astrophysical neutrinos.
In recent years, Qian has expanded his research into new areas, including the identification of a new site for neutron capture nucleosynthesis in early massive stars as explanation to the puzzling data on heavy elements in old stars. He is also working on the precise determination of the mass distribution of the Milky Way dark matter. Qian’s current research focuses on flavor oscillations of astrophysical neutrinos, as well as the heavy element nucleosynthesis in supernovae, neutron star mergers, and other astrophysical sites, and the chemical evolution of galaxies. Other topics include cosmic rays and electromagnetic signals produced during the nucleosynthesis of chemical elements.
Qian is also an enthusiastic mentor: Seven of his eleven former doctoral students and all of his former postdocs are now working in the academic world. One of them is currently leading his own research group at GSI/FAIR funded by a prestigious ERC Starting grant. This also contributes to collaboration and exchange among early-career researchers at GSI/FAIR.
During his stay at GSI/FAIR, Professor Yong-Zhong Qian will deepen his ongoing collaboration with several research groups in Germany—in particular, to uncover new signatures of nucleosynthesis in the new era of multi-messenger astrophysics. His expertise will also contribute to define key experiments at the FAIR facility. “The collaboration with Professor Qian will significantly advance our research on the origin of the elements in the universe. His theoretical work perfectly complements the experimental capabilities that GSI—and, in the future, FAIR—will offer,” said Professor Gabriel Martínez-Pinedo.
The second Humboldt Award winner will be visiting GSI/FAIR this fall. Dr. Peter Jacobs will be accompanied during his stay by Dr. Ralf Averbeck, deputy head of the ALICE research department at GSI/FAIR. Dr. Peter Jacobs is one of the leading scientists in the world-wide experimental program to study strongly-interacting matter at the highest energy densities, the quark-gluon plasma (QGP)—a state of matter that was present microseconds after the Big Bang. He uses nuclear collisions at the world’s highest-energy accelerators and has led the development of new experimental approaches in this field. A key focus of Jacobs’ work is the physics of jets—the hadronic remnants of highly energetic quarks and gluons. They serve as unique probes of QGP structure and dynamics (“jet quenching”). At the experimental level, precise measurements of jets in the complex environment of nuclear collisions are exceedingly challenging.
As a founding member of the STAR experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory (USA), Jacobs made seminal contributions to the discovery of jet quenching: In the early 1990s, he led the development of the STAR program on jet physics, which resulted in the first application of jet quenching to quantify the QGP properties. This discovery had a major impact also on the heavy-ion program at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and established jet quenching measurements as a key component there as well. Jacobs has been instrumental in the ALICE experiment at CERN since 2006.
Dr. Peter Jacobs is furthermore interested in the theoretical interpretation of heavy-ion data and the quantification of QGP properties. He is a founding member of JETSCAPE collaboration, a partnership between heavy-ion theorists and experimentalists, data scientists, and computer scientists. The collaboration has created a framework for the modeling of heavy-ion collisions, together with Bayesian inference analysis, to compare complex model calculations with a broad array of data. Dr. Peter Jacobs continues to develop novel instrumentation and analysis approaches to study both the quark-gluon plasma and the deep gluonic structure of hadrons (“gluon saturation”). Jacobs is working closely with the ALICE groups at GSI in Darmstadt and at the University of Heidelberg: The goal of this collaboration is to push related measurements further to open up new observational opportunities.
During his stay at GSI/FAIR, Dr. Peter Jacobs intends to further advance new measurement methods for jets and Bayesian inference approaches. His goal is to deepen our understanding of strongly interacting matter under extreme conditions—a central topic that will also be explored at FAIR. “Dr. Jacobs’ expertise in jet physics and his innovative approaches to data analysis will significantly enrich our experiments. His work is a perfect example of how theory and experiment must go hand in hand to unravel the mysteries of the strong interaction,” said Dr. Ralf Averbeck.
The Humboldt Research Award
The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation presents the Humboldt Research Award annually to internationally recognized scientists from abroad. The laureates are recognized as leading researchers for their lifetime achievements. They are given the opportunity to conduct research projects of their own choice at a research institution in Germany in cooperation with colleagues there.
https://www.humboldt-foundation.de/en/apply/sponsorship-programmes/humboldt-rese...
from left: Dr. Peter Jacobs (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA), Professor Yong-Zhong Qian ...
Copyright: G. Martínez-Pinedo, L. Weitz, GSI/FAIR
Merkmale dieser Pressemitteilung:
Journalisten
Physik / Astronomie
überregional
Forschungsprojekte, Personalia
Englisch
from left: Dr. Peter Jacobs (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA), Professor Yong-Zhong Qian ...
Copyright: G. Martínez-Pinedo, L. Weitz, GSI/FAIR
Sie können Suchbegriffe mit und, oder und / oder nicht verknüpfen, z. B. Philo nicht logie.
Verknüpfungen können Sie mit Klammern voneinander trennen, z. B. (Philo nicht logie) oder (Psycho und logie).
Zusammenhängende Worte werden als Wortgruppe gesucht, wenn Sie sie in Anführungsstriche setzen, z. B. „Bundesrepublik Deutschland“.
Die Erweiterte Suche können Sie auch nutzen, ohne Suchbegriffe einzugeben. Sie orientiert sich dann an den Kriterien, die Sie ausgewählt haben (z. B. nach dem Land oder dem Sachgebiet).
Haben Sie in einer Kategorie kein Kriterium ausgewählt, wird die gesamte Kategorie durchsucht (z.B. alle Sachgebiete oder alle Länder).
