Situated below the southern sky, on the Khomas highlands in Namibia, sits the High Energy Stereoscopic System, H.E.S.S., an observatory dedicated to look at the most energetic processes in the universe.
From October 1st on the H.E.S.S. collaboration has a new director: Dr. Lars Mohrmann from the Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik in Heidelberg was appointed as director of the collaboration by the H.E.S.S. steering committee. He is again supported by Prof. Dr. Mathieu de Naurois, from the Laboratoire Leprince-Ringuet, E'cole Polytechnique, CNRS, as deputy director for the 3rd extension period of H.E.S.S.
Lars Mohrmann studied astrophysics at the University of Aachen and completed his PhD at DESY in Zeuthen and the Humboldt Universität in Berlin. After Post-Doc positions both in Erlangen and Heidelberg, he became leader of the H.E.S.S. group at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik in Heidelberg in 2023. “As new H.E.S.S. director it will be a priority for me to guarantee a continued successful operation of the experiment, but also to promote a fruitful exchange between all the members of the collaboration”, Mohrmann explains his visions for his elected three-year term of office. With a secured operation of H.E.S.S. until 2028 his plans also include the setup of a publicly accessible archive for then more than 25 years of H.E.S.S. data.
The H.E.S.S. collaboration consists of more than 200 scientists from about 40 scientific institutions and 13 different countries, about half of them PhD students and Post-Docs, whose scientific career is based on the unique data from the H.E.S.S. telescopes. Construction, operation, and scientific exploitation of the many facets of H.E.S.S. have been the central theme in about 1,000 thesis projects and contributed significantly to the successful education and professional training in all of all the participating institutions. Mohrmann points out: “Another aspect that is important to me, is the visibility of early-career H.E.S.S. researchers, which I hope we will be able to increase”. To date, the H.E.S.S. Collaboration has published over 270 articles in high-impact scientific journals, covering more than 20 years of H.E.S.S. data on non-thermal astrophysics, and increasing the number of known sources of such extreme radiation from around 10 to more than 100 by now, many of them even spatially resolved.
The High Energy Stereoscopic System, H.E.S.S., is a unique system of five Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes that explore the production and propagation of high-energy particles in the Universe. These particles can only be produced in cosmic particle accelerators, such as supernova remnants or active galactic nuclei.
