Topic 2: "Cosmic Matter in the Laboratory"
The worldwide flagship facility for future research in the topic Cosmic Matter in the Laboratory will be the Facility for Antiproton and Ion research (FAIR), which is currently under construction. The major FAIR collaborations are:
- The CBM experiment will be one of the scientific pillars of the future Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Darmstadt. The goal of the CBM research program is to explore the QCD phase diagram in the region of high baryon densities using high-energy nucleus-nucleus collisions. The CBM detector is being developed by more than 400 members of 55 institutions in 15 countries.
- The HADES collaboration currently comprises 19 institutions from 10 European countries. Among the 120 members are physicists, engineers, PhD students and undergraduates studying at Master level. The GSI group in HADES takes care of the host lab duties like coordination and management positions, provides the scientific platform for analysis activities, manages the analysis frame work as well as the access to the HPC cluster and maintains the local experiment and infrastructure. HADES is customised to detect rare electron–positron pairs but indeed measures all charged particles in a large acceptance around mid-rapidity.
- The NUSTAR collaboration is devoted to the study of NUclear STructure, Astrophysics, and Reactions. More than 700 scientists from more than 170 participating institutes worldwide form the NUSTAR community. They all concentrate on the development and realisation of new instrumentation and methods for future experiments at the upcoming FAIR facility. The research interest of the NUSTAR collaboration is focused on the use of beams of radioactive species separated and identified by the Superconducting FRagment Separator (Super-FRS), which is the central element of all NUSTAR experiments.
- The PANDA experiment will be another of the scientific pillars of the future Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Darmstadt. One goal of the PANDA experiment is investigations of antiproton annihilation reactions for spectroscopy in the charmonium region. The collaboration is formed by over 500 collaborators from 19 countries. FZJ, GSI and HIM have significant impact on the PANDA collaboration, as is visible from the large number of management-level positions inside the collaboration.
Other important collaborations include:
- ALICE is the acronym for A Large Ion Collider Experiment. Located at the LHC, it is one of the largest experiments in the world devoted to research in the relativistic heavy ion physics. It involves an international collaboration of more than 1,200 physicists, engineers and technicians, including around 200 graduate students, from 132 physics institutes in 36 countries across the world.
- The BESIII experiment is located at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Beijing, China at the Beijing Electron Positron Collider II (BEPCII). It is an international collaboration investigating hadron structure and spectroscopy in the charm region. Of special interest are the recently observed exotic X,Y,Z-states, which are most likely exotic states of hadronic matter.
- JEDI is an international collaboration pursuing the search for charged particle EDM for light ions in storage rings in a staged project, which aims at the highest sensitivity (see Section 3.2.4). JEDI currently lists 97 members from 38 institutions and 11 countries and collaborates very closely with the BNLbased srEDM collaboration on a number of subjects relevant for charged particle EDM searches in storage rings. The leading institution for this project is the IKP of FZJ, together with RWTH Aachen University within JARA-FAME.
- PAX is an international collaboration trying to establish spin-filtering in a storage ring as the method to in-situ polarize antiproton beams with the aim of a possible future upgrade of the HESR of FAIR (see Section 3.2.3). For this project IKP (FZJ) and INFN (University of Ferrara) are the major proponents. It should be noted that an ERC Advanced Grant (POLPBAR) has been obtained from the European Commission with FZJ, Ferrara and JINR (Dubna) as participating institutions.
- The international TASCA collaboration working at GSI performs experiments on the synthesis, nuclear structure investigation, and chemical identi cation of superheavy elements. The collaboration contains more than 70 collaborators from 12 countries.
The activities in topic Cosmic Matter in the Laboratory are embedded in international collaborations including the EU Integrating Initiatives HP3 (HadronPhysics3) and ENSAR (European Nuclear Science and Applications Research). Each of these consists of over 2,000 physicists from across Europe, and coordinates the activities of these research fields by joining efforts on Transnational Access, Networking Activities, as well as Joint Research Activities.