“Best experience of my life”
- Particle Physics
- mundo
The particle physicists Prof. Johannes Albrecht and Prof. Kevin Kröninger work in research and train young talent as part of international collaborations. For example, the Department of Physics inspires the students of its international IMAPP master's program with its diverse offerings.
Bologna or Dortmund? In a ranking of attractive travel destinations, it is clear which of the two cities comes out on top. If you ask students instead of tourists, the order may be different. Two young particle physicists from the northern Italian university town spent the summer semester as part of the international IMAPP master's program at TU Dortmund University and were enthusiastic about their stay. “With its historic old town, Bologna cannot be compared to the Ruhr area, and we don’t try to pit ourselves against each other, but here in Dortmund we have a framework for research and teaching that students from abroad really value,” says Prof. Johannes Albrecht from the Department of Physics. His colleague Prof. Kevin Kröninger, together with partners from the Universities of Bologna and Clermont Auvergne, launched the International Master of Advanced Methods in Particle Physics, or IMAPP for short – the only international master’s with a joint degree from three universities that exists in this field. In Dortmund, all particle physics professors are involved in the program.
As specialists in experimental particle physics, Albrecht and Kröninger are also experts in international collaborations. Both work together at the CERN research center in Switzerland on experiments with over 5,000 researchers from all over the world. “We are really taking our discipline to the extreme in this regard,” says Kevin Kröninger. This is because, with CERN, the particle physics research community has an immensely attractive location. This is where the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – the world’s most powerful particle accelerator – is operated. In the 27-kilometer-long, underground tube, packets of protons are accelerated to almost the speed of light and brought into collision, creating billions of elementary particles. Complex detectors record their tracks, their energy and their decay, generating a wealth of data from experiments.
One of four large-scale experiments is the LHCb experiment. Professor Albrecht and researchers from all over the world are tracking down rare decays of B mesons – also known as beauty quarks. He is particularly interested in the mystery of why there is hardly any antimatter to be found in our universe, even though, in theory, equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created by the Big Bang. The ATLAS experiment, in which Professor Kröninger is involved, deals with similarly fundamental questions. In 2012, the experiment at CERN became famous for detecting the Higgs boson. At that time, we believed we had found the last piece of the puzzle for explaining our material world.
Today, we know that there must be other particles or phenomena beyond the Standard Model. After all, it only describes the visible part of the universe, and that only accounts for around five percent. The aim of the ATLAS experiment is to discover the dark side of our world, which does not interact with light.
Three countries – one degree
Back to Dortmund: The first IMAPP graduates are about to graduate, and the conclusion after two years couldn't be more positive: “Best experience of my life,” said one of the six students from the first cohort. The origin of this success story dates back eight years. An international summer school in Corsica launched tandem projects where students from different universities worked on a common topic over a semester. “Joint courses were planned and streamed via video, and ultimately we came up with the idea of offering an international master’s degree program in particle physics,” explains Kröninger. It took another two years to develop this program and conclude the contracts between the three universities.
“We can award 18 well-funded scholarships per year for our international master's degree program.” Prof. Kevin Kröninger
IMAPP is geared towards the needs of the job market, both in science and in business: Statistics and artificial intelligence, the development of detectors as well as electronics and computer science are also on the curriculum. In Dortmund, the major focus is on instrumentation, i.e. the technical side of experimental particle physics. Another special feature of the concept is that the students of one cohort stay together as a group and move together from Clermont to Dortmund and on to Bologna. They only part ways in the fourth and final semester. “The students go to one of our partner universities in different countries around the world for their master's thesis,” says Kröninger.
After starting with six or nine IMAPP students, TU Dortmund aims to have around 30 enrollments per academic year in the long term. Interest in the program was successfully boosted thanks to the recently approved funding from the European Union totaling 4.5 million euros for an Erasmus Mundus program. “This means we can award 18 well-funded scholarships for the international master's degree program every year,” says a delighted Kröninger.
Those interested can continue researching internationally in a comparable way. Regardless of funding, TU Dortmund University has been offering prospective doctoral students in the field of particle physics bi-national support in cooperation with partner universities in France and Italy for years. As part of a “cotutelle” process, both universities award a doctorate at the same time – a double degree that is usually linked to research stays in both countries.
