The Nuclear Physics Board of the European Physical Society has awarded the 2020 Lise Meitner Prize to

• Klaus Blaum (Max-Planck-Institute for Nuclear Physics, Heidelberg, Germany),

• Björn Jonson (Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden) and

• Piet Van Duppen (KU Leuven, Belgium)

"for their development and application of on-line instrumentation and techniques, for their precise and systematic investigation of properties of nuclei far from stability, and for shaping the scientific program at the online isotope separator facility ISOLDE, CERN."

The Lise Meitner Prize 2020 for Björn Jonson, Piet Van Duppen and Klaus Blaum honours three scientists representing different experimental techniques and three generations of researchers who have made outstanding contributions to the field of nuclear physics, both scientifically, techno-logically and in terms of science administration. Björn Jonson's name stands for the study of the lightest exotic nuclei, namely halo nuclei, whose surprisingly large matter radius he was the first (together with the late Gregers Hansen) to explain. Piet Van Duppen pushed the production and investigation of post-accelerated radioactive beams with REX-ISOLDE, for which he laid the foundation with his early work in Louvain-la-Neuve. Finally, the scientific work of Klaus Blaum is focused on the high-precision determination of nuclear ground state properties with laser and mass spectroscopic methods and the development of new techniques in this field.

Klaus Blaum, Björn Jonson and Piet Van Duppen have played a decisive role in turning a small-scale nuclear-physics experiment at the European Nuclear Research Centre CERN, which focuses mainly on high-energy experiments, into a facility that enjoys high recognition and respect in the CERN environment and has been the undisputed world leader in ISOL facilities for nuclear structure investigations for 50 years. All three have contributed to this outstanding success at CERN in a variety of ways and functions: as ISOLDE Physics Group Leader, chairman of the ISOLDE Collaboration Committee, member or chairman of the CERN scientific advisory committees, of the CERN Research Board and the Scientific Policy Committee, and as organizers of international conferences and schools in the field of nuclei far from stability.

The award ceremony of the Lise Meitner Prize 2020 will take place during the ISOLDE workshop on Nov-26 2020 as an online event.

The Lise Meitner Prize is awarded biennially by the European Physical Society for outstanding work in the fields of experimental, theoretical or applied nuclear science.

The 2016 Prize Laureate is:

• Prof. Ulf-G. Meißner, Universität Bonn and Forschungszentrum in Jülich, Germany

"for his developments and applications of effective field theories in hadron and nuclear physics, that allowed for systematic and precise investigations of the structure and dynamics of nucleons and nuclei based on Quantum Chromodynamics."

The prize consists of a Medal, a Diploma with the above citation, in addition to a cash award.

The Lise Meitner Prize is sponsored by:

• The Karin and Carlo Giersch Foundation
• The KVI Centre for Advanced Radiation Technology, Groningen
• The Nuclear Physics Institute Research Centre, Jülich
• The Institute of Nuclear Physics, Orsay
• The GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung, Darmstadt
• The 3rd European Nuclear Physics Conference, Groningen, 2015.

The prize medal and the diploma will be presented to Prof. Meißner at a scientific meeting on Advances in Effective Field Theories to be held in Jülich later in the year.

More information about the Lise Meitner Prize and the EPS Nuclear Physics Division can be found on the division's website.

The European Physical Society, through its Nuclear Physics Division, has awarded the Lise Meitner Prize 2014 jointly to Prof. Johanna Stachel (Physikalisches Institut der Universität Heidelberg, Germany), Prof. Peter Braun-Munzinger (GSI, Germany),  Dr. Paolo Giubellino (INFN Torino, Italy and CERN, Switzerland) and to Dr. Jürgen Schukraft (CERN, Switzerland). The prize is given every two years for outstanding work in the fields of experimental, theoretical or applied nuclear science.

The prize was awarded "for their outstanding contributions to the experimental exploration of the quark-gluon plasma using ultra-relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions, in particular to the design and construction of ALICE and shaping its physics program and scientific results bringing to light unique and unexpected features of a deconfined state of strongly-interacting matter at the highest temperatures ever produced in the laboratory."

The Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) is the state of deconfined and thermalized QCD matter at high temperature. It is a fundamentally new state of matter that permeated the early universe after the electro-weak phase transition, i.e. from picoseconds to about ten microseconds after the Big Bang. The unambiguous proof of its existence and the precise determination of its properties including critical temperature, degrees of freedom, speed of sound, and, in general, transport coefficients, advances our understanding of QCD as a genuine multi-particle theory. In addition, complex issues such as deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration are closely related. This field uniquely bridges nuclear and particle physics with connections to astrophysics and cosmology. Nucleus-nucleus collisions at high energies offer the only way to create matter under extreme conditions of energy density, pressure and temperature in the laboratory. 

The aim of ALICE as one of the large-scale experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN is the investigation of such a state of matter. The first period of LHC data taking has just been completed bringing to light unique and unexpected features of a deconfined state of strongly interacting matter at the highest temperatures ever produced in the laboratory. Striking highlights of results from ALICE include the bulk production of charmonium exhibiting novel mechanisms of hadronization; jet-quenching, with an unexpected momentum dependence of the production of identified particles at high momentum; substantial heavy-quark energy loss, as seen via the topological reconstruction of charmed D mesons; and the production of antimatter and antihypernuclei. Also the field of lattice QCD has strongly benefitted from these new and exciting results.

Johanna Stachel, Peter Braun-Munzinger, Paolo Giubellino and Jürgen Schukraft have made outstanding contributions to the development of this field, in particular to the design and construction of ALICE and shaping its physics program and scientific results.

More info
Lise Meitner Prize
EPS Nuclear Physics Division