Kolloquien

Heidelberg Graduate Days   mehr...

The Planck space mission has released exquisite observations of the early universe, providing the strongest evidence yet that the universe we live in is very dark indeed. Its precise results show that our universe is composed of 26.6% dark matter and 68.4% dark energy, while less than 5% is made up of the baryonic material that we are familiar with on Earth. With their long-standing quest to make these precision measurements essentially now concluded, cosmologists are rapidly turning their attention to a much bigger and further-reaching question: what is the exact nature of this dark universe?   mehr...

The heaviest chemical elements in the periodic table are synthesized through the rapid neutron-capture (r-) process but the astrophysical site where r-process nucleosynthesis occurs is still unknown. The best candidate sites are ordinary core-collapse supernovae (deaths of massive stars) and mergers of two orbiting exotic neutron stars.   mehr...

In 1999 the presenter had his first encounter with an active volcano, and he made 2 important conclusions:

1. Volcanoes are amazing
2. Here is work to do

He contacted his friend and colleague Prof. Ulrich Platt, and together they launched an EU-project DORSIVA, aiming at Development of Optical Remote Sensing Instruments for Volcanic Applications. The rest is history....

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Moore’s Law was and still is the driver of innovations in many different areas, including the smartphone, artificial intelligence and autonomous driving. Achieving greater performance while lowering costs and energy consumption has required geometrical shrink powered by the resolution of optical lithography. Without this innovation, the power consumption of e.g. hyperscale data centers would increase linearly with the amount of data and hinder our data-driven world.   mehr...

“Why is water the unique fluid in which life occurs? What is the role of water in the myriad of processes – from catalysis to molecular recognition- that make up metabolism in the cell?” has been named as one of the top future challenges in chemistry.   mehr...

First I will review the evidence that the Universe is full of dark matter, which outweighs ordinary neutron-proton-electron matter by a factor of 5. Then I will present a seemingly unrelated issue: the strong interactions respect time-reversal invariance, even though they could easily violate this symmetry a billion times more strongly.   mehr...

In this talk it will be described how pulsars (pulsating radio sources) were accidentally discovered, the main properties of pulsars will be outlined and also some instances described when pulsars were 'nearly' discovered.   mehr...

Nuclear fusion could contribute to the energy mix in the second half of this century. For a fusion reactor, matter has to be heated up to extremely high temperatures: more than 100 million degrees - about a factor of 10 hotter than the sun's core. At these temperatures, the material is fully ionized. The charged particles can be confined by magnetic fields, which are also able to provide the required efficient heat insulation.   mehr...

Particle physics is often equated with high energy collider experiments. However, over recent years it has become increasingly clear that high intensity and high precision experiments offer significant, complementary opportunities to explore for physics beyond the Standard Model. In this talk, we will look at a range of these experiments and the discovery opportunities they present.   mehr...

In November 2018, the General Conference for Weights and Measures, CGPM, established by the Metre Convention in 1875, decided in its 26^th meeting on the revision of the International System of Units (SI). The signatory states of the Metre Convention represent about 98% of the world’s economic power and, thus, the SI is the very foundation of global, international trade and the reliability of measurements worldwide. As outlined by Max Planck in his famous paper of 1900 postulating the “Planck constant”, the revised SI shall be based on fixing the numerical values of “defining constants”: the velocity of light, the elementary charge, the Boltzmann, Avogadro and the Planck constants, the Cs hyperfine clock transition and the luminous efficacy.   mehr...

Superconducting qubits are providing very interesting approaches to building hybrid quantum systems, connecting these high-performance microwave frequency electrical devices to other quantum systems. One compelling opportunity is provided by the ability to use superconducting qubits to control and measure acoustically-active structures, structures that can potentially serve to link these qubits to other two-level systems or to e.g. optical signals.   mehr...