Latest News
EPFL Adjunct Professorship to Christopher Mudry
Dr Christopher Mudry, who joined PSI in 1999 and is Research Group Leader of the Condensed Matter Theory Group at PSI since 2009, was awarded the title of Adjunct Professor at EPF Lausanne with the following citation. "Dr Christopher Mudry is a highly acclaimed theoretical physicist. He is regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on the quantum field theory of condensed matter and in the rapidly developing field of the topological properties of matter."
ERC Consolidator grant for Paolo Crivelli
Dr. Paolo Crivelli (ETH Zurich, Department of Physics, Institute for Particle Physics and Astrophysics) has recently been awarded an ERC Consolidator grant for his project "Mu-MASS" aiming at a new precision measurement of the Muonium 1S-2S transition energy, ultimately with an improvement by three orders of magnitude. Muonium is the hydrogen-like atom formed by a positive muon and an electron. Its energy levels are, in contrast to the case of ordinary hydrogen, completely dominated by Quantum-Electro-Dynamics (QED) and precision QED calculations are currently ahead of experiment. It will be the first time that CW two-photon spectroscopy is applied to muonium. Results will improve our knowledge of the muon mass, test bound state QED and search for physics beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Moreover, it will help to resolve the present 'proton radius puzzle' by providing a determination of the Rydberg constant free of finite size effects. While Dr. Crivelli is located at ETH H&oml;nggerberg, he and his team will spend a large amount of time at PSI and collaborate closely, both, with the NUM laboratories for Muon Spin Spectroscopy and for Particle Physics.
Eccellenza Professorship to Lea Caminada
Dr Lea Caminada, a researcher in the High-Energy Particle Physics group of the Laboratory for Particle Physics (LTP) in NUM, has been awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) Eccellenza Professorial Fellowship. Together with the High-Energy Particle Physics group Lea is working for the CMS experiment at the LHC facility at CERN. Her research proposal consists of two parts. In the first one she proposes to investigate the decay of the Higgs boson into charm quarks, which will enable a deeper understanding of it's nature. The second part focuses on the further development of silicon pixel detectors, a speciality of the group at PSI. Lea obtained her PhD in 2010 at the ETH in Zurich. After a 4 year postdoc at LBNL in Berkeley she moved to the University of Zurich in 2014. Since 2016 she has been holding a joint scientist position at PSI and University of Zurich.
Marc Janoschek appointed new head of LDM
Dr Marc Janoschek has been appointed new head of the NUM Laboratory for Scientific Developments and Novel Materials LDM. He will take office on November 15, 2018. Marc studied Physics at TU Munich and did his PhD at PSI and TUM on "Neutron Scattering on Chiral Magnets". After that he went to the University of California in San Diego as Feodor-Lynen Fellow. Since 2011 he is head of "Neutron research" in the "Condensed Matter and Magnet Science" group in Los Alamos. For his research Marc has been awarded the Wolfram Prandl Prize and the Los Alamos Fellow Prize for Outstanding Research. We wish Marc success and satisfaction for his new duties and wish to thank cordially Peter Keller, who led the LDM ad interim since March 2018.
Founding Partners Sign Charter Establishing Neutron Source Consortium LENS
On September 12 representatives of eight European research infrastructures including SINQ at PSI signed the Charter of the League of advanced European Neutron Sources (LENS) at the International Conference of Research Infrastructures, ICRI2018 in Vienna. The signing ceremony marks the establishment of a new strategic consortium of European neutron source facilities with the aim, according to the charter, to “facilitate any form of discussion and decision-making process that has the potential to strengthen European neutron science via enhanced collaboration among the facilities”. The founding partners in the consortium include both European and national facilities in France, Germany, Sweden, Hungary, the United Kingdom, Norway and Switzerland. Other qualifying facilities are invited to join at any time.
