From quantum computing to gut health: Researchers from five Clusters of Excellence at the University of Bonn explain fascinating topics and surprising connections in an engaging way as part of the new event series “Science at the Theater.” Tickets for this collaboration with Theater Bonn are now available for advance purchase.

Dr. Riccardo Pennetta from the Institute of Applied Physics at the University of Bonn has received an ERC Starting Grant for his research project “Atom-by-atom assembly of QUantum MattEr in waveguide and cavity QED” (AQUME). For his project, he will receive around 1.5 million euros over five years from the ERC.

RESEARCH TICKER UNIVERSITY OF BONN: A team of researchers from the University of Bonn, Heidelberg University and the National Autonomous University of Mexico has studied the critical behavior of light particles (photons) close to a phase transition. 

Many massive stars were once part of binary systems, but their exciting past is often lost – at least it was so far. A new study at the University of Bonn and at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics has now found a new method to identify stars that once gained mass from a companion – stars that now appear as single objects but carry the chemical scars of their binary youth. Using a unique “chemical fingerprint” – independent of specific evolutionary models – they were able to reconstruct the binary histories of massive stars. The method has already reclassified the well-studied star γ Columbae as a former mass gainer – challenging long-held assumptions about its origin– and offered new insight into Supernova SN 1987A’s progenitor. The findings have now been published in “Nature Astronomy.”

After two intensive weeks at DESY in Hamburg, the participating research groups draw a positive conclusion: During a joint test beam campaign, scientists from the Universities of Bonn, Dortmund and Heidelberg successfully tested new silicon pixel sensors for the Mighty Tracker, the future tracking detector system of the LHCb experiment, under realistic conditions. The sensors are a key component of the planned LHCb Upgrade II, which will prepare the experiment for Run 5 in the era of the HiLumi LHC.

The search for an as-yet undiscovered elementary particle has been given fresh momentum as the German Research Foundation (DFG) has now greenlit the construction of a special €6 million magnet system in the Color meets Flavor Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bonn, University of Siegen and TU Dortmund University. Dubbed “BabyIAXO,” it is being built to hunt for the axion, a hitherto undetected elementary particle that could unlock one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in particle physics.

The German eROSITA consortium (eROSITA-DE), which also includes the University of Bonn and which is being led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE), has released its second major public dataset, the “eROSITA Data Release 2” (DR2). Built from the first three all-sky surveys done by the eROSITA telescope aboard the Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) mission, DR2 provides the most sensitive and comprehensive catalogue of the X-ray sky currently available to the public. Spearheaded by the University of Bonn, the analysis of a massive galaxy cluster has shown that the theoretical models for how the Universe formed largely match the observations made, albeit with some interesting discrepancies in the finer details.