Welcome to the new PI Felix Riehn

We are happy to announce that Dr. Felix Riehn (TU Dortmund, AG Albrecht ) has joined the CRC 1491 as a new PI! 

Felix studies interactions of particles at the highest energies. He mostly focuses on building theoretical models and studying extensive air showers at the Pierre Auger Observatory.
Extensive air showers are formed when ultra-high energy cosmic rays that originate somewhere outside the solar system, interact with the nuclei in the Earth's atmosphere. As it turns out, none of the models we have for particle interactions are able to describe accurately what we observe in extensive air showers. This is part of the reason why we do not know exactly where the cosmic rays were originally accelerated.
In his research within the CRC, he wants to combine cosmic ray data on particle interactions from the Auger observatory with the observations of accelerator experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider to improve our understanding of particle interactions.

Interview with Julia Tjus in "AufRuhr"

The CRC 1491 speaker Julia Tjus was recently interviewed for the magazine “Aufruhr” by the Mercator Foundation.
She had the opportunity to talk about her research, with a particular focus on cosmic rays. Furthermore, she had the chance to share insights about her scientific career and provided helpful tips for young scientists.

The full interview (in German) can be found here.

Public lecture „Neutrinos: Unsichtbare Boten aus dem Kosmos “

We are pleased to invite you to the public lecture “Neutrinos: Unsichtbare Boten aus dem Kosmos " (in German).

Jonas Hellrung takes you on a journey to an extraordinary observatory at the South Pole, designed to detect neutrinos — ghostly particles that interact with matter only on the rarest of occasions and are therefore extremely difficult to capture. You will learn how scientists, including some from the Ruhr region, succeeded in creating the very first ‘photo’ of the Milky Way in neutrinos, and what this remarkable image reveals to us.


When 11.12.24 at 20:00
Where Planetarium Bochum

For registration and further information, please have a look at the Planetarium’s homepage.

Picture: 
 The distribution of neutrinos (shown in blue) in the Milky Way

Student Project Week October 2024

The SFB1491 was a partner once again for the Student Project Week at the Faculty of Physics and Astronomy of RUB in October 2024! 

By that, we are contributing to the effort of inspiring and engaging young people with the fascinating world of physics through hands-on experiences.
The kids experienced an exciting week investigating a broad range of physical effects, from gold coating with plasmas and uncovering the true colors of stars, to learning how ultrasound and X-rays help us see inside the human body.

More information on the program can be found here.

Welcome to our new PI Elisa Pueschel

We are delighted that Dr. Elisa Pueschel (AIRUB) has joined our CRC as a new PI! 

Elisa's research focuses on very-high-energy gamma-ray astronomy, including gamma-ray cosmology, blazar science, and the search for astrophysical dark matter. She is particularly interested in heavy dark matter above 100 TeV. She will use current and future generation gamma-ray instruments - including the Dark100 array, which her group focuses on - to probe this interesting dark matter phase space.

Long Night of Astronomy - Impressions

About 300 astronomy enthusiasts came to the RUB on Saturday evening (19.10.24) to explore with us and our amateur astronomer colleagues from Ad Astra the wonders of the night sky:

• watch comet Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS), 
• investigate Saturn and the moon with optical telescopes,
• and make first observations with the radio telescope of the new Campus Observatory.

Physical Review Letter on turbulence

Our scientist Rainer Grauer was involved in the development of a new approach to describe turbulence mathematically, together with his student Sumeja Bureković and long-term collaborator Tobias Schäfer (City University of New York).

In particular, irregular fluctuations, so-called intermittency, which cannot be described with a normal Gaussian distribution, are addressed.
They developed an approach using instantons - represent the probabilities of turbulence as a spatio-temporal path integral. This method allows for the first time to describe and calculate isolated and localized fluctuations, which is a major step in solving one of the big open questions in classical physics.

The full publication can be found here:

S. Bureković, T. Schäfer, R. Grauer „Instantons, Fluctuations, and Singularities in the Supercritical Stochastic Nonlinear Schrödinger Equation“

See also the news article on our faculty’s webpage here

Image: Instantones with smaller and larger localized fluctuation.