Aarhus Universitets segl

Gæsteprofessor: Michael Holzscheiter

Michael Holzscheiter has joined the Department on a 6-month leave from the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He will be working with the Aarhus Proton Therapy Group.

Michael Holzscheiter has joined the Department on a 6-month leave from the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He will be working with the Aarhus Proton Therapy Group (APTG) on the final data analysis of CERN Experiment AD-4/ACE (the Antiproton Cell Experiment) with the goal to extract values for the biological effectiveness for a beam of antiprotons stopping in biological targets, allowing generation of realistic treatment plans for treatment.

He is officially employed by the Arhus University Hospital and his local host in Physics is Niels Bassler. His visit is funded by AU’s Forskningsfond.

As a staff member at the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1985 to 2003, he has been leading the ACE experiment since its approval. Even before he had maintained a close relationship with AU for nearly 30 years and has visited many times.

Initially, the interest was in gravitational interactions of antimatter with the Earth’s gravitational field, the formation and trapping of antihydrogen atoms for fundamental physics studies, and studies of gravity of antimatter. He was instrumental in obtaining approval from CERN management to establish the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) and formed the ATHENA collaboration, which in 2002 produced the first low energy antihydrogen atoms. In parallel, he was actively involved in experiments towards quantum computing with trapped ions.

In 2003 he left Los Alamos to turn to the application of physics to cancer therapy at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics and the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg as a Marie Curie fellow.