Abstract
The importance and impact of spin can hardly be overestimated: “It is a mysterious beast, and yet its practical effect prevails all over science. The existence of spin, and the statistics associated with it, is the most subtle and ingenious design of Nature – without it the whole world would collapse.” (From: S. Tomonaga´s book The Story of Spin).
Spin of an ensemble of particles, called polarization, is exploited as a tool, not only in nuclear, hadronic and elementary and particle physics but also in important applications such as data storage or medical imaging.
In this talk, I will present examples of how polarization is used at the Cooler Synchrotron COSY at the Institute for Nuclear Physics of Forschungszentrum Jülich (Germany) for the investigation of fundamental questions like, e.g., the Matter-antimatter Asymmetry of our Universe and the Nature of Dark Matter.