The DFG will be funding a new Research Unit—Modern Fundamentals of Scattering Amplitudes—at the University of Bonn over the next four years. In particle physics, the scattering amplitude is the variable within a scattering process that links the theory with the actual experiment. The new Research Unit intends to study various aspects of these amplitudes and thus discover new fundamental principles of mathematics and physics and develop new methods for calculating them.
This will allow more precise calculations to be made of scattering processes in particle accelerators as well as gravitational waves, which are produced when black holes or neutron stars merge. “Modern experiments in particle and gravitational-wave physics are calling for increasingly accurate theoretical predictions, which only state-of-the-art mathematical models can provide. It’s precisely these that we’ll be using and developing further in the new Research Unit,” says its speaker Professor Claude Duhr from the Physikalisches Institut, who is also a member of the Matter Transdisciplinary Research Area at the University of Bonn.