Ph.D. Seweryn Kowalski, University of Silesia, together with prof. Eric Zimmerman from the University of Colorado Boulder, was elected as the spokesperson for the NA61/SHINE collaboration at CERN for a three-year term starting in December this year. He is one of the few Poles in charge of the experiment at CERN, which is located on one of the two largest accelerators.
prof. Seweryn Kowalski
So far, he served as deputy director of this experiment, and earlier, in 2019–2022, he managed a large hardware update of the detector, which allowed to increase the data collection speed by a factor of 10. It is worth noting that a group of physicists from the University of Silesia, in addition to analyzing measurement data, is responsible for the systems beam guidance and beam monitoring for the NA61/SHINE experiment.
The NA61/SHINE experiment is a collaboration of over 130 physicists from 29 institutions (12 countries), located in the largest elementary particle laboratory, CERN in Switzerland, at the SPS accelerator. The main research directions include the study of strongly interacting nuclear matter, with particular emphasis on the study of the properties of the phase transition to quark-algae plasma. Quark-gluon plasma is formed at very high pressure or very high temperature. Within it, quarks and gluons, the most basic building blocks of matter known to us, move freely (under normal conditions, they only exist in a bound state). In addition, this experiment conducts hadron production studies for large experiments investigating neutrinos, weakly interacting elusive particles (T2K, DUNE), as well as cosmic ray impact studies for experiments such as the Pierre Auger Observatory and KASCADE. This collaboration also measures light ion fragmentation, which helps understand the propagation of cosmic rays in the Galaxy and supports experiments such as AMS, installed on the International Space Station.
source: University of Silesia
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