DESY celebrated 10th Anniversary of ERC
16 March, 2017
The talks of ERC grantees reflected the vast range of exciting research performed at the International Science Campus Hamburg and at DESY in particular. Jochen Küpper gave an overview on activities in the research field Photon Science, representing the projects of Melanie Schnell, Francesca Calegari, Henning Moritz, Dwayne Miller, and himself. He illustrated how scientists develop high-tech strategies to investigate the nanocosmos with possible applications ranging from novel materials and sensors to medical sciences. The projects include studies of ultrafast molecular dynamics, for example charge flows in the building blocks of DNA, control schemes of molecules, and the generation of ultracold quantum gases, which serve as model systems for solid state samples. Kai Schmidt-Hoberg presented projects in the area of particle and astro-particle physics (Kai Schmidt-Hoberg, Kerstin Tackmann, Alexander Westphal, Walter Winter). These aim at unravelling the mysteries of the universe’s exponential expansion, dark matter, the Higgs boson and neutrinos, all of which point towards physics beyond the standard model. For example, he illuminated the different approaches that can be used to study dark matter and illustrated how scientists work on theories including more than three dimensions. The largest ERC grant with DESY involvement was presented in the third talk by Franz Kärtner. In this collaboration well-established scientists (Petra Fromme, Ralf Assmann, Henry Chapman, Franz Kärtner) bring together their expertise to realize a miniature accelerator that generates X-ray radiation suitable for the investigation of ultrafast processes in biological systems. In comparison to the currently built European XFEL, he explained the various steps that are necessary to shrink the different aspects of the accelerator. After the talks representatives of the grantees’ research groups presented their science during a poster session.