As one of the ELEMENTS principal investigators, she leads the DMGW (Dark Matter, Modified Gravity and Gravitational Waves) group researching on the open questions such as the nature of dark matter by looking at possible gravitational waves signatures in neutron star or black hole binary mergers.

For 23 years now and together with the foundation of the local bank 1822 Frankfurter Sparkasse, the Goethe University honors excellent lecturers who are committed not only to innovation in teaching and having an exceptionally well connection to the students, but also to making an impact by being involved in topics like fostering diversity and equal opportunities. First place for this prestigious prize is endowed with 15,000 euros. The awarding ceremony took place on 12 June 12 2024 at Campus Westend in Frankfurt.

We congratulate Laura warmly for this extraordinary achievement!

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The award was presented to Luciano Rezzolla on the occasion of a master class on black holes he organized at the New Uzbekistan University. This master class was attended by people interested in physics and astrophysics.

Source

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The third place went to the press release “Cosmic chocolate pralines: general neutron star structure revealed” by the Public Relations & Communications office at Goethe University. ELEMENTS’ science communication officer Dr. Phyllis Mania based the text on an inspiring quote by spokesperson Luciano Rezzolla, who had compared the inner structure of neutron stars to different types of chocolate pralines.

Jury member Mike Zeitz (Spektrum der Wissenschaft) said:

“It is a special art to make basic research palatable. Goethe University took the assignment literally and embedded a hard nut from nuclear and astrophysics in the everyday favourite chocolate. The chocolate metaphor helped to illustrate complex theoretical findings on the structure of neutron stars, and thus appealed not only to the jury but also to a wide variety of international media. The graphics provided supported the imagination, even if people from outside the field might not have been able to follow the well-structured but sometimes complicated content in the text. The appetite had long since been whetted and inspiration for one’s own adaptations awakened – the supreme tasks of every press release.”

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Elfner’s previous round birthday already brought her a well-deserved promotion: At 30, she was named one of Germany’s youngest female physics professors – still an exception, at least in theoretical physics. “I am fascinated by how the smallest building blocks of our world work – that is what I want to understand,” says Elfner. She is working on a state of matter that existed in the early universe only microseconds after the Big Bang. “Afterwards, the smallest and free components of matter, the quark-gluon plasma, transformed into today’s building blocks of matter, the protons and neutrons”. This can be simulated in energy-intensive particle accelerators by accelerating atomic nuclei made of lead or gold to almost the speed of light, so that when they collide with each other, temperatures and densities are created that existed shortly after the Big Bang. Elfner describes these processes in mathematical models: She calculates the temporal development of the microscopic heavy ion collisions and compares various assumptions for the properties of matter with experimental data.

Currently, 16 scientists in her group are conducting research in seven national and international collaborations. In our cluster, for example, they are trying to understand how the properties of matter at high densities can be determined from heavy ion collisions in order to elucidate the astrophysical processes involved in the fusion of neutron stars.

Regular activities and excursions keep the team together. Elfner is very committed to young scientists; despite her young age, she has already successfully guided almost 40 young scientists to their scientific degrees. In addition to educating students and doctoral candidates, she regularly gives the public an insight into her research in lectures and at events – in the process, she demonstrates how successful women can be in physics.

Elfner has been awarded several prestigious prizes for her scientific achievements, being nominated as “Scientist of the Year” by the Alfons and Gertrud Kassel Foundation recently and awarded with the Heinz Maier Leibnitz Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG) in 2016.

FIAS has now underlined her exceptional performance and high level of commitment by appointing her a Senior Fellow. The Stiftungsrat (Board of Trustees) unanimously appointed her to the ranks of the FIAS Faculty. “I am delighted about the appointment,” says the Frankfurt native – “and that I can continue to contribute to FIAS and its shaping”. FIAS Director Elsen adds: “With this appointment, the theoretical description of the interaction of nuclear matter will continue to be competently and prominently represented at FIAS in the future”.

The exploration of the world in miniature will not let go of Hannah Elfner in the future: “A better understanding of the transition from protons/neutrons to the quark-gluon plasma at high densities would be great”.

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The same day, he was also awarded a Laureatus-professorship by the “Walter Greiner Gesellschaft zur Förderung der physikalischen Grundlagenforschung“, which aims at ideologically and financially supporting basic research in Frankfurt, especially in the field of Physics. “Having such a prestigious endorsement from a society that is dedicated to the promotion of science in Frankfurt is of enormous importance to me and strengthens my sense belonging to a city that has always welcomed me and made me feel a Frankfurter”, Rezzolla says.

Finally, Rezzolla was announced to be a winner of the Falling Walls Science Breakthrough in Physical Sciences 2022 only yesterday. The Falling Walls Foundation celebrates groundbreaking research across disciplines, asking “Which are the next walls to fall in science and society?”.

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Professor Martínez-Pinedo is affiliated at TU Darmstadt and GSI/FAIR. Apart from his activities in our Research Cluster ELEMENTS he is also a Principal Investigator of the Collaborative Research Center SFB 1245 at TU Darmstadt and holds an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council.

The Research Cluster ELEMENTS congratulates Professor Martinez Pinedo to the well-deserved recognition of his ground-breaking scientific achievements.

The post Leibniz-Prize 2022 awarded to ELEMENTS’ Principal Investigator Professor Gabriel Martínez-Pinedo appeared first on ELEMENTS.

Dr. Michaela Arnold (TU Darmstadt and PI of ELEMENTS) was awarded with the “2020 DPG Junior Scientists’ Prize for Accelerator Physics” by the department “Accelerator Physics” of the German Physical Society (DPG). The award ceremony had been postponed to September 22, 2021, due to the CoViD-19 pandemic. The award was delivered by Prof. Dr. Kurt Aulenbacher (JGU Mainz), head of the Accelerator Physics department of the DPG, saying that the laureate “demonstrated significant achievements in the establishment of the first Energy-Recovery Linear Accelerator in Germany, the S-DALINAC electron accelerator at TU Darmstadt.

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