The PANDA Experiment will be one of the key experiments at the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) which is under construction and currently being built on the area of the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, Germany. The central part of FAIR is a synchrotron complex providing intense pulsed ion beams (from p to U). Antiprotons produced by a primary proton beam will then be filled into the High Energy Storage Ring (HESR) which collide with the fixed target inside the PANDA Detector.
The PANDA Collaboration with more than 420 scientist from 18 countries intends to do basic physics research on various topics around the weak and strong forces, exotic states of matter and the structure of hadrons. In order to gather all the necessary information from the antiproton-proton collisions a versatile detector will be build being able to provide precise trajectory reconstruction, energy and momentum measurements and very efficient identification of charged particles
Currently the collaboration with Russian Institutes is suspended. For details read the statement from GSI.
During our online collaboration meeting in May this year the collaboration board endorsed one candidate for the position of our spokesperson and one candidate for the deputy position.
The Vote on the PANDA Spokesperson and PANDA Deputy Spokesperson takes place electronically in May/June according to the PANDA Governance Rules.
The electorate are all official members of PANDA with a university degree and a PANDA membership of at least one year as reported by the institute heads.
Please note that a quorum of 50% of registered voter has to be reached for the election to be valid.
Instructions for voting
To vote, access the PANDA Vote form on this site by logging in using your personal GSI web login.
If you are not already logged in, follow the link above and you will be asked for your user credentials and on successful login you will be redirected to the ballot page. If you are already logged in, you can access the polls via menu item "Ballot paper" as well.
Please vote between May 19th 2025, 00:00h CEST and June 10th 2025, 24:00h CEST. Before and after that period the link given above will not work.
You have then accessed the ballot page, where you can mark your individual vote for the candidates endorsed by the Collaboration Board (options: accept, non-accept, abstain).
Your vote is anonymous. You can only vote once.
In case of technical problems contact the PANDA office.
The award was announced at the most recent Panda Collaboration meeting at GSI, Darmstadt and handed over to Dr. Roberto Bruschini (with certificate) by the spokesperson of the Panda Collaboration Prof Klaus Peters (left) and the chair of the Theory Adisory Group Prof Christian Fischer (right), University Giessen, Germany, during a dinner ceremony.
Dr. Bruschini used Coupled-Channel Schrödinger Equations in adiabatic and diabatic forms for Charmonium-like Mesons below and above threshold. The diabatic Born-Oppenheimer approximation allows for a unified study of conventional and exotic charmonium-like mesons, which has a great impact to the PANDA physics program.
The Panda Collaboration awards the Theory PhD Prize to specifically honor students’ contributions related to the Panda project. Candidates for the PhD Prize are nominated by their doctoral advisors. In addition to being directly related to the Panda Experiment, the nominees’ doctoral degrees must have received a rating of “very good” or better. Up to three candidates are shortlisted for the award and can present their dissertations at the Panda Collaboration meeting. The winner is chosen by a committee that is appointed for this task by the Panda Collaboration.
Hannes Zmeskal passed away on July 23, 2024 after a short severe disease. With Hannes we lose an unparalleled experienced researcher in the field of exotic atoms and experimental low-energy hadron physics. His work manifested in many important publications. He was a driving force in experiments on muon/pion experiments and low-energy kaon nuclear physics. His success in acquiring third party funding is remarkable – he was principal investigator in projects of the Austrian Science Fund and in the European research activities like Strong2020.
There is a possibility of expressing condolences online.
I know him since 1980 when I joined a research group at Paul Scherrer Institute (SIN at this time) in Switzerland. Johann Zmeskal was a specialist of all kind of cryogenic targets and detector systems used in experiments on muon catalyzed fusion, the nuclear fusion is resulting from the strong binding of
two deuterons or deuteron-triton using a negatively charged muon which is released after the fusion process with a high probability and can start another fusion cycle. The finding of hyperfine effects in the molecular formation was topic of his PhD work - a big success and it is published in Phys. Rev. A.
He was member of many Collaborations like SIDDHARTA, ASACUSA and PANDA. In the PANDA experiment he contributed to the target system from the beginning but he was also working on the time-of-flight system. Due to his experience in cryogenic and ultrahigh vacuum systems he contributed to low-energy antiproton physics in experiment at the antimatter facility of CERN.
