"Women* in Physics Bonn" is a community of women* that meet monthly to share their experiences and foster connections among women* in physics. Their goal is to network in a relaxed and friendly environment over coffee and cake, and to engage in work-related discussions with the other participants - from Master's students up to postdocs.

The new research group of Matthias Schott works on questions of experimental particle physics, in particular on precision measurements of electroweak gauge bosons, studies of non-perturbative effects of QCD, and the search for axion-like particles.

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.