April 2020
It's MAGIX!
“Together with around 20 colleagues, I am working on the development and construction of an experiment for the new electron accelerator MESA. We have named the experiment MAGIX: it consists of a windowless gas target and two movable spectrometers. I am responsible for the design and construction of the target.
The special thing about MAGIX is that the accelerated electron beam is only scattered by the gas – the actual target – and the scattering process is not disturbed by the walls of the container. To achieve this, colleagues from Münster have built a device that injects extremely cold gas into a high vacuum at supersonic speed. In Mainz, we realized the structure “around it”, so to speak: later in the experiment, the electron beam will run along here and a small proportion of the accelerated electrons will collide with the gas flow.
©: Torsten Zimmermann
With MAGIX we want to answer some of the most fundamental questions of modern physics – with unprecedented precision: How big is the proton exactly? Can we find clues for dark photons? Can we understand the fusion of carbon to oxygen in the sun more precisely? When I started my diploma thesis, MAGIX only existed on paper. Today, four years later, we have installed the target in the A1 spectrometer of our existing accelerator MAMI – to test the system, but also to record initial data on the proton radius.
What drives and motivates me in my work? Planning and building an experiment from the very beginning – taking it out of its infancy, so to speak, and creating something completely new in the process. I find all of this in my current research project: It's MAGIX!”
Stephan Aulenbacher completed his diploma thesis at the Institute for Nuclear Physics and is currently about to complete his PhD. He already worked as a student assistant at the A1 experiment during his studies. There he met Professor Achim Denig – and the topic for his diploma and PhD thesis was made perfect. In addition to his research activities, Stephan Aulenbacher has been project manager for the hadron physics intersection within “Netzwerk Teilchenwelt” since the beginning of 2020.