Kolloquien

XXXVI. Heidelberger Graduiertentage
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Axions, axion-like particles (ALPs), dilatons, and other ultralight (masses from 10^-4 down to 10^-22 eV) particles have been discussed as possible candidates for dark matter. An interesting feature of these ideas is that they lead to predictions of potentially observable transient and oscillating effects.   mehr...

Collisions of ultra relativistic heavy nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in the US and at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe create ephemeral droplets of Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), the hottest matter on earth, with temperatures up to 5 trillion Kelvin. Experiments at RHIC and the LHC provide strong evidence that the QGP flows briefly as a nearly perfect fluid, with very little resistance to its motion.   mehr...

The quintessence of neuronal communication are the action potentials or “spikes”, sharp pulse-like electrical events that neurons send down their axons to evoke postsynaptic potentials in connected cells. All information our brains have about the external world, and all internal mental events, must ultimately be represented in the spatio-temporal patterns of spiking activity.   mehr...

Early universe cosmology holds the promise to be able to provide explanations for a wealth of observational data. I will argue that new fundamental physics such as superstring theory is required in order to develop satisfactory models of the very early universe.   mehr...

The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) is a US-German twin satellite project to observe mass transport in system Earth on monthly basis. The presentation will review the major GRACE mission components and data products, some typical science accomplishments from the past decade and the current mission status.   mehr...

'Classical' observations of the light from stars provide information about the overall stellar properties, including surface temperature and composition, but say little about their interiors. As noted by Sir Arthur Eddington early in the previous century stellar interiors are inaccessible to direct observation, owing to the high opacity of stellar matter.   mehr...

The aim of ultra-relativistic heavy ion physics is the study of strongly interacting matter under extreme conditions of high temperature and/or high matter density using collisions of heavy nuclei.QCD predicts that at sufficiently high energy density there will be a transition from ordinary hadronic matter to a plasma of deconfined quarks and gluons - a transition which took place in the early universe a few microseconds after the Big Bang and which might still play a role today in compact stellar objects.evinc   mehr...

In the past three decades, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become a vital tool for clinical diagnosis and life science research. An ongoing trend is the introduction of research magnets with much more powerful static magnetic fields, including magnets at 7 Tesla and higher.   mehr...

Approaching temperatures near the absolute zero, i.e. the lowest temperature in the whole universe, the atoms develop extreme behaviors, which challenge our understanding. In this extreme regime, the atoms assume exceptional behaviors and form a new type of matter, which is now governed by the laws of quantum mechanics.   mehr...

In this colloquium talk I will give an accessible overview of the emerging field of wavefront shaping in strongly scattering media, highlighting the opportunities for new research. Random scattering of light, which takes place in paper, paint and biological tissue is an obstacle to imaging and focusing of light and thus hampers many applications. At the same time scattering is a phenomenon of basic physical interest as it allows the study of fascinating interference effects such as open transport channels, which enable lossless transport of waves through strongly scattering materials.   mehr...

It is notoriously difficult to observe, let alone control, the position and orientation of molecules because of their small size and the constant thermal fluctuations that they experience in solution. Molecular self-assembly with DNA provides a route for placing molecules and constraining their fluctuations in user-defined ways and with up to Angstroem-scale precision.   mehr...

The new cryogenic electrostatic storage ring CSR at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics can store atomic, molecular and cluster ion beams from an accelerating platform (up to 300 kV) on a closed orbit in a low-temperature environment at extremely high vacuum.   mehr...

When passing through a scene light typically undergoes multiple reflections in its path from the light source to the detector. The vast majority of imaging techniques relies exclusively on light that travels a direct path from the object of interest to the detector. Indirect light often makes up a significant part of the collected image information.   mehr...