Helmholtz Research Academy Hesse for FAIR

The workhorse

The SIS100 is the workhorse of the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research.

SIS stands for heavy ion synchrotron - "SchwerIonen Synchrotron" in German. It can accelerate almost all ions, from the very light ones like hydrogen to the heavy ones like gold or lead. In doing so, it takes advantage of the other accelerators. In the preceding accelerators, such as UNILAC or SIS18, the particles are pre-accelerated and then shot into SIS100 at an appropriately high speed (physicists are usually interested in the energy the particle has).

In the accelerator, which is about 1.1 km long, the injected particles are then accelerated to about 99% of the speed of light. Afterwards, the high-intensity particles are directed to experiments to conduct research on a wide variety of topics.