After a decade of delays, the €3.3 billion nuclear physics facility in Germany aims to run its first experiments in 2027
Thomas Nilsson (left), scientific managing director of FAIR, visiting the construction site. Photo credits: T. Silz, GSI / FAIR
A major international research facility based in Germany, dedicated to studying the structure of matter and the evolution of the universe, is getting ready to run its first experiments, more than 20 years after plans were first drawn up.
The Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research in Europe (Fair) in Darmstadt is being built as an extension to the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research, a federal and state co-funded research centre founded in 1969.
It will be one of the largest accelerator facilities in the world, providing particle beams of all the chemical elements’ ions as well as antiprotons. This will allow researchers to study fundamental questions such as how heavy elements including gold and lead were formed and how a neutron star behaves.
“We want to take the extreme environments in the universe, mimic the conditions in the laboratory and study the…
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