Welcome Room: Vortragssaal

Opening Talk: From Particles to Cosmology

• Geraldine Servant (DESY, U Hamburg, IFAE Barcelona)

Room: Vortragssaal Geraldine will review recent developments in the fields of particle physics and cosmology, with emphasis on their interrelations, and the possible connection between the Dark Matter puzzle and the matter antimatter asymmetry of the universe.

Intermediate-mass black holes: Potential seeds for supermassive black holes

• Markus Kissler-Patig (Gemini Observatory, Hawaii)

Room: Vortragssaal Intermediate-mass black holes, featuring masses of a few hundred to a few tens of thousands solar masses, have recently attracted quite some interest. They fill the gap between solar mass black holes and supermassive black holes detected it the centers of galaxies. Intermediate-mass black holes might be at the origin of the formation of the latter. After a decade of controversy, a few reliable intermediate-mass black holes are now known. Surprisingly, they appear to follow relationship between black hole mass and host mass defined by supermassive black holes and their galaxies. Coincidence or physical cause? Markus will review the recent work on intermediate-mass black holes at the centre of Galactic globular clusters and nearby dwarf galaxies and put them into the context.

Modeling type Ia supernova explosions

• Friedrich Roepke (U Wuerzburg)

Room: Vortragssaal Type Ia supernovae play an important role in observational cosmology and in various astrophysical processes. They have been instrumental in establishing our current cosmological model with an accelerated expansion rate. As main producers of iron group elements, they are a key component in the cosmic cycle of matter. However, the questions of the progenitor systems from which these cosmic explosions arise and of their physical mechanism are not settled yet. Several possibilities have been suggested and after introducing some general concepts of thermonuclear astrophysical explosions Friedrich will discuss recent developments by presenting multi-dimensional simulations that refer to different scenarios. In combination with detailed radiative transfer calculations that predict observables from the models and comparison with astronomical data, these shed light on the progenitor systems.

Star formation feedback

• Bruce Elmegreen (IBM)

Room: Vortragssaal Stellar energies in the form of photons, winds, and supernovae power turbulence in the interstellar medium and occasionally trigger more star formation. Extensive observations of HII regions and wind-blown cavities around young massive stars in the Milky Way suggest that their primary influence is on the immediate surroundings, sculpting and pushing the molecular clouds out of which the stars formed. The influence of supernovae can be much more extensive and may even regulate star formation rates globally. Here we present observations of these energies and their effects, compare them with other driving energies for turbulence, such as gravity, and consider the implications of feedback for star formation and interstellar structure on a wide range of scales and through cosmic time.

Rare isotopes and the origin of the heavy elements

• Reiner Krücken (TRIUMF, U British Columbia)

Room: Vortragssaal The production of about half of the elements from iron to uranium is associated with the astrophysical rapid-neutron capture process (r-process). However the astrophysical site (or sites) of the r-process have not been identified so far. While core-collapse supernovae explosions have been the favourite scenario for a long time, modern astrophysical simulations fall mostly short in producing the neutron-rich environment needed for the r-process. Neutron star mergers are becoming more popular as they seem to produce the right environment, however open questions remain, for example with respect to very metal poor stars showing r-process abundances. It is possible that several astrophysical sites contribute to the r-process abundances. The r-process involves very short-lived neutron-rich nuclei for which we do not have experimental information on their properties and relevant reaction rates. There is a world-wide effort to produce and study these rare isotopes relevant for the r-process at current and future Rare Isotope Facilities, like RIKEN (Japan), ISAC/ARIEL (Canada), ISOLDE/CERN (Switzerland), FRIB (US), and GSI/FAIR (Germany). At the same time theoretical sensitivity studies are evaluating the relevance of nuclear physics input and guiding experimental programs. This talk will present an overview of the current challenges and approaches in understanding the r-process abundances, in particular with respect to the underlying nuclear physics, and will discuss select examples of experimental studies of nuclei involved in the r-process.

Discussion Room: Vortragssaal

What we (do not) know about gamma-ray bursts

• Jochen Greiner (MPE)

Room: Vortragssaal Since the dedicated Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB) satellite Swift (since 2004) and the Fermi Gamma-Ray Mission (since 2008) have provided a wealth of new, mostly confusing data, the recent 2 years have finally brought some progress in our understanding. Jochen will concentrate on three sub-topics of these new developments, showing that surprises are still possible nearly 50 years after the first discovery of a GRB.

