July 12, 2024

Between May and August 2024, KSETA hosted four students from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay and one student from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology for an internship at KIT.

The internships of Sujeet Mehta and Ziyu Xie took place at the Institute of Electronics and Data Processing (IPE) in Dr. Michele Caselle's group, supervised by Luca Scomparin, Olena Manzhura and Dr. Timo Dritschler. The interns focused on AMD-Xilinx Versal family devices, applying them to Reinforcement Learning on accelerators. Their work respectively aimed to achieve higher-performance simulations and low-latency inference.

Annirudh K P from IIT Bombay worked with Timo Muscheid also at the Institute of Electronics and Data Processing (IPE) in the HEP-QC Instrumentation group lead by Dr. Oliver Sander and Dr. Luis Ardila on the hardware design for a new system to be used for readout of the BULLKID experiment, a Dark Matter detection experiment foreseen at the Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy. During his internship, he designed a custom front-end PCB including component characterization and selection, schematics and layout.

The intern Rashmi Meena worked with the doctoral fellow Wenjie Hou on high-energy cosmic ray anisotropies and used a deep neural network framework to reduce uncertainties in the analysis of the arrival directions. Ramchandar Naik worked with another doctoral fellow, Shefali, with the scalar data from the prototype station at the IceCube Surface Array Enhancement, and investigated effects of the atmospheric conditions on the event rates and particle densities recorded by the installed scintillation detectors. The projects of Rashmi Meena and Ramchandar Naik were carried out at the Institute of Astroparticle Physics (IAP) in the group of Dr. Andreas Haungs.

Four interns were supported by a scholarship from the DAAD as part of the IAESTE exchange program.

May 14, 2024

The 14th Einstein Telecope (ET) Symposium took place in Maastricht from May 6-10. It gave the chance to unite with colleagues deeply engaged in the Einstein Telescope project and those who share a profound interest in ET. KIT was represented at the symposium by eleven scientists.

At the much-regarded poster session, Lennard Busch, KSETA Fellow at the ITTK, won one of the four equal poster prizes.

Link to the symposium

May 2, 2024

3D Ultrasound computer tomography (3D-USCT) is a unique, innovative imaging technique for early, radiation-free breast cancer detection that avoids all the disadvantages of classical mammography while promising high resolution and sensitivity. During his doctoral studies, Martin Angerer as a KSETA fellow worked on the design, fabrication, characterization and optimization of ultrasound transducer arrays for 3D ultrasound computed tomography (3D USCT). The key to his success was the unique infrastructure at KIT provided by the Helmholtz “Matter and Technology” program. The technically most challenging component of 3D-USCT system are the piezo transducers that emit and detect ultrasound waves. Martin Angerer has built a complete set of ultrasonic transducers and demonstrated in simulations that the physical limits were nearly reached with his solution. With his devices he contributed to a successful technology transfer project. He was able to combine fundamental research with his decisive contributions to the project and tight deadlines. In addition, he explored alternative technologies to overcome the limitations of composite materials with piezoelectric fibers. His excellent research has now been awarded with the Helmholtz doctoral price 2024.

The Helmholtz doctoral prize for mission-oriented research is awarded annually in competitive decision to a thesis with outstanding contribution to solving the most pressing problems facing our society. Doctoral students are to be encouraged to conduct mission-oriented research and thus to position themselves at the interface between science and application, to develop and expand entrepreneurial skills, and to help shape the transfer of science to society at an early stage.

Martin Angerer, “Transducer Arrays for 3D Ultrasound Computed Tomography”, PhD thesis, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), 2022, doi: 10.5445/IR/1000152507

Link: https://www.helmholtz.de/newsroom/artikel/helmholtz-verleiht-promotionspreis-2024/

March 15,  2024

A German-Dutch collaboration between the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VUA) and the KIT has employed an ultra-sensitive intracavity absorption technique in the near infrared to measure transition frequencies between ro-vibrational energy levels of the radioactive tritium hydride (HT).

