BMBF provides nine million euros for research at the LHC
(July 8, 2015) Particle
physicists at Heidelberg University have
been awarded funding for their research at the world’s largest and most
powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva. Over
the next three years, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)
will provide more than nine million euros for work on the ATLAS, ALICE, and
LHCb experiments at the LHC. Related theory projects were also approved.
After a two-year break, the Large Hadron Collider at the
CERN European Nuclear Research Centre has resumed operations and has been
delivering new data since the beginning of June. “The past two years were
marked by very difficult and hard upgrade work,” says Prof. Dr. Hans-Christian
Schultz-Coulon of the Heidelberg Kirchhoff Institute for Physics. Now the LHC
has been “relaunched” with increased energy, an improved accelerator and
improved experiments. At a record energy of 13 teraelectronvolts (TeV), protons
are once again colliding within the particle detectors. With the new data the
CERN physicists hope to gain further surprising insights into the nature of the
recently discovered Higgs particle and phenomena beyond. “With the funding from
the BMBF, Heidelberg University can continue to participate in this research
journey and carry on with its extremely successful work,“ says Prof. Dr. Ulrich
Uwer of the Institute for Physics at Ruperto Carola. With their experimental
and theoretical work, Heidelberg physicists are making important contributions
to both data analysis and data interpretation as well as the operation and
upgrade of the LHC experiments.
Over 10,000 researchers from more than 80 nations are
participating in the CERN experiments, including numerous students and doctoral
candidates. Their work aims at answering fundamental questions on the building
blocks of matter and their role concerning the genesis of our universe.
Scientists working on the ATLAS experiment, for example, are exploring the
origin of the elementary particle masses and attempting to unravel the nature of
dark matter. The ALICE collaboration is analysing the properties of the
so-called quark-gluon plasma a new state of matter that is believed to have
made up the universe shortly after the Big Bang. LHCb research focuses on
understanding the differences between matter and antimatter, which is the basis
for the existence of our world.