Testing cosmological models with X-ray galaxy cluster population

• Hans Böhringer (MPE)

Room: Vortragssaal We use a statistically very well characterised X-ray-flux-limited sample of galaxy clusters to study the large-scale structure of the Universe out to redshifts of ~ 0.4. We use the cluster mass function to obtain tight constraints on the amplitude parameter of the density fluctuation power spectrum. We find some tension in the resulting amplitude parameter with the prediction from the PLANCK results in the frame of the standard Lambda-CDM cosmological model. The results can be reconciled, however, by for example introducing massive neutrinos. We also use the cluster sample to study the matter distribution in the local Universe in a cosmographical fashion. One of the findings of this research is a locally underdense region in the Southern Galactic Cap region, with interesting consequences for local measurements of cosmological parameters.

The IceCube Neutrino Telescope: first light in neutrinos

• Elisa Resconi (TUM)

Room: Vortragssaal Elisa will report about the recent observation of high-energy extraterrestrial neutrinos from IceCube. She will also discuss scenarios for possible associations.

The growth of supermassive black holes

• Kirpal Nandra (MPE)

Room: Vortragssaal The growth by accretion of supermassive black holes (SMBH) generates an important component of the radiation in the Universe. That growth also has widespread implications for the development of the rest of the baryonic Universe, via the process of feedback. Over the past few years, sensitive X-ray surveys have transformed our understanding of the evolution of the supermassive SMBH population. X-ray selection has proved very effective in revealing accreting SMBH which are hard to detect otherwise, either due to obscuration, or dilution by the host galaxy. Making the most of these X-ray surveys is not straightforward, however, due to the complex selection effects and the great difficulty in determining the nature of the X-ray emitting SMBH population. This requires both exceptional observational data, and sophisticated techniques to exploit them. Both data and analysis techniques have reached the stage where we can now make confident statements about how black holes in galactic nuclei grow. In this talk, the state of the art of the study of of SMBH evolution will be reviewed. The prospects for future observations to resolve the remaining open issues will also be discussed.

The search for neutrinoless double beta decay: present and future

• Bela Majorovits (MPP)

Room: Vortragssaal Neutrinoless double beta decay, if observed, would be the first confirmation of a lepton number violating process. Apart from this, observation of neutrinoless double beta decay could shed light on a few more unanswered questions in neutrino physics. Some of them will be shortly discussed. The main focus will be on the presentation of the actual status of experiments that have lately delivered new limits for the isotopes 76Ge and 136Xe and/or are expected to start data taking very soon. A short biased outlook to the further future of neutrinoless double beta decay searches will be given.

Direct dark matter searches and the XENON experiment

• Teresa Marrodan (MPI fuer Kernphysik, Heidelberg)

Room: Vortragssaal Although the existence of dark matter is motivated by a variety of cosmological and astronomical observations, its nature is still unclear. Commonly, elementary particles are assumed to be the constituents of this non-luminous matter. Among the candidates, the Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are favoured. Direct detection experiments aim to measure their scattering off target nuclei. Such measurement can provide very valuable information on the particle mass and its interaction probability with matter. The XENON experiment uses liquid xenon as target material. Currently, the XENON100 detector, located at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory in Italy, is operating with an active volume of 62 kg liquid xenon. The detector employs the two-phase TPC (Time Projection Chamber) technology where the produced light and charge are detected by means of two photomultiplier arrays. So far the data released provides no evidence for dark matter. The resulting exclusion limits on the WIMP-nucleon cross section for spin-dependent and -independent interactions rule out theoretically favored regions of the cross section and WIMP mass parameter space. Furthermore, the data has been interpreted in terms of axion-like particle interactions and a corresponding exclusion limit has been derived. In order to to improve the experimental sensitivity by two orders of magnitude, the construction of XENON1T started in summer 2013. Commissioning is planned for summer 2015. After an introduction to dark matter and a brief summary of the status of searches, this talk will focus on the direct detection with the XENON experiment. The XENON100 results from the last years will be reviewed and the construction status of XENON1T including future plans will be discussed.

Dark matter crisis on small scales?

• Carlos Frenk (U Durham)

Room: Vortragssaal A commonly-held belief is that the standard cold dark matter model faces four challenges on small scales, often referred to as the: (i) core-cusp; (ii) missing satellites; (iii) too-big-to-fail; and (iv) satellite planes problems. Carlos will review these four challenges in the light of new results from recent high resolution N-body hydrodynamics simulations of Local Group analogues which are part of the Evolution of Galaxies and their Environment (EAGLE) project. The inclusion of baryons in the simulations has important consequences for several of these topics.

