About the Theory Group

Pierre Capel, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Institute for Nuclear Physics of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and member of the PRISMA+ Cluster of Excellence, has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). This honor recognizes his careful and creative application of few-body methods to the study of nuclear reactions involving exotic nuclei. The APS Fellowship Program was established to recognize outstanding members who have made significant advances in physics through original research and publication. It is a distinct honor that signifies recognition by professional peers. Each year, no more than 0.5 percent of APS members are elected to the Fellow status.

Pierre Capel has made major contributions to the study of nuclei near the so-called nuclear drip line, which marks the edges of the table of nuclides beyond which atomic nuclei are unbound. A particular focus of his research is the study of halo nuclei. In such nuclei, a compact core of nucleons is surrounded by a diffuse "halo" of either protons or neutrons. This unique structure provides insight into interesting properties of matter that cannot be studied in other, more conventional, nuclei. Capel's work has established key connections between results of reaction experiments and nuclear structure properties, earning him the Fellowship award. This award is not only an affirmation of the excellent quality of his research, but it will also further enhance the reputation of JGU as a leading international center for nuclear and hadron physics. ...

The German Research Foundation (DFG) today approved the establishment of a new Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). The CRC 1660 "Hadrons and Nuclei as Discovery Tools" aims to understand the strong interaction that leads to processes involving hadrons, nuclei, and atoms. The goal is to answer fundamental questions: What physical phenomena occur beyond the Standard Model of particle physics (SM) and how can we measure and describe them? The spokespersons of the new Collaborative Research Centre are Professor Concettina Sfienti (experiment) and Professor Marc Vanderhaeghen (theory) from the Institute for Nuclear Physics at JGU. ...

The paper Improved analysis of isovector nucleon matrix elements with N_f=2+1 flavors of O(a) improved Wilson fermions by Dalibor Djukanovic, Georg von Hippel, Harvey B. Meyer, Konstantin Ottnad, and Hartmut Wittig has been highlighted as an Editors' suggestion in Physical Review D. The paper presents an update of our determination of the isovector charges and the isovector twist-2 forward matrix elements on the N_f=2+1 gauge ensembles generated by the Coordinated Lattice Simulations (CLS) effort. We have significantly extended our coverage of the parameter space by adding ensembles at the physical pion mass and fine lattice spacing, at nearly physical pion masses and very fine lattice spacings, and at very large physical lattice volumes, enabling a well-controlled extrapolation to the physical point. Another major improvement is achieved owing to the extended range of source-sink separations, which allows us to perform two-state fits to summed correlator ratios, leading to a much higher level of control over excited-state effects.

Das Buch Causality Rules (Second Edition). Dispersion theory in non-elementary particle physics von Dr. Vladimir Pascalutsa ist bei IOP Publishing erschienen.