© Bielefeld University / Christoph Pelargus
Bielefeld University joins Particle World Network
The nationwide Particle World network brings together research institutes, pupils and learning centres to attract young people to mathematics, computer science, natural sciences and technology - the STEM subjects. Together, young people and teachers are to be taught about particle physics in an exciting and understandable way. Bielefeld University is now part of the nationwide project. Its first contribution is a public presentation followed by a workshop on Saturday, 11 November. Professor Dr Sören Schlichting from Bielefeld University will then present the work of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) particle accelerator at the CERN research centre in Geneva.
The Particle World network now brings together over 30 locations at German research institutes and at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN). The network is managed by the Technical University of Dresden and is under the patronage of the German Physical Society (DPG). It is currently part of the KONTAKT2 project (Communication, Recruitment of Young Scientists and Participation of the General Public in Knowledge in the Field of the Smallest Particles), funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
The Bielefeld researchers have been involved in basic research into particle physics for many years. To this end, they are developing theoretical calculations of the properties of exotic forms of nuclear matter, such as those that existed in the early universe shortly after the Big Bang. They are also working on the theoretical description of relativistic heavy ion collisions, which recreate the conditions shortly after the Big Bang in large-scale international research experiments at particle accelerators such as the LHC at the CERN research centre. This research is funded by the German Research Foundation as part of the Collaborative Research Centres/Transregio "Strongly Interacting Matter under Extreme Conditions" (SFB/TRR 211) and by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia as part of the NRW-FAIR Network of Excellence.
The Faculty of Physics attaches great importance to communicating basic scientific research to outsiders. The Faculty has therefore greatly expanded its external communication in recent years. In 2003, the "teutolab Physik" was set up and more than 35,000 school pupils took part in the experimental and hands-on laboratory. Last year, the Faculty of Physics welcomed more than 500 interested people to "Experience Physics!" to mark its 50th anniversary. In the "CosmoFit" project, the physicists offer an introduction to space research, promoted as part of the Science Year 2023 "Our Universe". In addition to children and young people, adults are also invited to explore the topic of space in various workshops and an escape game. "From now on, our diverse outreach activities will be usefully complemented by the new activities in the Particle World network. We hope that this will get more people interested in physics and increase the general acceptance of basic research among the population," says Professor Dr Sören Schlichting, who coordinates public relations work in the field of particle physics at Bielefeld University.
The first joint event of Bielefeld University and the Particle World Network will take place on 11 November as part of the Germany-wide Particle World Week. In a public presentation, Sören Schlichting will first provide an insight into the elementary building blocks of matter and their experimental investigation in heavy ion collisions at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. This will be followed by an interactive workshop where participants will have the opportunity to visualise the traces of elementary particles in a cloud chamber and gain their own experience of working with data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator at CERN.
Further information here.
07.12.23 MSR
Top ERC funding in the millions for four researchers
For the first time, Bielefeld University has simultaneously acquired four Consolidator Grants from the European Research Council (ERC). The prestigious funding goes to the health scientists Professor Dr Anna Oksuzyan and Professor MD Kayvan Bozorgmehr, the physicist Professor Dr Gergely Endrödi and the social anthropologist Dr Megha Amrith. The grants will be sponsored with a total of more than 8 million euros, of which 7.3 million euros will go to Bielefeld University. The four research projects are scheduled to start in the course of 2024. The ERC Consolidator Grant is highly coveted - this time, only 14.5 per cent of applications were approved. In Germany, Bielefeld University is second only to Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in the number of Consolidator Grants awarded in this round.
"The fact that four researchers associated with the university have been awarded Consolidator Grants in the same funding round is a huge success. I would like to congratulate all four researchers," says Professor Dr Angelika Epple, Rector of Bielefeld University. "They have all attracted attention through their outstanding publication achievements and international research collaborations. With the research projects now being funded, they are taking the next step in their careers and bringing new, forward-looking impetus to their fields of research."
Which phase transitions the hot cosmic plasma has undergone since the Big Bang
Professor Dr Gergely Endrödi from the Faculty of Physics is sponsored by the ERC with the CoStaMM project (funding amount: around 1.9 million euros). The project focuses on the phase transitions that took place in the first second of the universe and the gravitational waves generated as a result. After the Big Bang almost fourteen billion years ago, the universe was in a hot, dense state. Since then, it has been cooling and expanding. "How this expansion takes place is determined by the building blocks of matter, elementary particles such as quarks and gluons," explains Gergely Endrödi. His project is investigating which phase transitions the hot cosmic plasma undergoes during this process. "In certain cases, something similar happens to the boiling of water, where bubbles form. The collision of the corresponding bubbles of cosmic matter could have generated gravitational waves - an echo of the phase transition that we can still detect today." One focus of the project ending date is to investigate the thermodynamics of quarks and gluons for the first time, taking the electromagnetic interaction into account. Some of the world's most powerful mainframe computers are being used to solve the underlying equations.
