With the construction of the world’s largest magnetic sphere accelerator, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) set an officially registered world record in June 2017. Substitutes from JGU have now presented the official diploma certificates from Guinness World RecordsTM to the students who set up the experiment on the rails of the Mainz Transport Company (MVG) on campus. “My special thanks go to the students of the Rabanus-Maurus-Gymnasium and the Otto-Schott-Gymnasium, without whose commitment the attempt on the MVG rails would not have been possible,” said the President of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Professor Georg Krausch.

“The accelerator with its 700 steel spheres and 350 magnets, which was built by the students over a distance of more than 500 meters, has been sawn into more manageable pieces and now distributed to schools together with the steel spheres and magnets. There it can then be used for experiments in physics lessons,” explain the spokespersons of the PRISMA cluster of excellence at JGU, Prof. Dr. Matthias Neubert and Prof. Dr. Hartmut Wittig. PRISMA organizes various student programs in the field of physics to introduce students to research in particle and hadron physics at an early age. “The kits, which can be used to recreate the magnetic chain reaction in the classroom, will also be distributed to other schools in Mainz. In this way, complex physical principles can be illustrated using simple means – an important concern for us researchers,” Neubert and Wittig continue.

PRISMA is one of two clusters of excellence in Germany dedicated to researching fundamental questions about the nature of the fundamental building blocks of matter and their significance for the physics of the universe. As part of PRISMA, physicists carry out experiments at accelerators on campus and in major international projects. The physicists have just been invited to submit a full proposals for the continuation of the “Precision Physics, Fundamental Interactions and Structure of Matter” cluster in the federal and state excellence competition and have thus cleared the first hurdle on the way to further grant funding.