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.
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.
New member of the Physikalisches Institut and Bethe Center doing research in mathematical physics
New high-tech measurement methods are required to detect new phenomena sought after in particle physics. The University of Bonn Research and Technology Center for Detector Physics (FTD), thanks to its research groups, is a leading developer of such detector technology, employed at research institutions around the world. A ceremony was held for operational start-up of the scientific equipment, attended by numerous high-profile guests.
Many substances change their properties when they are cooled below a certain critical temperature. Such a phase transition occurs, for example, when water freezes. However, in certain metals there are phase transitions that do not exist in the macrocosm. They arise because of the special laws of quantum mechanics that apply in the realm of nature’s smallest building blocks. It is thought that the concept of electrons as carriers of quantized electric charge no longer applies near these exotic phase transitions. Researchers at the University of Bonn and ETH Zurich have now found a way to prove this directly. Their findings allow new insights into the exotic world of quantum physics. The publication has now been released in the journal Nature Physics.
The Belle II cooperation project at the Japanese research center KEK is helping researchers from all over the world to hunt for new phenomena in particle physics. The international experiment has now reached a major milestone after a team successfully installed a new pixel detector in its final location in Japan. The size of a soda can, the detector was developed in order to make out the signals coming from certain types of particle decays, that can shed light on the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry that has been observed in the universe. The installation ran without a hitch and is a key milestone in the evolution of the experiment and German-Japanese research collaboration.