Tord Johansson Awarded PANDA Honorary Lifetime Membership
Tord Johansson and PANDA’s spokesperson Professor Kai Thomas Brinkmann, Gießen, Germany, at the prize ceremony. Photo: Ulrich Wiedner
Tord Johansson, Senior Professor at the Division of Nuclear Physics at the Department of Physics and Astronomy has been awarded an honorary appointment for his contributions within the planned PANDA experiment at the accelerator facility FAIR.
Tord Johansson is chief executive for Sweden’s contribution to the PANDA experiment’s detector and has worked with the project since it began in 2004.
During PANDA’s latest collaboration meeting at the research centre GSI/FAIR, he was awarded an honorary lifetime membership within the PANDA collaboration, “PANDA Honorary Lifetime Membership”.
“It is very gratifying and honouring that my commitment and contribution as a physicist to an international collaboration is appreciated in this way,” says Tord Johansson.
The motivation for the award is:
“for his outstanding contributions to the PANDA collaboration and the field of hadron physics.”
His work within the PANDA project has meant pre-studies of physics with hyperons. Above all, Tord Johansson has in Uppsala been responsible for the development of electronics for a so-called electromagnetic calorimeter (EMC) built by 16 000 crystal blocks which is tasked with measuring the energy of photons and electrons created at antiproton collisions. He has also mentored a number of doctoral students within the field.
About the PANDA experiment
PANDA is a planned experiment at the accelerator facility FAIR in Germany which is under construction. The purpose of PANDA is to study collisions between antiprotons and protons in order to explore the strong force in an energy interval where the greatest unsolved questions within the standard model can be found. Questions that they are trying to answer within the project are:
- Why do not quarks exist as free particles but only in bound states in our world?
- How is the mass of these states generated (the Higgs mechanism explains just around 1% of the proton’s mass)?
About FAIR
The Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) is an accelerator facility for nuclear, hadron and ion physics. The facility is under construction next to the GSI research facility in Darmstadt, Germany. Construction is taking place as part of an international convention signed by Sweden in 2010. Swedish researchers and Uppsala University participate in building the facility and play an active role in three of the collaborations developing and constructing the experiments at FAIR: SPARC/APPA, AGATA/NUSTAR and PANDA.
The Council for Research Infrastructures (RFI) funds this research infrastructure, which the Swedish Research Council considers to be in the national interest.