University of Silesia in Katowice

We are proud to inform that Seweryn Kowalski, PhD, DSc, Assoc. Prof. and Prof. Erik Zimmerman from the University of Colorado Boulder have been selected as the Spokespersons for the NA61/SHINE cooperation at CERN for a three-year term starting this December. He is one of the few Poles in charge of an experiment at CERN at one of the two largest accelerators.

To date, he has served as deputy spokesperson for this experiment and previously led a major hardware upgrade of the detector between 2019 and 2022, which allowed for increased data collection rates. Worth noting is the fact that, aside from measurement data analysis, the team of physicists from the University of Silesia is responsible for beam guidance and beam monitoring for the NA61/SHINE experiment.

Seweryn Kowalski and the story of his cooperation with CERN – an article prepared for the 30th anniversary of Poland joining CERN: Seweryn Kowalski CERN | My story

The NA61/SHINE experiment involves the cooperation of more than 130 physicists from 29 institutions (12 countries) at CERN – the largest particle laboratory – in Switzerland on the SPS accelerator. The main areas of research include the study of strongly interacting nuclear matter, with a particular focus on investigating the properties of the phase transition to quark-gluon plasma. Quark-gluon plasma is created at extremely high pressure or temperature. Within its boundaries, quarks and gluons – the most fundamental building blocks of matter – are able to move freely (in regular conditions they can only exist in a bound state). In addition, the experiment carries out hadron production studies for large experiments studying neutrinos, weakly interacting elusive particles (T2K, DUNE), as well as cosmic ray interaction studies for experiments such as the Pierre Auger Observatory and KASCADE. Within this cooperation, light ion fragmentation measurements are also carried out, which allows us to understand the propagation of cosmic radiation in the Galaxy and supports such experiments as the AMS installed on the International Space Station.