A fully tritium-compatible cavity cell has been manufactured at the KIT main workshop and a tritium-dosing system based on a temperature-controlled getter has been build and characterized at the Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe (TLK). Finally, the assembly was integrated into the laser spectroscopy infrastructure at the LaserLAB Amsterdam. There, doctoral researchers Frank Cozijn and Meissa Diouf of the VUA were joined by KSETA fellow Valentin Hermann from TLK for setting up the equipment and for performing the measurements. Despite experimental challenges imposed by the use of tritium, high-quality spectra could be recorded successfully for the first time.

The relative total uncertainty of the observed lines was determined to be about 1e-10. This corresponds to an accuracy three orders of magnitude better than previous measurements in tritiated hydrogen molecules and which is also exceeding the precision of corresponding theoretical predictions at the moment. This opens up a formidable path for benchmarking quantum electrodynamics in bound state systems for tritiated molecules.

The corresponding paper "Precision measurement of vibrational quanta in tritium hydride" by F. M. J. Cozijn, M. L. Diouf, W. Ubachs, V. Hermann, and M. Schlösser has been published Phys. Rev. Lett. 132, 113002 (https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.113002).

The groups by Wim Ubachs (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Department of Physics and Astronomy) and Magnus Schlösser (KIT, IAP, Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe) have been fruitfully collaborating on the field tritium precision spectroscopy since 2017 with a total record of six publications.

Our postdoctoral researcher and KSETA alumnus Dr. Harun Reşid Acaroğlu from the Institute for Theoretical Particle Physics (TTP) has rediscovered an important collection of scientific oriental manuscripts which belongs to the library of the Humboldt University of Berlin (see here for more details).

Dr. Acaroğlu has obtained his PhD degree in particle physics at the TTP early this year and while currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the latter, he also pursues a second PhD degree in Islamic Theology at HU Berlin. In this programme he explores theological, historical and scientific aspects of Islamic prayer times and their calculation (see this interview for more details).

The collection comprises a total of 196 works in Arabic, Ottoman or Persian, contained either as originals, copies or reproductions. Its oldest works were authored by scientists from the 9th century and the majority of the collection consists of manuscripts on mathematics and astronomy. Most mathematical works address algebraic or geometric problems while also containing multiplication tables and tables of trigonometric functions. The works on astronomy mainly consist of treatises on astronomical instruments and their usage, such as various quadrants or the astrolabe. Some works also contain astronomical tables listing equatorial coordinates (e.g. solar declination or right ascension) as a function of either the sun’s ecliptic longitude or horizontal coordinates (e.g. solar elevation or azimuth).

Given that some manuscripts are unique while others are rare enough to only exist in a few additional copies in international libraries, the collection’s rediscovery bears significant relevance for related fields like for example the history of astronomy.

Intern Xiaoyue Ma from Nanjing University in China is a guest at KSETA from 01. Oktober to 31. Dezember 2023.

Xiaoyue Ma investigates flavor-violating processes involving new hypothetical particles in connection with so-called Seesaw extension of the Standard Model, which are suitable to explain the observed masses and mixings of neutrinos.

The project is carried out at the Institute for Theoretical Particle Physics (TTP) in the group of Prof. Ulrich Nierste and supervised by Dr. Robert Ziegler.

For his outstanding research on readout electronics for magnetic microcalorimeters with frequency division multiplexing, Nick Karcher has been awarded the Helmholtz doctoral prize for mission-oriented research. Magnetic microcalorimeters are orders of magnitude more sensitive than other detector types but require operation at temperatures of only a few millikelvin. Nick Karcher has developed a readout concept that enables scaling up the number of sensors to thousands of these extremely sensitive chips by using only a single transmission line to the cryostat. This groundbreaking work is key to future precision experiments with large sensor matrices.

