The “afterglow” of the universe is an important piece of evidence for the Big Bang. This background radiation also provides important answers to the question of how the first galaxies were able to form. Researchers at the Universities of Bonn, Prague and Nanjing calculate that the strength of this radiation has probably been overestimated up to now. If the results prove to be accurate, it would call into question the theoretical foundation of the standard model of cosmology. The results have now been published in the journal “Nuclear Physics B.”

Technology is being pushed to its very limits. The upgrades to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN slated for the next few years will increase data transfer rates beyond what the current neutrino detector for the FASER experiment can cope with, requiring it to be replaced by a new kind of more powerful detector. This is a task that physicist Professor Matthias Schott from the University of Bonn will be tackling with the help of €1 million in Reinhart Koselleck funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Clausius Assistant Professor Dr. Lena Funcke of the University of Bonn is one of ten researchers to receive a Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize awarded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Endowed with a purse of 200,000 euros, the DFG characterizes the Prize as Germany’s most prestigious award for researchers in early stages of their careers. 

An international research team has analyzed data from 41 million galaxies in order to estimate the distribution of matter in the universe. The data confirm a long-established model – much to the team’s surprise.

Germany’s members of the Euclid Consortium have played a significant role in producing the mission’s first large set of survey data which the European Space Agency has just released. Researchers from the Argelander Institute for Astronomy (AIfA) of the University of Bonn have been involved in these activities. The data includes stunning images of deep fields with a breathtaking number of 26 million galaxies, many showing their detailed structures. More than 380,000 galaxies have been characterized according to their shapes and distances. Nevertheless, this impressive milestone is only a foretaste of what we can expect in the coming years. 

A delegation from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in the Ghanaian city of Kumasi has taken part in a German Physical Society symposium, also extending a memorandum of understanding with the University of Bonn during the visit.

From Monday, January 27 to Wednesday, January 29, 2025, 31 employees from the various workshops, the FTD and the PI administration traveled to CERN together. The aim of the excursion was to give non-scientific staff an insight into the experiments at CERN in which the Physikalisches Institut is involved.

The ATLAS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) reported the first observation of top quarks in collisions between lead ions in a talk held at CERN last week. Members of the research group of Prof. Dr. Matthias Schott from the Physikalisches Institut at the University of Bonn have been contributing to this new study. The observation of top-quark pairs represents a significant step forward in heavy-ion collision physics, paving the way for new measurements of the quark–gluon plasma that is created in these collisions and delivering fresh insights into the nature of the strong force that binds protons, neutrons and other composite particles together.