Real-time data analysis
Doctoral students in the field of particle physics deal with data analysis even more intensively than during their undergraduate studies. This is because all experiments in high-energy physics (HEP) have one thing in common: They produce gigantic amounts of data – up to 40 terabytes per second! This roughly corresponds to the storage capacity of 10,000 conventional Blu-Ray disks. “Such unimaginably large sums of data can only be used efficiently if they are analyzed in real time and not saved first to be processed as a second step. The volume is simply too big for that,” explains Johannes Albrecht. New techniques of real time analytics (RTA) do more than simply mark a paradigm shift in particle physics. The analysis of data now plays a key role in many industries and the development of very different technologies. Albrecht gives the financial market and self-driving cars as examples: “Data must be evaluated in real time everywhere so that analysts can make sound decisions for investors or self-driving vehicles will brake at the right moment.”
That is why physicists have been in demand as specialists for years when it comes to dealing with large amounts of data. 90 percent of graduates work in industry after completing their master’s degree or doctoral qualification. This is where “SmartHEP” comes in – an international doctoral network that brings together young scientists from particle physics with specialists from computer science and industry. “With this network, we are taking a step towards reality. We no longer just implicitly train young talent for the market by having them analyze accelerator data through machine learning methods. We now send them directly to various industrial companies and have them do very hands-on work there,” says Johannes Albrecht.
For the physics professor, the new model is a balancing act because a doctorate should always focus on basic research. That is why the industry placements are comparatively short at just two to four months. Johannes Albrecht is currently supervising a doctoral student from Italy and a young researcher from England as part of SmartHEP. In addition to the scientific component of her doctorate, the Italian student works at a Dortmund startup that has adopted the slogan “Data Matters” and implements data analysis methods for industry. In the main part of his dissertation, the British researcher is working on algorithms that filter data in real time. His placement is in Lund, Sweden, working with a company that develops self-driving cars.
Application for Cluster of Excellence
Despite all the possibilities opened up by transferring real-time analysis methods from physics to applications in industry, basic research is not to be overlooked. And TU professors Albrecht and Kröninger are certain that there is still considerable potential here. That is why they have submitted an application for funding as a “Cluster of Excellence” alongside the universities of Bonn and Siegen and the Jülich Research Center as part of the federal and state government’s excellence strategy. The partners aim to appoint seven to eight professorships in order to continue collaboration on research into elementary particles. “The locations complement each other very well,” explains Albrecht. Everyone specializes in researching certain quarks. “The cluster would allow us to take research to another level and build a common structure to look at all six quarks in their entirety from both an experimental and theoretical perspective.”
At its core, it's all about the big questions: How is our universe structured, what is dark matter, and why is there no antimatter? But basic research always has enormous transfer potential, Kröninger emphasizes, and the cluster could also have an impact in this respect. He gives the example of radiotherapy for cancer treatment, which would not be at its current level without accelerator technologies, and the well-known classic the World Wide Web, which was created at CERN.
Text: Christiane Spänhoff
About:
Prof. Johannes Albrecht grew up in Darmstadt and studied physics in Heidelberg and Sydney. After completing his doctorate in Heidelberg in 2009, he worked at the European Research Center CERN in Switzerland for three years. In 2013, he came to the Chair of Experimental Physics V at TU Dortmund University through the Emmy Noether Program of the German Research Foundation. Since 2020, he has held the professorship for experimental flavor physics (Heisenberg Professorship). Prof. Albrecht's working group focuses on experimental particle physics and medical physics.
Prof. Kevin Kröninger was born in Mainz. He studied physics at the Universities of Göttingen and Bonn and Northeastern University in Boston. As part of the academic staff of the Max Planck Institute for Physics, he received his doctorate in 2007 from the Technical University of Munich. After earning his postdoctoral lecture qualification in Göttingen, he came to TU Dortmund University in 2014, where he holds a professorship for experimental elementary particle physics. Prof. Kröninger's working group addresses questions in experimental particle physics and medical physics as well as technology transfer between the two fields.
This is an article from mundo, the research magazine of TU Dortmund University.