The Helmholtz doctoral prize for mission-oriented research is awarded annually in a competitive decision to a thesis with an outstanding contribution to solving the most pressing problems facing our society. Doctoral students are to be encouraged to conduct mission-oriented research and thus position themselves at the interface between science and application, to develop and expand entrepreneurial skills, and to help shape the transfer of science to society at an early stage.

Nick Karcher: Ausleseelektronik für magnetische Mikrokalorimeter im Frequenzmultiplexverfahren (engl.: Readout electronics for magnetic micro calorimeters with frequency division multiplexing),
https://publikationen.bibliothek.kit.edu/1000148040.

Main components of the ECHo DAQ system developed by Nick Karcher during his PhD Thesis.

Intern Anne-Solène Bornens from ESPCI Paris (Ecole Superieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles) is a guest at KSETA from May 30 to August 21, 2023.

Anne-Solene Bornens is investigating properties of multi-loop integrals occuring in scattering amplitudes of elementary particles. In particular, she is studying the behaviour of certain classes of integrals using different methods of numerical evaluation.

The project is carried out at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (ITP) in the group of Prof. Gudrun Heinrich.

KSETA hosts interns from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay in Mumbai from May to July 2023.
Working with doctoral fellows Mark Weyrauch and Paras Koundal, the intern Amanaganti Rohan Ganesh used deep learning methods to perform cosmic-ray mass composition analysis. Sudeshna Dutta worked with another doctoral fellow, Megha Venugopal to calibrate the electronics chain for the upcoming deployments of the Surface Array Enhancement. The projects were carried out at the Institute of Astroparticle Physics (IAP) in the group of Dr. Andreas Haungs.
The internship were supported by a  financial contribution of DAAD within the IAESTE exchange programme.

In the context of the 83th Spring Meeting of the German Physical Society the 1st Datathon of the Working Group on Physics, Modern IT and Artificial Intelligence (AKPIK) was held. Together with 8 other teams, Greta Heine, Cedric Verstege, Moritz Bauer, Florian Wemmer and Jonas Eppelt faced the challenge.
A modified Fashion-MNIST training dataset and four hours time were given. The task was to select the best 10.000 datapoints in the training dataset to train a given neural network and achieve the highest accuracy on a test dataset.
The ETPs team followed multiple paths to solve this task and tried Autoencoders, CNNs, and manual sorting. In the end a simple Lasso-Regression proved to be the best solution of all 46 handed in solutions.
Congratulations also to the Team “54th Element” for winning the most creative solution price. All results can be found at https://cloud.e5.physik.tu-dortmund.de/akpik23.
Thanks to the organisers from AKPIK and the sponsor d-fine. We are already excited for the 2nd Datathon.

KSETA Doctoral Fellow Paras Koundal and postdoc Thomas Huber host
interns from IIT Mumbai from May to July 2022. The Master students
Anjali Yadav and Harsh Choudhary work on projects related to the
observation of cosmic rays with and the development of electronics for
the IceCube observatory. The projects are carried out at IAP in the
group of Andreas Haungs.

KSETA Doctoral Fellows Mostafa Jalal and Paras Koundal and postdoc
Thomas Huber host interns from IIT Mumbai in November and December
2021. The Master students Sudharsana Prasad G S, Nishtha Sahni, and
Harshul Gupta work on projects related to the observation of cosmic rays
with the IceCube observatory, the development of electronics for this
facility, and a control system for KATRIN or other large-scale
experiments. The projects are carried out at IAP and IPE in the groups
of Andreas Haungs and Andreas Kopmann, respectively. 

Particle Physicist Isabel Haide was awarded a PhD fellowship of the state of Baden-Württemberg (Landesgraduiertenförderung (LGF)) to support excellent young scientists - congratulations! 

Isabel Haide will be working at the ETP in the working group of Prof. Torben Ferber.

She will focus on real-time reconstruction of particles in the Belle II experiment using artificial intelligence, and searches for dark photons.

