The Council of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has elected Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Manfred Lindner, director at the MPI for Nuclear Physics, to the rank of AAAS Fellow, to honor his “distinguished contributions to both theoretical and experimental particle physics.” Each year since 1874, the AAAS Council elects members whose efforts on behalf of the advancement of science, or its applications, are scientifically or socially distinguished. This is normally presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association, which, however, this year will be virtual.
The theoretical and experimental research of Prof. Lindner ranges from cosmology and extensions of the standard model of particle physics to the properties of neutrinos and the search for dark matter. Current theoretical research concerns mechanisms which aim at explaining the scale hierarchy between the scale of electroweak interactions and high embedding scales. Furthermore, theories for explaining neutrino masses and their interaction, as well as particle physical candidates for dark matter in the Universe are being studied. One of the main experimental activities is the XENON project for the direct detection of dark matter. Lindner is co-spokesperson of the XENON collaboration, which has achieved internationally leading results with the XENON1T detector which received a lot of attention. The even more sensitive successor detector, XENONnT, will soon begin taking data. Projects on neutrino physics (CONUS, STEREO, LEGEND200) also aim at fundamental questions: The proof of coherent neutrino scattering at low energies, the existence of new neutrino types and the question of whether one of the fundamental symmetries, namely lepton number conservation, is violated.
Manfred Lindner studied physics at the LMU Munich where he also received his PhD in 1987. After research stays at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Chicago and at CERN in Geneva, he moved to the Heidelberg University as a Heisenberg fellow. Having received offers from several well-known universities, he decided in 1993 to accept the offer of the TU Munich for a professorship. In 2006, he finally was appointed by the Max Planck Society as director at the MPI for Nuclear Physics, where he is leading the division Particle and Astroparticle Physics. In addition, he is a professor at the Heidelberg University and a member of a number of important national and international committees. For his contributions to neutrino physics, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm in 2016.