He was a leading figure in the experiments DEAR, SIDDHARTA and SIDDHARTA2 at Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati of INFN from the beginning of the electron-positron collider DAFNE operation.
Hannes Zmeskal was finally co-spokesperson of the very successful SIDDHARTA2 experiment on kaonic deuterium which is after the kaon-hydrogen experiment a key experiment to study the strong interaction at lowest energies in an exotic atom with strangeness.
Hannes Zmeskal with his patient, kind and optimistic nature was always a calming pole in any of his many experiments. It has to be highlighted that Hannes was an extremely good mentor for a new generation of researchers.
Loved by all who knew him, he will be missed.
With great sadness we have received the message, that Carlo Guaraldo passed away.
He was a great hadron physicist and one like nobody else who was building bridges between people and who paved the way into the future.
We will miss him vey much and keep his memory.
Carlo Guaraldo (1938-2024) was a key figure and a pillar of the Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati (LNF) of the Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN), as well as of the European hadronic physics community.
Born in Torino, Guaraldo studied physics at Sapienza University in Rome, and his scientific interest was the understanding of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD).
He began his scientific career in the 1960s at the Frascati Laboratories, where he investigated the nuclear structure by studying pion scattering on various nuclei and a wide range of photoreactions. He eventually became the head of the local facility LEALE (Laboratorio Esperienze Acceleratore Lineare Elettroni) where these activities were conducted.
A member of the Torino-Frascati-Dubna collaboration (TOFRADUP) and leader of the ALFA3 project, Guaraldo started participating in experiments at the CERN Low Energy Antiproton Ring in the 1980s. He was involved in PS179 and later in the OBELIX (PS201) experiment, where he and Tullio Bressani from Torino University served as spokesmen. The OBELIX experiment aimed to conduct spectroscopy of exclusive hadronic states produced via antiproton and antineutron interactions under various conditions. Guaraldo was a driving force in the collaboration, proposing several research lines including Pontecorvo reactions and exotic hadron spectroscopy, with particular interest in the H-dibaryon and the E/iota resonance.
In the 1990s, Guaraldo supported the realization of the DAFNE complex. He played a crucial role in defining the scientific program for the new facility and, along with Bressani, secured approval for a nuclear physics program at DAFNE, initially intended solely for CP-violation and fundamental symmetries studies. After contributing to the approval of the FINUDA experiment (Fisica NUcleare a DAfne), he shifted focus to establish a new research line: the study of kaonic atoms. This research has been enduring, extending the scientific life of the facility to the present days. Guaraldo served as spokesperson for the DEAR and SIDDHARTA experiments, which achieved the world most precise measurements on kaonic atoms.
At the turn of the millennium, Guaraldo was a pioneer in promoting cooperative efforts across the hadron physics community. He initiated and led a series of successful projects funded by the EU commission, coordinating the HadronPhysics, HadronPhysics2, and HadronPhysics3 initiatives from 2004 to 2014. These projects provided open access to six world-class experimental facilities (COSY, MAMI, LNF, ELSA, GSI/FAIR, and CERN) and the European Centre for Theoretical Physics ECT* in Trento, fostering new developments in hadron physics. This was certainly the most complex and challenging managerial activity Carlo Guaraldo pursued, but having been involved in many other important committees, he was well trained for this role.
Guaraldo's extensive managerial experience included serving on the INFN Management Board, the Program Advisory Committee of FZ Jülich, and the executive board of the DIRAC (PS212) CERN experiment. He was involved in financial working groups for the FAIR project in Darmstadt and the X-FEL project in Hamburg, and held roles in cooperative activities between INFN and various international organizations such as the Institute for Nuclear Physics (INP) in Novosibirsk, the Moscow Meson Factory Troizk, the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) in Moscow, and the Institute for Research and Development for Physics and Nuclear Engineering (IFIN-HH) in Bucharest.
Beyond his professional achievements, Carlo Guaraldo was known as a kind and friendly person with broad cultural interests. Curious and open-minded, he was a mountain lover and a tenacious cyclist. His presence will be missed, along with the coffee he made with his own moka machine for visitors to his office.
The PANDA Experiment will be one of the key experiments at the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) which is under construction and currently being built on the area of the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, Germany. The central part of FAIR is a synchrotron complex providing intense pulsed ion beams (from p to U). Antiprotons produced by a primary proton beam will then be filled into the High Energy Storage Ring (HESR) which collide with the fixed target inside the PANDA Detector.