It is with great sadness that we have to inform you about the unexpected passing of our dear colleague and friend Prof. Dr. Willem (“Wim”) de Boer on October 13, 2020, at the age of 72.

Please read here our obituary.

Anton Huber has been nominated as candidate for the elections of the State Legislature of Baden-Württemberg in 2021 for the electoral district Karlsruhe-East. He received his Ph.D degree in July 2020 with the dissertation "Analysis of first KATRIN data and searches for keV-scale sterile neutrinos" completed at the Institute for Experimental Particle Physics (ETP). His scientific activities, which he continues as a postdoc in the KATRIN group, have been accompanied by voluntary service as mayor of Karlsruhe district Wolfartsweier and member of Karlsruhe's city council.

At the BPS meeting in May 2019, Dr. Daniela Mockler, who recently did her doctorate at KSETA, was awarded the "Prize for best speaker". Congratulations!

The young scientist contest has a long tradition at the annual BPS meeting. Both doctoral students and young postdocs with less than 5 years of professional experience after their PhD defense are eligible to take part in the competition. From among the applicants, the committee initially invited eight speakers to a pre-selection and chose three of them as finalists, who presented their papers at the BPS meeting on May 22. The three finalists will also have the opportunity to write an article on their topic for the B-Phy Magazine of the Belgian Physical Society.

For the first time, the yearly KSETA PhD workshop was organized this year in collaboration with the research training group "GRK 1694: Elementary Particle Physics at Highest Energy and Highest Precision". A total of 11 participants from 4 institutes met in Bad Herrenalb from April 15th to 17th to learn from each other about different topics in the form of group puzzles. Topics ranged from specific experiments like FASER or TRISTAN, experimental methods like tracking of particles to theoretical physics. Moreover, the controversial question whether to build a new particle accelerator like Future Circular Collider (FCC) was also discussed. The program was completed by the visit of the alumni Hannes Mildner (University of Sheffield), Pascal Nagel (Bosch) and Matthias Weinreuter (freelance software developer), who spoke about their experiences in industry and science, and a hike to the Bernstein rock.

Meghana Mahaveer Patil is a KSETA PhD student at IBPT. Within a video about the IBPT for the Spring Meeting of the American Physical Society, she reports in a short spot (starting at 4:27) about her work in accelerator technology.

See the whole video here

For her presentation at the conference "11th International Workshop on Top Quark Physics 2018", Denise Müller, PhD student at the Institute of Experimental Particle Physics (ETP), was awarded the prize for the best young scientist presentation in front of 130 participants.

The 11th edition of the conference "International Workshop on Top Quark Physics" took place in Bad Neuenahr from 16 to 21 September. This annual conference brings together experts from theory and experiment who deal with the heaviest of the six quarks, the top quark. Traditionally, the Young Scientist Forum gives young scientists the opportunity to show their work in short presentations. Denise Müller reported on the measurement of the single top quark production in the t channel with data from the CMS experiment, where she does research together with other colleagues from ETP under the supervision of Dr. Thorsten Chwalek.

While top quarks are generated in pairs with top antiquarks in strong interaction, the generation of single top quarks takes place in weak interaction, the secrets of which have not yet been revealed in detail. In Denise Müller's analysis it was possible to measure the relationship between the production probabilities of individual top quarks and individual top antiquarks with unprecedented precision and thus to make statements about the inner structure of the proton.

The KIT is involved in the CMS experiment with a ninety-member working group headed by Prof. Thomas Müller. In 2012, the long-sought Higgs particle was also discovered there.

Between May and July 2018 five  Master students from IIT Bombay in Mumbai and another Master student from Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute Of Technology in Surat visited KSETA with a KHYS Internship Grant.

Their local hosts were the KSETA Doctoral Fellows Jochen Gemmler, Thomas Huber, Aswathi Balagopal, Mridula Prathapan and Alaa Kuotb Awad.

