discovered_01_2013

FOCUS// The HZDR Research Magazine WWW.Hzdr.DE 14 15 been looking for traces of Higgs particles, nuclear physicists are now hoping to record quark signals. By doing so, they could potentially consolidate their assumptions regarding the origins of our Universe and the nature of matter. US physicist Murray Gell-Mann was the first to coin the term "quark" back in the 1960s in order to describe the basic building blocks of hadrons, in other words, particles similar to protons and neutrons held together by a strong, reciprocal force. Gell-Mann received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his hadron classification and interaction scheme. The patron saint for the then newly postulated elementary particle was – you guessed it! – the popular Old World dairy product known as "quark." Gell-Mann is said to have come across the word in a novel by Irish novelist James Joyce, who, in turn, is alleged to have first heard it in a market on a trip through Germany. Dense nuclear matter straight from the lab Considering the required immense research equipment and the number of necessary experiments, an undertaking such as the hunt for the Higgs particle or the search for quarks can only be realized in the context of a large research collaboration. Darmstadt, Germany, will be a new future location people will identify with this branch of physics. In Darmstadt, construction of FAIR (the acronym stands for the "Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research") is already well under way. Its mission is to supply antiproton and ion beams to facilitate investigations into the structure of matter and the origins of the Universe. One part of this is the CBM experiment. Protons and neutrons are made up of three quarks each, which are held together by a special kind of glue consisting of elementary particles called gluons. The project – its full name is "The Compressed Baryon Matter Experiment (CBM)" – is, in effect, named after the baryons, the class of nuclear particles belonging to the very confusing world of small and smallest building blocks of matter. "If you pack the nuclear constituents more densely, you are able to examine the behavior of essentially free quarks," explains HZDR physicist Lothar Naumann. As part of the CBM project, the Rossendorf team is collaborating with 400 scientists from 50 research facilities in 15 countries. Together, they want to develop and investigate this state of dense nuclear matter FAIR: 3D view of the planned Darmstadt accelerator center FAIR for antiproton and ion research. Diagram: FAIR/GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung

discovered_01_2013

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