ISNR honorary membership awarded to Eberhard Lehmann
The International Society for Neutron Radiology ISNR was founded in 1996 with the aim to organize regular conferences with the focus on the use of neutrons for imaging purposes. During the 11th World Conference on Neutron Radiography, held recently in Sydney (Australia) and organized by ANSTO, the Honorary Membership of ISNR was awarded to Eberhard Lehmann - in recognition to his contributions for the progress in the field of neutron imaging on national and international level. The Neutron Imaging and Activation Group NIAG of the LNS has been active member in ISNR from the very beginning. Presently and since 2014, Markus Strobl the head of NIAG is vice-president elected of ISNR – and was reelected recently until 2022. In addition, NIAG member Pavel Trtik is now representing PSI in the ISNR board until 2022.
Shang Gao receives SGN Young Scientist Prize
Dr. Shang Gao was awarded the Young Scientist Prize of the Swiss Neutron Scattering Society for his high quality thesis and neutron scattering investigation leading to the discovery of a spiral spin-liquid state in the compound MnSc2S4 and of fast monopole hopping rates in the spin-ice compounds CdEr2X4. The prize is sponsored by Swiss Neutronics and is awarded annualy to a young scientist in recognition of a notable scientific achievement in the form of a PhD thesis. The photo shows Shang together with the SGN president Prof. Henrik Ronnow during the prize ceremony.
Claire Donnelly dissertation and research awards
In August 2018, Claire Donnelly was awarded the SPS Award in Computational Physics, sponsored by COMSOL, and the Werner Meyer-Ilse Memorial Award. We congratulate her on these awards as well as for two awards earlier on in the year: the ETH Medal for an outstanding doctoral thesis and the American Physical Society Richard L. Greene Dissertation Award, recognizing doctoral thesis research of exceptional quality and importance. These prizes are for her dissertation on “Hard X-ray Tomography of Three Dimensional Magnetic Structures”.
Claire carried out her dissertation in the Laboratory for Mesoscopic Systems (ETH Zurich – Paul Scherrer Institute) in collaboration with the CXS group and the OMNY project, with experiments at the cSAXS beamline SLS, and Sebastian Gliga, a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Glasgow. She will continue this research at the University of Cambridge with a Leverhulme Fellowship supported by the Newton Trust. We wish her every success! - Picture courtesy of the APS.
CMS Young Researcher Prize awarded to Lea Caminada
Lea Caminada, a researcher in the High-Energy Particle Physics group of the Laboratory for Particle Physics (LTP) in NUM, has received the annual CMS Young Researcher Prize. This Prize is given once a year to outstanding young physicists who made very significant and sustained contributions to the CMS experiment at the LHC facility at CERN. Dr. Caminada has been recognized for her contribution to the construction, installation and commissioning of the two pixel detectors which were build at PSI for the CMS experiment. Her work also included the measurement of the B-meson production cross section and the observation of the Higgs boson in association with top quarks.
SNSF professorship awarded to Andreas Crivellin
The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) awarded this year an SNSF professorship to Andreas Crivellin (NUM, Laboratory of Particle Physics (LTP), Theory Group) for his research plan on the study of Lepton Flavour Universality Violation (LFUV) in B meson decays. These processes received a lot of attention in the last years due to the intriguing hints for LFUV which, if confirmed, would prove the existence of physics beyond the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. The project will be jointly hosted by the LTP at PSI and the Physik-Institut of the University of Zurich and is a direct follow-up of Andreas’ current Ambizione grant here at PSI. Therefore, he will continue investigating the promising hints for LFUV (which are at the 5 sigma level) and examine their impact on models of physics beyond the SM and their connection for lepton flavour violating processes such as μ → e+γ and μ → 3e, measured here at PSI. Together with his own position for 4 years, the SNF also granted 2 PhD students and 1 postdoc who will work at PSI as well.
Andreas Crivellin obtained his PhD in 2010 from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. After a postdoctoral position at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Bern and a personal Marie Curie Fellowship at CERN he joined in 2016 the Theory Group of the LTP with his Ambizione grant of the SNSF.