The interns participated in projects related to the current and future experiments Belle in Tsukuba (Japan), milliQan at CERN in Geneva (Switzerland), and IceCube Gen2 and IceTop at the South Pole, as well as the development of CMOS sensor technology.

Under the motto "From PhD students for PhD students" the KSETA workshop took place again this year in Freudenstadt. From 2nd to 4th of July, a total of 19 participants from 6 different institutes came together to contribute to the interactive program comprising the data acquisition and processing, programming languages, Feynman graphs and astroparticle physics.  Moreover, during the KSETA Alumni evening fellows fruitfully discussed with two young scientists Lenka Tomankova (Ruhr University Bochum) and Bernhard Siebenborn (KIT) "how to stay in science".

The Helmholtz Association supports three international research schools, among them the International Research School on Astroparticle Physics and Enabling Technologies, applied by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) together with Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM), Buenos Aires. The spokespersons of the Research School, that is expected to start on April 1, 2018, are Dr. Ralph Engel from the German side and Dr. Alberto Etchegoyen from the Argentinian side.

More information

The KSETA Doctoral Workshop of the year 2017 took place in Freudenstadt in July.

The motto of the workshop was “From doctoral students, for doctoral students” and it aimed at providing a platform for Fellows from different institutes to interact with each other.

The workshop consisted of talks and tutorials from KSETA Fellows, with the aim to help out other Fellows. Alumni from KSETA were also invited to talk with the Fellows about job opportunities after PhD. The Fellows also participated in social activities like hiking through the forest and visiting the local bath.

Prof. Robert Klanner, University of Hamburg and DESY, was chosen to receive the Julius Wess Award 2016.

More Information

Each year nationwide only six PhD graduates receive a Helmholtz-Doktorandenpreis, one in each research area. The Helmholtz-Doktorandenpreis in the research area "Matter" went to KSETA twice in a row, after Benjamin Schmidt winning the 2015 Award.
Wolfgang Hollik had completed his PhD at the Institute for Theoretical Particle Physics in the group of Prof. Ulrich Nierste and is now a postdoc at the Helmholtz Centre DESY in Hamburg.
More information

As in the past years, the KSETA Doctoral Workshop took place in Freudenstadt in July.

As usual the motto was "From doctoral students, for doctoral students". In addition it was linked to the KSETA motto "Broader, Deeper, Better":

Broader - Get an comprehensible insight into PhD projects of KSETA colleagues and discuss links to your own project in small groups.
Deeper - Learn more about a specific topic within the scope of KSETA in plenary talks prepared by fellows.
Better - Get to know alumni now working for companies and ask them about employee's life in industry. Improve your scientific writing skills in a writing workshop.

Please find more informationen on the Indico Website.

The awards were presented by Dr. Leonie Mück, senior editor at Nature. They consist of a cash prize and an annual subscription of Nature.

Congratulations!

http://neutrino2016.iopconfs.org

The third KSETA Plenary Workshop took place from February 22 to 24, 2016 at Hotel Vierjahreszeiten in Durbach, just like in the years before.

All Fellows and Principal Investigators were invited to participate in the plenary workshop of the whole school. The aim of the workshop was to learn more about all the research fields in KSETA and to strenghten cooperation and team building.

More information here.

Five PhD students were granted the Doktorandenpreis of the Helmholtz Association for their outstanding scientific achievement, including Benjamin Schmidt, former PhD student at KSETA - congratulations!

More Information

The next KSETA Doctoral Workshop will take place from July 6 to 8, 2015 at Waldhotel Zollernblick in Freudenstadt, located in the Black Forest.

Registration is open until May 31.

On the program there are tutorials by PhDs which can be useful for other PhDs, invited talks from external speakers with topics ranging from soft-skills to scientific themes, and social activities.

Please visit our indico-website for details. 

