News Archive 2011
28 December 2011
Prof. Walter Hälg died aged 94 on December 28, 2011
The NUM division mourns for one of the pioneers of neutron scattering and reactor technology in Switzerland: Professor Walter Hälg, who died after short illness on December 28, 2011 in Baden/Switzerland. Walter Hälg was born in 1917 in Basel. He received his PhD from the University of Basel in 1943. After some years at the 'Physikalisches Institut' in Basel he moved to the AG Brown Boveri Co in Baden (BBC), the predecessor of the current ABB. During his time with BBC, he worked on the development of the Swiss heavy water reactor DIORIT in Würenlingen - with a visiting year at the Norwegian research reactor JEEP. The DIORIT went critical on August 26, 1960. Afterwards Walter Hälg moved to ETH Zurich, became full professor for nuclear reactor technology and established neutron scattering in Switzerland. He was the first proposing to build a spallation neutron source behind the proton accelerator, today's SINQ. Walter Hälg retired in 1984. For many years he was member and head of the research commission of ETH Zurich. He was honorary member of the Swiss Neutron Scattering Society, of the distinguished Physical Society of Zurich and donator of the ENSA Walter Hälg prize. The staff of the NUM division and the whole neutron scattering community will sadly miss him.
18 November 2011
Aldo Antognini receives Gustav-Hertz-Prize of the German Physical Society
On November 18, 2011 the German Physical Society (GPS) announced that the two researchers Dr. Aldo Antognini (ETH Zürich, Institute for Particle Physics, Prof. K. Kirch) and Dr. Randof Pohl (MPQ Garching, Laser Spectroscopy Division, Prof. T. W. Hänsch) will be awarded the Gustav-Hertz-Prize of the GPS. The prize will be given to them on the occasion of the next spring meeting of the Society in March 2012 in Stuttgart. The laureats are honored because of their outstanding contributions in the recent measurement of the Lambshift in muonic hydrogen and the precise determination of the proton’s charge radius. The experiment was performed by an international team at the Paul Scherrer Institut. The photo shows Aldo (left) together with NUM scientist Franz Kottmann in the "laser hut" of PSI (courtesy M. Fischer, PSI). More information.
17 November 2011
Anne Möchel receives the DTG Young Researchers Award 2011 of the German Thermoelectric Society
Physicist Dr. Anne Möchel (Institut für Festkörperforschung, Forschungszentrum Jülich) has been awarded the DTG Young Researchers Award 2011 by the German Thermoelectric Society (Deutsche Thermoelektrik-Gesellschaft, DTG) for her doctoral thesis “Lattice dynamics in thermoelectric Zintl phases”, carried out at JCNS-2. While researching her thesis, Dr. Möchel made extensive use of the instruments at several large research facilities like SINQ. The award ceremony, which included speeches from the prize winners, took place on 17 November at the annual general meeting of the DTG in Freiburg, Germany.
16 September 2011
JUM@P User Meeting 2011
More than 200 participants attended the 2nd Joint User Meeting JUM@P'11 of the PSI facilities SINQ, SLS and SμS on September 15 and 16, 2011. The meeting consisted of a plenary session on the first and seven parallel topical workshops on the second day. One highlight was the award of the PSI Thesis Medal to Elena Mengotti from the SYN division at PSI. More information and a picture gallery of the meeting is still available from the JUM@P'11 Webpage.
22 July 2011
Christian Rüegg (LNS) receives Erwin Felix Lewy-Bertaut Prize
Christian Rüegg, head of the Laboratory for Neutron Scattering at PSI, wins the Erwin Felix Levy-Bertaut prize for his work on low-dimensional quantum spin systems and quantum phase transitions. The prize is awarded jointly by the European Crystallographic Association ECA and the European Neutron Scattering Association ENSA to a young scientist in memoriam of Erwin Felix Levy-Bertaut, who was one of the pioneers in Europe investigating atomic and magnetic structures by neutron and X-ray diffraction. Christian received the prize from the chairman of ENSA Prof. Michael Steiner (Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin) at the European Neutron Scattering Conference ECNS in Prague in July 2011.
19 May 2011