In the week from November 6 to 12, 2023, research institutions and universities across Germany opened their doors to give interested visitors of all ages an insight into the fascinating world of the physics of the smallest particles. The University of Bonn also took part in this Germany-wide event as part of the Netzwerk Teilchenwelt and offered a varied program consisting of a 3-day particle physics camp for pupils in the Detector Physics Research and Technology Center and a film evening followed by a panel discussion for the general public in the Wolfgang Paul Lecture Hall.

On Friday, November 17, 2023, we had the enormous pleasure of hosting Grant Sanderson, author of the mathematics youtube channel 3blue1brown in the Bonn Physics Colloquium following a suggestion by the student council.

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.

New member of the Physikalisches Institut and Bethe Center doing research in mathematical physics

The Physikalisches Institut is the host of this year's meeting of the German institutes in the ATLAS-Collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider. From 19th to 22nd of September 2023, the focus of the physicists are the operations and data taking of the ATLAS experiment, the analysis of the data, and the coming upgrades of the detector for future data taking periods.

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.

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.

A one-day meeting on particle phenomenology was organized by Herbi Dreiner's group in Bonn together with groups from Aachen, Heidelberg, Nijmegen and U. Amsterdam.