Annual report / Institut für Kernphysik / COSY 2007

On November 7/8, 2007 the kick-off event and a symposium on physics at the future FAIR facility took place at GSI-Darmstadt, during which the start of the project was officially announced. This important milestone strongly influences the activities of the IKP. As in previous years, the institute continued its vigorous engagement for the High Energy Storage Ring (HESR) as well as the PANDA and PAX experiments. IKP is in charge of all major HESR components, among them the ion optical design of the ring, the rf systems, the beam-diagnostics and magnets, as well as stochastic cooling. IKP has also taken on central responsibilities for the PANDA central charged particle tracking and vertexing, the PANDA frozen pellet target, as well as establishing a method to achieve a high degree of antiproton polarization for PAX. After the launching of the FAIR project these activities are now continuing to be vigorously pursued. After the HGF Midterm Review in September, the committee expressed strong support for the theory group and was impressed by the stable operation of COSY and by the developments for the HESR. The ongoing physics program at ANKE was very positively acknowledged as well as progress with WASA, and the new proposal on ”Strangeness Physics at COSY-TOF”. The inaugural meeting of the Virtual Institute “Spin and strong QCD” (Spokesperson: Ulf-G. Meißner) took place on November 30, 2007 at the IKP. The experimental as well as theoretical research of this Virtual Institute—with participating institutions IKP, GSI, Universities Bern, Bonn, Cracow, Torino, INFN Ferrara — is focused on three of the most important aspects of non-perturbative strong interactions with a direct connection to the hadron physics programs at COSY, PANDA and PAX at FAIR: Hadron spectroscopy, symmetry tests and polarization. The experimental work at IKP is focused around the COSY accelerator complex: $\bullet$ The WASA detector at an internal target station of COSY has been completely installed. A first experiment on thr pp $\rightarrow$ pp$\eta$ reaction has successfully been carried out. [...