Measuring the expansion of the Universe: Final results from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS)

• Shirley Ho (U Carnegie Mellon)

Room: Vortragssaal Baryon Oscillations Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) have just finished surveying 10,000 square degrees, containing over one million galaxies within the redshift range of 0.2<z<0.7. Shirley will discuss some of the most recent results from BOSS including the 1% measurement of BAO at z=0.57 and then discuss some of the complications and lessons learned from the BOSS, including effects of non-linear evolution of density fluctuations, and how we learned to deal with them. Shirley will finally put all of this into the context of current and upcoming surveys including Sloan Digital Sky Survey 4, Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and WFIRST-AFTA.

Discussion Room: Vortragssaal

Challenges for new physics in the flavor sector

• Wolfgang Altmannshofer (Perimeter Institute, Waterloo)

Room: Vortragssaal Wolfgang will report on recent attempts to explain the hierarchical flavor structure of the standard model quarks and leptons in the context of new physics models. In addition, he will review the unique sensitivity of various flavor observables to new physics, allowing to indirectly probe very high scales beyond the direct reach of colliders. Finally, Wolfgang will discuss current anomalies in flavor observables and how they can be addressed with new physics.

Discrete symmetries and quark flavour searches for new phenomena

• Adrian Bevan (Queen Mary University of London)

Room: Vortragssaal Discrete symmetries are fundamental to our understanding of laws of physics. The conservation and violation of the three symmetries of Parity (spatial inversion), Charge Conjugation (interchange of particle and antiparticle) underpin our knowledge of particle interactions. What we know provides an incomplete picture. Particle physics experiments at colliders are following two paradigms improve our knowledge of this (and other) issue. The first is to directly search for new particles or phenomena, which resulted in the recent discovery of a Higgs-like boson at CERN. The second is to perform precision measurements of rare processes in the hope that detailed studies will highlight discrepancies arising from some new phenomenon. Adrian will discuss discrete symmetry violation tests in the context of quark flavour physics, and recent experimental highlights of rare decay searches for new phenomenon.

Neutrino oscillations in the era of leptonic CP violation searches

• Antonio Palazzo (MPP)

Room: Vortragssaal Neutrino physics is entering a new era. The discovery of a non-zero value of the third mixing angle theta_13 has opened the door to the searches of leptonic Charge-Parity Violation (CPV). Intriguingly, the running experiments are already providing hints of a quite large (almost maximal) CPV. If confirmed, this would imply that the size of the CPV in the lepton sector is three orders of magnitude larger than that involved in the quark sector. The CPV searches may reserve even more striking surprises, providing information on physics beyond the Standard Model (SM). In fact, several anomalies suggest the existence of new light sterile neutrino species and all the SM extensions endowed with extra sterile states also involve additional CPV. Antonio will show that the long-baseline experiments, originally designed for searching the standard (3-flavor) CPV, can provide information also on the new CPV sources. The results of both standard and non-standard CPV searches will deepen our understanding of the structure of the fundamental interactions.

Electric dipole moment searches

• Peter Fierlinger (TUM)

Room: Vortragssaal Since the 1950’s people search for electric dipole moments (EDM) of fundamental systems, an unambiguous manifestation of parity (P) and time reversal symmetry (T) violation. Assuming the conservation of CPT, T violation in a fundamental system also means CP violation. This has only been observed in very few systems in the Standard Model of particle physics (SM) and is not sufficient to describe the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the Universe. With a long history of improvements, the upper limit for an EDM of the neutron has been pushed to dn < 2.9·10−26 e·cm, an extraordinarily small number. This result restricts many theories for physics beyond the SM and is complementary to physics at the LHC. Next to the neutron, also many other systems can be competitive probes for EDM searches, using quite different experimental approaches and scales. Here, table-top experiments using atoms and molecules have recently achieved notable experimental sensitivities, but also new ideas using future accelerators and particle storage rings are being discussed. An overview of the field of research will be presented in this talk, with one focus on the new neutron EDM installation at TUM.

Cosmic microwave background and inflation

• Martin Bucher (APC Paris)

Room: Vortragssaal Observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies have played a key role in establishing cosmology as a field in which theoretical speculation is tightly constrained by observation. Martin will discuss how CMB observations constrain theories of cosmic inflation, emphasizing both the recent Planck 2015 results and future prospects to further constrain inflation using the B mode of the polarization.

