All the Fun of the FAIR: Fundamental physics at the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research

Abstract

The Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) will be the accelerator-based flagship research facility in many basic sciences and their applications in Europe for the coming decades. FAIR will open up unprecedented research opportunities in hadron and nuclear physics, in atomic physics and nuclear astrophysics as well as in applied sciences like materials research, plasma physics and radiation biophysics with applications towards novel medical treatments and space science. FAIR is currently under construction as an international facility at the campus of the GSI Helmholtzzentrum for Heavy-Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany. While the full science potential of FAIR can only be harvested once the new suite of accelerators and storage rings is completed and operational, some of the experimental detectors and instrumentation are already available and will be used starting in summer 2018 in a dedicated research program at GSI, exploiting also the significantly upgraded GSI accelerator chain. The current manuscript summarizes how FAIR will advance our knowledge in various research fields ranging from a deeper understanding of the fundamental interactions and symmetries in Nature to a better understanding of the evolution of the Universe and the objects within.

invited comment, published in Physica Scripta 94 (2019) 033001

References in corpus (24)

• The order of the quantum chromodynamics transition predicted by the standard model of particle physics
• Origin of the heavy elements in binary neutron-star mergers from a gravitational wave event
• Theory of Core-Collapse Supernovae
• Ab-initio Determination of Light Hadron Masses
• Neutron-star radius constraints from GW170817 and future detections
• Challenges in QCD matter physics - The Compressed Baryonic Matter experiment at FAIR
• High-precision measurement of the atomic mass of the electron
• Toward the excited meson spectrum of dynamical QCD
• The 12C(a,g)16O reaction and its implications for stellar helium burning
• Coupled-Channel $D\pi$, $D\eta$ and $D_s\bar{K}$ Scattering from Lattice QCD
• The size of the proton - closing in on the radius puzzle
• Isotope shift in the dielectronic recombination of three-electron ^{A}Nd^{57+}
• Dilepton production and off-shell transport dynamics at SIS energies
• Dielectron production in Ar+KCl collisions at 1.76A GeV
• Study of dielectron production in C+C collisions at 1 AGeV
• The electromagnetic form factors of the proton in the timelike region
• Laboratory measurements compellingly support charge-exchange mechanism for the 'dark matter' $\sim$3.5 keV X-ray line
• Strangeness fluctuations and MEMO production at FAIR
• Molecular-Cloud-Scale Chemical Composition II: Mapping Spectral Line Survey toward W3(OH) in the 3 mm Band
• Testing axial and electromagnetic nucleon form factors in time-like regions in the processes $\bar{p}+n\to {\pi }^{-}+{\ell }^{-}+{\ell }^{+}$ and $\bar{p}+p\to {\pi }^0+{\ell }^{-}+{\ell }^{+}$, $\ell =e$, $\mu$
• Dilepton production in heavy-ion collisions with in-medium spectral functions of vector mesons
• Precise determination of the 1s Lamb Shift in hydrogen-like lead and gold ions using microcalorimeters
• The contribution of axial-vector mesons to hyperfine structure of muonic hydrogen
• Weighted difference of g-factors of light Li-like and H-like ions for an improved determination of the fine-structure constant

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Probing dense QCD matter in the laboratory: The CBM experiment at FAIR
• Status of the Compressed Baryonic Matter experiment at FAIR
• Astrophysics in the Laboratory: The CBM Experiment at FAIR