Name: Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) – participation of the Czech Republic
Institute: Nuclear Physics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences
Coordinator: RNDr. Andrej Kugler, CSc.; kugler@ujf.cas.cz
Website
FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research in Europe) is a new European research infrastructure for nuclear and hadron physics currently under construction at Darmstadt in Germany as a part of the capacity of GSI (Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung). The Czech participation in FAIR, organized within FAIR-CZ, is anticipated to cover not only research activities in hadron physics, nuclear physics and nuclear astrophysics in CBM (Compressed Baryonic Matter), PANDA (Anti-Proton Annihilation at Darmstadt) and NuSTAR (Nuclear Structure, Astrophysics and Reactions), which are research pillars of FAIR, but also activities in other fields of science, such as radiobiology and biophysics developed in FAIR-APPA (Atomic, Plasma Physics and Applications), another research pillar of FAIR. The multidisciplinary aspect of FAIR-CZ is one of its unique features, supported by portfolio of services, such as support and infrastructure for the development and production of complex scientific devices for conducting FAIR experiments in the Czech Republic, coordinating access to research at FAIR, as well as technologies developed in all four FAIR research pillars and the operation of a computer centre in the main FAIR hosting institution, which serves as the national Tier3 centre of the GRID computer network. After its completion, FAIR will be a leading worldwide facility for hadron and nuclear physics for the next several decades. FAIR will be unique in areas such as the production of highly compressed plasma exploiting intense heavy-ion beams, with
an unparalleled research program focused on cooled antiproton beams and internal-target storage-ring capabilities for Quantum Chromodynamics studies. FAIR is expected, for example, to verify models of compressed matter, which is used to describe the fusion of neutron stars assumed to be the source of recently detected gravitational waves (Nobel Prize in 2017).