Degree: Professor
Position: Professor
Division: Astrophysics II (Warsaw)ORCID: 0000-0002-4342-4554
Office: 119
Phone: +48 223296119
E-mail: haensel@camk.edu.pl
Paweł Haensel is a professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center (CAMK) in Warsaw.
After graduating in physics at the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw (UW), he was hired at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of UW (1968) in the group of nuclear theory. The topic of his Ph.D. (1972) was theory of spin and isospin polarized nuclear matter, and his habilitation thesis (1976) referred to the properties of dense neutron matter, relevant for physics of neutron stars. In 1978 he moved to the newly established CAMK PAN, where he works until now. In years 1984-1987 he was the deputy director of CAMK. He received the title of professor in 1987.
He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Physics of the University of Liège (Belgium, 1975-1976), after which he visited France several times for long-term stays: at CEA Saclay (1982-1983) and Observatoire de Paris (1991-1993 as Directeur des Recherches, and 1997-2000 as Professeur Invité PAST). Important for his scientific development were visits to leading research centers in the USA (Princeton University, State University NY Stony Brook, Fermilab).
In years 1992-2017, he directed a series of programs of Polish-French collaboration in astronomy. These programs distributed grants for visits of Polish astronomers in France and French astronomers in Poland. They resulted in more than four hundred Polish-French publications, and over thirty PhDs of young astronomers directed by Polish and French co-supervisors.
Research by Prof. Haensel concerned the structure, dynamics, and evolution of neutron stars (NS), including of superdense matter in NS interiors. As for now, he is working on structure and dynamics of NS at the stage of inspiral in the NS-NS binary. Moreover, he studies evolution of NS crust in low mass close binary systems with transient accretion of matter from a companion. His CAMK collaborators, involved in the topic of nuclear astrophysics and dense matter physics, are: Prof. Leszek Zdunik, Prof. Michał Bejger, and a Ph.D. student Lami Suleiman.
Prof. Haensel is an author and co-author of over 190 peer-reviewed articles. A list of and links to his publications are available from the service NASA ADS.
The most cited papers published by Prof. Haensel include: theory of quark stars (1986), rapid NS cooling (Direct Urca, 1991), equations of state for NS (Sly, 1997, 1998, 2001). A book "Neutron Stars 1. Equation of state and structure" (Springer, 2007, with Dmitry G. Yakovlev i Aleksander P. Potekhin) is frequently referred to in NS papers.