The second KSETA Plenary Workshop took place on March 4-6, 2015 at Hotel Vierjahreszeiten in Durbach. All Fellows and Principal Investigators were cordially invited to participate in the second plenary workshop of the whole school. The aim of the workshop was to learn more about all the research fields in KSETA and to strenghten cooperation and team building.

More Information

Due to new legal regulations since January 1, 2015 a PhD agreement has to be signed acc. to §38, paragraph 5 Landeshochschulgesetz (LHG) immediately after receiving the confirmation of supervision.

In addition, the online registration of all doctoral researchers at KHYS is mandatory: http://www.khys.kit.edu/handbuch.php.

What holds the world together at its core

On November 13, 2014 KSETA-PI Prof. Margarete Mühlleitner from the Institute of Theoretical Physics (ITP) was a guest of ZDF Morgenmagazin. On the occasion of CERN's 25th birthday, she explained aspects of particle research to the general public in a short contribution.
 

KIT Young Investigator Group Contributes Significantly to the AMS Experiment on the International Space Station ISS

The latest results of the measurement of high-energy particles with the detector AMS on the International Space Station ISS deepen our understanding of the origin and nature of cosmic radiation.

A junior research group of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) under the leadership of Dr. Iris Gebauer is significantly involved in the experiment: It played a leading role in measuring the total flow of electrons and positrons.

The spokesperson of the AMS project, Professor Samuel C. C. Ting, presented the results at the CERN Research Centre.

Researchers from the Institute of Experimental Particle Physics (ETP) at KIT, led by Professor Wim de Boer, were involved in the development and construction of several components of the AMS detector. In 2011, the KIT set up the Young Investigator Group (YIG) "Cosmic Ray Transport Models for Dark Matter Searches with AMS-02" under the direction of Dr. Iris Gebauer to analyze the data. The YIG has taken the lead in measuring the total flow of electrons - negatively charged elementary particles - and positrons - antiparticles of electrons with opposite charges.

Press Release of KIT

The KSETA Doctoral Workshop (July 21–23, 2014) allows interested KSETA fellows to learn more about methods and tools that might support their research. Invited are fellows from all the different research fields in KSETA, from theoretical or experimental particle physicists to software- or cryo-engineers, to spend three interesting and inspiring days together and have the chance to benefit from other's experience.

In groups, the participants are asked to prepare a tutorial "from doctoral fellows for doctoral fellows" on a topic that could be useful to others outside of their own field of research, such as introductions to useful tools, basic technologies for non-engineers, basics in physics for non-physicists or methods for research. The workshop is rounded up by invited talks and discussions.

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Since the discovery of a Higgs boson by the CMS and ATLAS Collaborations in 2012, physicists at the LHC have been making intense efforts to measure this new particle’s properties. The Standard Model Higgs boson is the particle associated with an all-pervading field that is believed to impart mass to fundamental particles via the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism. Awaited for decades, the 2012 observation was a historical milestone for the LHC and led to the award of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics to Peter Higgs and François Englert. An open question arising from the discovery is whether the new particle is the one of the Standard Model -- or a different one, perhaps just one of many types of Higgs bosons waiting to be found. Since the particle’s discovery, physicists at the LHC have been making intense efforts to answer this question.

This week, at the 37th International Conference on High Energy Physics , a bi-annual major stage for particle physics, which in 2014 is held in Valencia, Spain, the CMS Collaboration is presenting a broad set of results from new studies of the Higgs boson. The new results are based on the full Run 1 data from pp collisions at centre-of-mass energies of 7 and 8 TeV. The analysis includes the final calibration and alignment constants and contains about 25 fb-1 of data. 

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What are air showers and what do they tell us about our cosmos? Answers for students and teachers as well as for scientists are provided by the new internet platform KASCADE Cosmic Ray Data Centre (KCDC). In the research project KASCADE, KIT scientists have been collecting data from space for 20 years, which now are freely available for the public.