News 2012

As of 1^st December, Professor Cees Sterks has taken office as Director ad interim of KVI. Professor Sterks has been asked by the Board of the University of Groningen to oversee the transition of KVI into a new situation. In order to clearly mark the transition and to give it every chance of succeeding, the current KVI Director, Professor Klaus Jungmann, has decided to resign his post.

On Friday 30 November 2012, a symposium was held in Hampshire Hotel Plaza Groningen on the occasion of the retirement of ex-KVI-Director Muhsin Harakeh and Herbert Löhner.

On 30 November 2012, KVI Professor Herbert Löhner was decorated with Royal Honours as Knight in the Order of the Lion of the Netherlands (Ridder in de Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw).

KVI-researchers have received funds in the FOM projectruimte for the proposal ‘Cosmic lightning’. Authors of the proposal are Olaf Scholten and Ad van den Berg of KVI, and Ute Ebert of the Centrum Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam.

The open day on Sunday 21 October was very successful. Approximately 600 visitors found their way to the KVI.

On 19 October Jordy de Vries will defend his thesis 'Hadronic Time-Reversal Violation in Effective Field Theory'.

On 14 September Wilber kruithof will defend his thesis 'Laser trapping of sodium isotopes for a high-precision β-decay experiment'.

The KVI Mechanical Engineering department is producing complex parts for an innovative racing car of the Hanzehogeschool, the Groningen University of Applied Sciences. The car is being developed by a team of 45 students of the Hanze Racing Dvision (HARD). The racing car, running on biogas, will participate in August in the Baltic Open Formula Student event in Darmstadt, Germany.

On 18 May Manisha Ranjan will defend her thesis ' Design and Characterization of a Cryogenic Stopping Cell for Radioactive Ions'.

On 11 May Simona Stoica will defend her thesis 'Causal and unitary scattering amplitudes compliant with crossing symmetry at low energy'.

KVI-scientists Nasser Kalantar and Johan Messchendorp have recently published a review article in the high-impact journal Reports on Progress in Physics, with the title “Signatures of three-nucleon interactions in few-nucleon systems”. The article has been published together with scientists from Forschungszentrum Jülich and Ruhr University Bochum (both Germany). A picture of the detection system at KVI made it to the cover of the journal. The article provides an extensive theoretical and experimental overview of the present understanding of three-nucleon forces and its implications in the field of nuclear physics.

Article in the Volkskrant of Tuesday 20 March 2012

If the long-expected Higgs particle is indeed discovered by the LHC then how will we know for certain that it possesses the characteristics predicted by the Standard Model of elementary particles? A relatively simple way could be to examine the momentum distribution of the Higgs-like particle. This new idea has been proposed in an article by KVI Professor Daniël Boer and co-authors, which was published today by the renowned journal Physical Review Letters.

On 9 January Victor Stoica will defend his thesis 'Digital pulse-shape analysis and controls for advanced detector systems'.