Gergely Endrödi was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at Bielefeld University in 2020. He studied physics at Eötvös University Budapest Hungary, where he also completed his doctorate. From 2010 to 2015, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Regensburg and from 2016 to 2020 as Emmy Noether Junior Research Group Leader at Goethe University Frankfurt.
Further information here.
07.12.23 MSR
Bielefeld researchers using European supercomputers
Physicists Dr. Olaf Kaczmarek and Dr. Christian Schmidt-Sonntag of Bielefeld University have secured 82 million core hours on the most powerful supercomputers in Europe. This will not only speed up the research process in their respective projects on heavy quarks in a plasma of quarks and gluons (Dr. Kaczmarek) and the phase diagram of quarks and gluons (Dr. Schmidt-Sonntag), but also highlight the importance of their work. The researchers’ findings will later be transferred to the Bielefeld supercomputer at the Bielefeld GPU Cluster and be made publicly accessible.
Supercomputers are often indispensable in modern scientific research: they are an essential tool for processing the ever-increasing volumes of data needed for statistics, forecasts, and other calculations across a wide range of disciplines.
The collaborative ‘European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking’ (https://eurohpc-ju.europa.eu) project has invested a great deal of funding into the construction of new European flagship supercomputers over the past years. Since June 2023, the supercomputers ‘LUMI’ in Finland and ‘Leonardo’ in Italy came in third and fourth place in the global ranking of the 500 most powerful supercomputers around the globe. First place is currently held by the ‘Frontier’ supercomputer in the United States, and second by ‘Fugaku’ in Japan.
As responsible project leads for an international team of scientists, Bielefeld researchers Dr. Olaf Kaczmarek and Dr. Christian Schimdt-Sonntag were successful in the first round of a call for applications for computing time on these systems. The won out over myriad competitors from around the world in a rigorous application review process and have now been allocated 60 million core hours on LUMI-G and 22 million core hours on Leonardo – corresponding to the annual computing power of 20,000 and 6,000 laptops, respectively. This computing time will facilitate their research, which investigates the properties of matter under extreme conditions.
This research into extreme conditions of matter deals with temperatures and particle densities that are, for instance, believed to have been present in our universe shortly after the Big Bang, but also with temperatures and particle densities similar to those produced and measured in heavy ion experiments in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the ‘CERN’ European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland, and in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Accelerator (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Long Island, New York. These research projects are part of the Collaborative Research Centre TransRegio 211, ‘Strong-Interaction Matter under Extreme Conditions’ (https://crc-tr211.org/), which brings together researchers from the Goethe University Frankfurt, Bielefeld University, and the Technical University of Darmstadt.
As members of the North Rhine-Westphalian Competence Network for High-Performance Computing (HPC.NRW), a consortium that was recently extended through the end of 2024, Olaf Kaczmarek and Christian Schmidt-Sonntag provide support to Bielefeld researchers and their projects at the Bielefeld GPU Cluster, and also offer advice on how to apply for computing time at other supercomputers in the region, namely in Germany and Europe.
For more information, please see:
SIMULATEeQCD
BNL News zum Projekt über schwere Quarks
PUNCH4NFDI
HPC.NRW
COSMOfit - Ready for space?
In search of Alpha Centauri and micrometeorites
"COSMOfit" offers an introduction to space exploration with workshops and an Escape Game.
3 - 2 - 1 - Liftoff! The "COSMOfit" project has started in Bielefeld. Together with researchers from Bielefeld University and Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences (HSBI), Wissenswerkstadt Bielefeld offers an introduction to space research. In addition to children and young people, adults are also addressed.
The "COSMOmission" is an immersive "Escape Game" for which a room in the Volksbank Bielefeld-Gütersloh at the Kesselbrink was transformed into a spaceship cockpit. On the way to the star system Alpha Centauri, the players have to solve various puzzles in order to reach the destination - the fictitious Earth-like planet Gaia. In this way, scientific knowledge from space research is conveyed in an unusual and playful way. Researchers from the Faculties of Physics and Biology at Bielefeld University and researchers and students from the "Digital Media and Experiment" course at Bielefeld University were involved in the development.