Gauge/Gravity Duality: Foundations and Applications

• Johanna Erdmenger (MPP)

Room: Vortragssaal Based on string theory, gauge/gravity duality is a new concept within theoretical physics which provides new links between quantum field theories and gravity theories. A duality is a map between two different theories which describe the same physics. In addition to its intrinsic interest, gauge/gravity duality has a wealth of applications since it maps strongly coupled gauge theories, which are hard to solve, to weakly coupled classical gravity theories, which are much more tractable. In particular, gauge/gravity duality allows to study transport properties and meson excitations in QCD-like theories at finite temperature and density. In the talk, both the essential concepts of gauge/gravity duality and two application examples will be highlighted.

The Gravitational Universe

• Monica Colpi (U Milano)

Room: Vortragssaal Gravity is the engine behind many of the processes in the Universe, and much of its action is dark. Gravity has its own messenger: the gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime. They travel essentially undisturbed with virtually no information loss. ESA has recently selected the science theme of "The Gravitational Universe" for the Cosmic Vision L3 mission. In this framework, eLISA will be the first ever mission to study the entire Universe and the first to detect directly gravitational waves from space. eLISA will offer a wide view of a dynamic cosmos using gravitational waves as new and unique messengers. In the frequency interval of operation, around a milli-Hertz, there is a richness of sources, among them the collision of massive black holes, and possibly a background from the big bang. eLISA has also guaranteed sources in the form of verification binaries in the Milky Way. In this talk Monica will describe how exquisite measurements of black hole masses and spins from the coalescence signals will make it possible to test the black hole hypothesis in the strong field dynamical sector, and to trace the black hole merger history across all stages of galaxy formation and evolution, from the earliest epochs when the first seeds of unknown origin start forming at redshifts as high as 17-20, according to theories. High precision measurements of stellar black holes plunging into massive black holes in galactic nuclei will make possible for the first time to conduct spacetime cartography thus allowing to constrain any deviation from the Kerr metric of General Relativity in the unexplored volume of spacetime very near the horizon. It is clear that eLISA will open up our Universe as never before, by exploring the critical scales around singularities all the way to cosmological dimensions.

Discussion Room: Vortragssaal

Learning about the Higgs boson

• Klaus Desch (U Bonn)

Room: Vortragssaal The discovery of a new boson by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider represents landmark in our understanding of elementary particles and their interactions. To date, the measured properties of the boson render it amazingly consistent with the hypothesis of being the Standard Model Higgs boson. In order to validate or disprove this most simple hypothesis, many more measurements have to be performed and their precision has to be improved to discriminate against alternative theories. In the talk, Klaus will review the current status of experimental Higgs physics. He will motivate future measurements to be performed both at the LHC and at future lepton colliders. In addition, he will discuss the difficulties and prospects for these measurements. Klaus will argue that studying the Higgs boson in great detail opens up numerous windows for the discovery of new phenomena beyond the Standard Model of particle physics.

Quantum Chromodynamics at the LHC with proton and nuclear beams

• David d'Enterria (CERN)

Room: Vortragssaal The strong interaction among quarks and gluons is described by the theory of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) within the Standard Model of particle physics. David will review the main QCD results obtained during the first 3 years of operation ("Run 1") of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) with proton and nuclear collisions at multi-TeV energies, including: (i) total hadronic cross sections, (ii) multiparton interactions, (iii) parton distribution functions (PDFs), (iv) extraction of the strong coupling alpha_s, and (v) quark-gluon-plasma physics.

New physics optimism at 13 TeV

• Andreas Weiler (DESY)

Room: Vortragssaal Andreas will discuss the impact of run I of the LHC on physics beyond the Standard Model and the expectations for the currently beginning 13 TeV run.

Future colliders at the energy frontier of particle physics

• Frank Simon (MPP)

Room: Vortragssaal With the discovery of the Higgs boson at LHC, all particles of the Standard Model have been observed experimentally, yet many questions are left unanswered. The discovery has intensified the planning for future high-energy colliders, which aim to probe the Standard Model and the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking with higher precision and to extend and complement the search for new particles currently under way at the LHC. This talk will review the concepts for future colliders beyond the LHC currently being discussed with a focus on their physics potential as well as the key technological challenges that have to be met to push the boundaries of particle physics further into the high-energy regime.

Discussion and wrap-up Room: Vortragssaal