One of the highlights in the annual Physics calendar is the announcement of the “Physics Breakthroughs of the Year”, by the journal Physics World. This year, our paper on "Sympathetic cooling of protons mediated by a superconducting LC-circuit", published in Nature, was selected as one of the top ten achievements made in 2021. The work was conducted here in our group at the Institute for Physics at the University of Mainz (see press release). It is a key method to improve future proton and antiproton precision measurements in the BASE collaboration.
According to Physics World, the selections must meet the following criteria:
- Significant advance in knowledge or understanding
- Importance of work for scientific progress and/or development of real-world applications
- Of general interest to Physics World readers
Our paper was nominated in combination with work by our antimatter research colleagues from the ALPHA collaboration at CERN, which demonstrated for the first time laser cooling of antihydrogen atoms. Both efforts together are nominated for “the development of innovative particle cooling techniques”. The muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab and their improved measurement of the muon magnetic moment anomaly is also on the list - a work with contributions from Mainz by the group of Martin Fertl. Further nominations are the event horizon telescope collaboration and their first image showing the polarization of light in the region surrounding a supermassive black hole, and the observation of Pauli blocking in ultracold gases of fermionic atoms.
| For the full list of finalists follow this link. |  |