In the "COSMOlabs", children and young people as well as adults slip into the role of space explorers and take a closer look at the universe. There are five different workshop topics, developed with researchers from the Faculties of Physics and Biology at the university. Why is it dark at night when there are such an unimaginable number of stars? And can micrometeorites actually be found in the dust from the roof of a university building? Participation in the "COSMOlabs" and the "COSMOmission" is free of charge. Dates are available until mid-December.
COSMOfit takes place as part of the Year of Science 2023 under the theme "Our Universe", initiated by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and Wissenschaft im Dialog (WiD). All those involved in Bielefeld aim to bring topics from space research to a broad public and to convey the fun of curiosity and discovery. The team of the Wissenswerkstadt, whose domicile in the city centre on WilhelmstraÃe will open in summer 2024, will also give a foretaste of the future interdisciplinary work of the new Bielefeld institution with "COSMOfit".
Registration at: www.cosmofit.de
More about the Wissenswerkstadt: www.wissenswerkstadt.de
Dates and information
COSMOmission - Escape Game
every Friday 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. and Saturday 12 p.m. and 2 p.m. (90 minutes)
Dates until mid-December
Participation is free (from 14 years, children from 8 years accompanied)
Location: Volksbank Bielefeld-Gütersloh am Kesselbrink.
Registration necessary at: www.cosmofit.de
COSMOlabs - Workshops
Workshops from 10 years (children from 8 years accompanied)
"Why is it dark at night?" & "Aristarchus: A Journey through the Solar System".
Workshops from 14 years/adults onwards
"Micrometeorites: In search of space dust", "Enigmatic Universe: How do we find black holes?" & "Enigmatic Universe: What colours do galaxies have?"
The COSMOlabs will take place in the Green Cube (Kesselbrink) and at Bielefeld University.
Participation is free of charge, registration is necessary at: www.cosmofit.de
MSR 1.9.23
Information field theory for experiments on large-scale research equipment
Radiobiology, radioastronomy and cosmic radiation
The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is funding the joint project "Information Field Theory for Experiments on Large-scale Research Facilities" as part of its programme Exploring the Universe and Matter (ErUM). The working group of Prof. Dominik Schwarz at Bielefeld University is involved in this project. The project is coordinated by the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (Garching). Prof. Schwarz's group, together with colleagues from the University of Hamburg and the Technical University of Munich, will apply methods of information field theory to problems in radio astronomical imaging. Other project partners are RWTH Aachen, the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, the Technical University of Munich, and the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Munich. Information field theory is a toolbox that allows to obtain a maximum amount of information about physical fields with the support of incomplete measurements and under consideration of measurement errors. In this ErUM-Data project, information field theory methods are further developed for radiation biology, radio astronomy and cosmic particle radiation.
For more details see: https://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/1077039/news20230606
Subkelvin cooling for space travel
Magnetic materials can be used as coolants in ordinary refrigerators or to reach ultracold temperatures to power quantum computers or space telescopes, for example.
Researchers from Herakleion, Edinburgh, Saragosa and Bielefeld have recently succeeded in synthesizing a new material based on gadolinium-containing molecules that has excellent cooling rates at temperatures between 1.5 K and 0.3 K. This is exactly the temperature range that is needed for applications in space telescopes.
The contribution of the Bielefeld-based working group Schnack consists in modeling the material with the support of advanced quantum mechanical methods.
Source: J. Am. Chem. Soc. 145 (2023) 7743-7747
https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.3c01610
MSR 20.4.23
When the light is neither "on" nor "off" in the nanoworld
MSR, 21.2.23
Exchange Invitation
The Faculty of Physics invites all interested physics teachers to an open exchange on the topic "Physics in school" on March 21, 2023 (2:15 - 3:45 pm). Topics include (professional development) offers for teachers and students as well as the new "Kernlehrplan".
Further information / registration.
LSR, 7.2.23
Nanomembranes with pore molecules for more efficient filtering
International Research Cooperation with Bielefelder Physicists Publishes Study in Nature (in German)
CP, 1.10.22
New Video from the Department of Physics
Video by Chris Harting (in German)
MSR, 1.10.22
Bachelor's in Physics 2022/23
New Bachelor's course starts in the winter semester of 2022/23. Detailed information can be found here.
MSR, 1.10.22
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