Ina Brandes, Minister for Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, has visited the electron accelerator "ELSA" on the Poppelsdorf campus of the University of Bonn. The large-scale device has been reliably delivering the latest findings for research into the building blocks of matter for over three decades. It is part of a 70-year tradition of Nobel Prize-winning accelerator research at the University of Bonn.

Since more than a decade it has been possible for physicists to accurately measure the location of individual atoms to a precision of smaller than one thousandth of a millimeter using a special type of microscope. However, this method has so far only provided the x and y coordinates. Information on the vertical position of the atom – i.e., the distance between the atom and the microscope objective – is lacking. A new method has now been developed that can determine all three spatial coordinates of an atom with one single image. This method – developed by the University of Bonn and University of Bristol – is based on an ingenious physical principle. The study was recently published in the specialist journal Physical Review A.

The University of Bonn has some excellent news to report, with two new cluster initiatives given the green light to apply for funding as part of the Excellence Initiative of the German government and federal states. The German Research Foundation and the German Council of Science and Humanities made the announcement earlier today. The two new cluster initiatives are thus among the 41 chosen from the 143 draft proposals in all from across the country that were evaluated. In 2019, the University of Bonn secured an already impressive six clusters, more than any other university in Germany. All of these clusters are applying to maintain their status, putting the University in with a chance of hosting eight Clusters of Excellence.

Today, the German eROSITA consortium released the data for its share of the first all-sky survey by the soft X-ray imaging telescope flying aboard the Spectrum-RG (SRG) satellite. With about 900,000 distinct sources, the first eROSITA All-Sky Survey (eRASS1) catalogue has yielded the largest X-ray catalogue ever published. Along with the data, the consortium released today more than 40 scientific papers describing new results ranging from studies of the habitability of planets to the discovery of the largest cosmic structures. Based on just the first six months of observations, eROSITA has already detected more sources than had previously been known in the 60-year history of X-ray astronomy. Now available to the worldwide science community, the data will revolutionize our knowledge of the high-energy Universe.

Prof. Dr. Simon Stellmer's Quantum Metrology research group celebrates the inauguration of the ring laser experiments on Thursday, February 1 from 13:00.

Physics professor Scrooginger doesn't think much of other people: Colleagues are ungrateful, doctoral students are lazy and students are stupid. So what should Scrooginger think of all the ghosts who appear with physics experiments just before Christmas? The new show "Eine physikalische Weihnachtsgeschichte" ("A physical Christmas story") will be performed on December 21 at 5:30 pm in the Wolfgang-Paul lecture hall in German. Registration is open.

 The new Collaborative Research Center (CRC) "NuMeriQS: Numerical Methods for Dynamics and Structure Formation in Quantum Systems" aims to advance the understanding of dynamics and structure formation in quantum systems. The German Research Foundation (DFG) is setting up the CRC at the University of Bonn to strengthen cutting-edge research. Forschungszentrum Jülich and the Max Planck Institute für Kohlenforschung are also involved. The start is planned for April 2024. Over the next three years and nine months, around eight million euros will flow into the research network. The Transdisciplinary Research Area "Matter" at the University of Bonn supported the creation of the CRC.

On Friday, November 17, 2023, we had the enormous pleasure of hosting Grant Sanderson, author of the mathematics youtube channel 3blue1brown in the Bonn Physics Colloquium following a suggestion by the student council.