Interdisciplinary Consortium Aims to Make Research Data from Physics Usable

Professor Kevin Kröninger is a particle physicist at TU Dortmund University. Together with scientists from throughout the world, he is conducting research at CERN in Geneva, one of the world’s largest research centers. The collisions produced by the particle accelerators there generate huge amounts of data from which the researchers hope to gain insights into the functional building blocks of matter. “Particle physics is a good example of how important a well-functioning data infrastructure is for research,” says Kröninger. “We have to secure the data throughout their entire life cycle and make them accessible to all researchers. The NFDI funding is a push by Germany to achieve further improvements in this area.”

The interdisciplinary consortium named “PUNCH4NFDI” will commence its work in the autumn. PUNCH stands for “Particles, Universe, NuClei & Hadrons”. Accordingly, the consortium represents the four research fields of particle physics, astroparticle physics, hadron and nuclear physics, and astronomy. It is headed by the DESY research center – short for “Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron” (“German Electron Synchrotron”). On the part of TU Dortmund University, physics professors Johannes Albrecht, Kevin Kröninger and Bernhard Spaan are involved. The aim is for both TU Dortmund University as well as all scientific institutions in Germany to benefit from the consortium’s findings and new developments.

As part of the project funded by the NFDI, the physicists from Dortmund will be getting to grips, among others, with the development of real-time data processing. In large-scale particle physics experiments, such an enormous volume of data is generated that not all of it can be stored. Algorithms must therefore decide what is potentially interesting and therefore stored and what must be deleted without further ado. New methods such as machine learning should help to improve these decision-making algorithms in the future. In addition, the consortium has set itself the goal of sensitizing the next generation of scientists towards the topic of research data infrastructure. “Proper handling of research data is an important element of good scientific practice,” explains Professor Johannes Albrecht. The consortium will therefore develop teaching materials to raise awareness, starting already with students and teaching them the technical know-how they need to save their data and make them available to others.

TU Dort­mund University involved in consortia from other specialist fields

In the second round of funding, the NFDI4Earth consortium was also approved, in which Professor Nguyen Xuan Thinh from the Department of Spatial Planning at TU Dortmund University is involved. Researchers from the university’s Department of Physics are part of the new “FAIRmat” consortium within Collaborative Research Centers/Transregios 160 and 142.

The consortia from the first round of funding have already been working for a year on improving research data infrastructure: On behalf of TU Dortmund University, Professor Norbert Kockmann, Alexander Behr, Professor Gabriele Sadowski and Dr. Katrin Rosenthal from the Department of Biochemical and Chemical Engineering are participating in “NFDI4Cat”, Dr. Frauke Maevus from the Department of Mechanical Engineering is participating in “NFDI4Ing” in the framework of Collaborative Research Center/Transregio 188, and Professor Stefan Kast, Nicolas Tielker and Professor Paul Czodrowski from the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology are involved in “NFDI4Chem”.

Further information:

• Particles, Universe, NuClei and Hadrons for the National Research Data Infrastructure (PUNCH4NFDI)

• forschungsdaten.info

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