{"id":23865,"date":"2016-04-20T16:35:00","date_gmt":"2016-04-20T14:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cms.zdv.uni-mainz.de\/fb08-prisma\/2016\/04\/20\/werner-heil-als-herausragender-physiker-geehrt\/"},"modified":"2026-02-09T10:06:12","modified_gmt":"2026-02-09T09:06:12","slug":"werner-heil-als-herausragender-physiker-geehrt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prisma.uni-mainz.de\/en\/2016\/04\/20\/werner-heil-als-herausragender-physiker-geehrt\/","title":{"rendered":"Werner Heil honored as an outstanding physicist"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/jgu-base-pageheader><\/jgu-base-heading>\n\n
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Experimental physicist Prof. Dr. Werner Heil was honored as an outstanding scientist and highly esteemed co-worker at a celebratory colloquium at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) on Tuesday. Around 200 guests from Germany and abroad accepted the invitation to Mainz, which was issued on the occasion of the physicist’s official retirement. As a senior research professor, Werner Heil will remain at the Institute of Physics for a further two years and will supervise research in the field of ultracold neutrons until the research unit is handed over to a successor. Werner Heil established research with ultracold neutrons in Mainz, having previously carried out unique development work on magnetic resonance imaging of the lungs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Werner Heil, born on February 1, 1951 in Landau, first studied physics in Kaiserslautern and then in Mainz before obtaining a doctorate (from.) at the Institute of Nuclear Physics at JGU. Research stays took him from Mainz first to Paris and then, after his habilitation, to Grenoble for three years, where he worked intensively on ultracold neutrons. In 1999, he accepted the offer of appointment as Professor of Experimental Physics at JGU. Werner Heil is married to the renowned Rhineland-Palatinate artist Carmen Stahlschmidt and has two grown-up sons. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his research, he deals with the intrinsic angular momentum of a particle, the spin, and its orientation in the magnetic field in a variety of ways. In 1998, Werner Heil, experimental physicist Ernst W. Otten, nuclear medicine specialist Manfred Thelen and Mich\u00e8le Leduc from ENS Paris received the highly endowed K\u00f6rber Prize for European Science for the development of a new procedure in which magnetic resonance imaging is used to scan the lungs with the help of hyperpolarized helium-3. Heil and Otten were nominated for the German Future Prize in 2000 for their new method of lung diagnostics. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Around ten years ago, Heil’s work group, in cooperation with employees from the Institute of Nuclear Chemistry and the Technical University of Munich, succeeded in generating ultracold neutrons, which are required for various precision experiments such as the clause of the lifetime of the free neutron. As part of the PRISMA cluster of excellence, Heil has initiated a user facility at the TRIGA Mainz research reactor, which is also available to external researchers. In another line of work, Heil is working on using the precessional motion of the nuclear spin of polarized noble gases to produce spin clocks. These spin clocks are so precise that the inaccuracy is only one second in a billion years. Possible applications range from magnetometry to clock comparison experiments to test fundamental symmetries in nature. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Werner Heil’s work is characterized by interdisciplinary cooperation, not only with nuclear chemistry and medical physics, but also in other fields of physics – a scientific breadth that has led to research contacts worldwide. His ability to inspire and motivate others made his work group a center of attraction for many young employees and students. In his laudatory speech, Prof. Dr. Klaus Blaum, Director at the Max Planck Institutes for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg and a long-standing co-worker, praised Heil as an “inspiring scientist and a great person”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Experimental physicist Prof. Dr. Werner Heil was honored as an outstanding scientist and highly esteemed co-worker at a celebratory colloquium at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) on Tuesday. Around 200 guests from Germany and abroad accepted the invitation to Mainz, which was issued on the occasion of the physicist’s official retirement. As a senior research … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":554,"featured_media":19249,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[105],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-press-release"],"primary_category":{"id":105,"name":"Press release","slug":"press-release","parent":0,"breadcrumb":"Press release"},"media":{},"image":{"url":"https:\/\/cms.zdv.uni-mainz.de\/fb08-prisma\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/255\/2025\/10\/08_physik_heil_small.jpg","credit":""},"index":"20.04.2016","assigned_date":"","external_link":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/prisma.uni-mainz.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/prisma.uni-mainz.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/prisma.uni-mainz.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prisma.uni-mainz.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/554"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prisma.uni-mainz.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23865"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/prisma.uni-mainz.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23865\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28847,"href":"https:\/\/prisma.uni-mainz.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23865\/revisions\/28847"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prisma.uni-mainz.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/prisma.uni-mainz.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prisma.uni-mainz.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prisma.uni-mainz.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}