Kolloquien

I will start with an overview of the status of dark matter searches and of the prospects for uncovering its nature in the next decade. I will then focus on the interplay between dark matter, black holes, and gravitational waves, and discuss the prospects for characterizing and identifying dark matter using gravitational waves, covering a wide range of candidates and signals. Finally, I will present some new results on the detectability of dark matter overdensities around black holes in binary systems, and argue that future interferometers may enable precision studies of the dark matter distribution and particle properties.   more...

In this talk, I will generally introduce the area of emerging infectious diseases and specifically discuss mechanism and traits determining animal, insects and human interactions and state-of-the-art data driven approaches and findings from empirical studies.   more...

The extraordinary advances in quantum control of matter and light have been transformative for atomic and molecular precision measurements enabling probes of the most basic laws of Nature to gain a fundamental understanding of the physical Universe.   more...

Ever since Hawking's discovery that quantum black holes radiate, a microscopic understanding of this phenomenon has been a litmus test for a consistent theory of quantum gravity. An idea that has transformed the field, and occupied center stage during the past two decades, is to consider the black hole horizon as a holographic screen on which the black hole interior is recorded.   more...

On this 50th anniversary year of QCD, confinement remains the metaphorical elephant in the standard model, tamed, yet elusive in essence. Fresh insight can be gained from the many-body dynamics of infrared wee partons revealed at high energies. Though apparently extremely complex, key features of this “buzz” of wee partons are captured by emergent semi-classical lumpy structures of dense gluons described by the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) effective field theory. The CGC provides a common framework to explore multi-particle final states at collider energies and in particular provides a sophisticated understanding of the process of thermalization in heavy-ion collisions.   more...

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST, or Webb), a joint NASA, ESA and CSA mission, was launched on Christmas 2021 and is the largest, most powerful and complex space telescope. It is an orbiting infrared observatory that complements and extends the discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope, with longer wavelength coverage and greatly improved sensitivity. The longer wavelengths enable JWST to look much closer to the beginning of time and to hunt for the unobserved formation of the first galaxies.   more...

We experience a golden era in testing and exploring relativistic gravity. There is an unparalleled access to experimental data that allow us to pursue the question, as to whether Einstein’s theory of gravity is our last word in our understanding of gravity. Besides results from gravitational wave detectors, satellite or lab experiments, radio astronomy plays an important complementary role - whether it is the cosmic microwave background, black hole imaging or, obviously, binary pulsars.   more...

Es war die größte Artkisexpedition jemals. Im Oktober 2019 ließ sich der Forschungseisbrecher Polarstern fest in das arktische Meereis einfrieren, um nur mit der Kraft der natürlichen Eisdrift ein ganzes Jahr durch die zentrale Arktis zu driften. Unterstützt von sechs weiteren Schiffen sowie Flugzeugen und Hubschraubern ist dabei erstmals die direkte Umgebung des Nordpols im Winter mit einem modernen Forschungseisbrecher erreicht worden.   more...

Despite many decades of intense study, our knowledge about the internal structure of the proton remains incomplete in many respects. At a scale of 0.1 femtometers or less, the proton is a strongly bound, highly relativistic dynamical system, and producing 'images' of such a system is a conceptual and experimental challenge. A programme of three-dimensional proton imaging has been devised since the turn of the century, and experimental prospects to realise it, have received a strong boost with the planning of an Electron-Ion Collider in the United States.   more...

When particles are part of a many-body system, they can change their properties due to their interaction with the surrounding medium. The particles become dressed by excitations of the medium and new collective states of matter are formed. In this state of matter, the particles turn into quasiparticles, sometimes called polarons, that can share much similarity with the original particles.   more...

Digitale Computer, die Informationen in Form von Bits darstellen, haben sich über viele Jahre hinweg in beispielloser Weise weiterentwickelt und sind in unserem Leben allgegenwärtig geworden. Heute stoßen diese klassischen, auf Miniaturisierung basierenden Technologien an ihre Grenzen, und es werden neue Rechenparadigmen gesucht, um den Stromverbrauch zu senken und die Rechenleistung zu erhöhen. Zwei neue Ansätze haben in den letzten Jahren enorme Fortschritte gemacht.   more...

For many decades, the running joke in fusion research has been that `fusion’ is twenty years away and always will be. Yet, this year we find ourselves in a position where we can talk about the milestones of burning plasmas, fusion ignition, and target energy gain greater than unity in the past tense – a situation that is remarkable!   more...

The computational resources required to describe the full state of a quantum many-body system scale exponentially with the number of constituents. This severely limits our ability to explore and understand the fascinating phenomena of quantum systems using classical algorithms. Quantum simulation offers a potential route to overcome these limitations. The idea is to build a well-controlled quantum system in the lab, which represents the problem of interest and whose properties can be studied by performing controlled measurements.   more...

Laser powered, plasma based accelerators where electrons surf on waves and can reach multi- GeV energy levels in a few 10’s of cm that, if one relies on conventional methods, would require machines multiple football fields long. Although many challenges remain, this new technology is at the brink of offering a profoundly different way in which we may build particle accelerators.   more...