Kolloquien

Following LIGO's discovery last year of a gravitational-wave signal from a pair of merging black holes, it was suggested that such black holes might make up the cosmic dark matter. The idea was supported by a remarkable coincidence between the merger rate implied by LIGO and the rate at which such black holes should merge, if they were to make up the dark matter.   mehr...

I will present an overview of where we stand in the physics of high energies and ultrasensitive experiments, mentioning developments from Large Hadron Collider experiments and elsewhere, and give an assessment of what comes next. I will bring plenty of questions, and look forward to hearing yours!   mehr...

The ‘standard’ model of cosmology is founded on the basis that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating at present — as was inferred from the Hubble diagram of Type Ia supernovae. There exists now a much bigger database of supernovae so we can perform rigorous statistical tests to check whether these ‘standardisable candles’ indeed indicate cosmic acceleration.   mehr...

The construction of ever larger and costlier accelerator facilities has its limits, and new technologies will be needed to push the energy frontier. Plasma Wakefield acceleration is a rapidly developing field and is a promising candidate technology for future high-energy accelerators. The AWAKE collaboration is pursuing an approach to accelerate electrons to the TeV energy regime in a plasma.   mehr...

Dass Gravitation überhaupt eine Antwort auf eine theoretische Frage ist -- und nicht etwa nur ein geschicktes Postulat zur Modellierung einer der vier bekannten fundamentalen Kräfte -- lässt sich aus einem erstaunlichen Zusammenspiel von bereits im Grundstudium bekannten Fakten und einigen wenigen (aber hochspannenden!) Spezialkenntnissen verstehen.   mehr...

Collisions of heavy nuclei at high energies produce deconfined quark-gluon matter, a state of matter which prevailed in our Universe in its first 10 microseconds of existence. I will discuss how properties of this state of matter as well as the still-mysterious transition to hadrons with confined quarks and gluons are currently investigated with experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.   mehr...

Lebende Materie ist außerordentlich dynamisch und organisiert sich spontan in komplexen Mustern und in räumlichen Strukturen. Eine fundamentale Frage der Biologie ist es zu verstehen, wie Zellen räumliche Symmetrien brechen. Beispiele zellulärer Symmetriebrechung sind Zellpolarität und Zellchiralität. Solche zellulären Asymmetrien spielen eine wichtige Rolle bei der Entstehung komplexer Organismen.   mehr...

Mapping out the ''phase'' boundary between the low temperature confining phase of ordinary hadronic matter and the phase of an asymptotically free gas of quarks and gluons is one of the central goals of current theoretical studies of strong interaction matter as well as experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.   mehr...

Since their discovery in 1971 the superfluid phases of Helium-3 have proved to be the ideal testing ground for many fundamental concepts of modern physics. Phenomena such as anisotropic Cooper pairing, p-wave states, chirality, macroscopic quantum coherence, spontaneous breaking of high symmetries, and exotic topological defects are not only an important enrichment of the physics of condensed matter, but also provide important links to particle physics, defect formation in the early universe and, most recently, quantum turbulence.   mehr...

In den letzten Jahren wurden mit Hilfe der Stringtheorie neue, überraschende Verbindungen zwischen Quantenfeldtheorien und höherdimensionalen Gravitationstheorien entdeckt. Diese holographischen Dualitäten verbessern unser Verständnis der fundamentalen Theorien der Natur und haben darüber hinaus zahlreiche Anwendungen. Insbesondere ermöglichen sie eine revolutionär neue Sicht auf stark gekoppelte Quantensysteme in vielen Bereichen der Physik.   mehr...

In this talk I will present the work we are conducting in the Visual Learning Lab Heidelberg, which is at the intersection of computer vision and machine learning. After a gentle introduction to classical supervised machine learning, I will explain our latest research results, which often do not fit in this classical form.   mehr...

Recent highlights from the Run-2 data taking period of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC are presented. From a personal perspective, the talk will give insight into the challenges of taking, analysing and interpreting the Run-2 data.   mehr...

Smoking can kill! Our current energy system is heavily smoking. In view of critical CO₂ emissions and depleting conventional resources, a transformation towards a sustainable energy system is needed. Applied Theoretical Physics and the Physics of Complex Networks are able to contribute to the solution of this grand challenge. We discuss a simple network model, which describes a future European electricity system with a high share of wind and solar power generation.   mehr...

Very high energy (VHE) gamma ray astronomy - at photon energies of 100 GeV and beyond - has developed in giant steps, with the number of known cosmic VHE gamma ray sources approaching 200. Systems of large imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes have played a key role in this development.   mehr...