ERC Consolidator Grants for Karoline Schäffner and Marius Wiesemann

PIRATES: Innovation for detecting dark matter

According to current knowledge, around 25 percent of the universe consists of dark matter, while the familiar, visible matter accounts for only about 5 percent. Around 20 experiments worldwide are currently attempting to detect the mysterious particles of dark matter – an enormous scientific challenge, as these particles interact with normal matter only extremely rarely, if at all, and therefore leave hardly any measurable traces. 

One of these experiments, DAMA/LIBRA, claims to have detected dark matter. However, this has not yet been confirmed by independent experiments. With COSINUS, Karoline Schäffner and her team want to verify the controversial results. To do this, they are using the same detector material as the original, but are working with significantly more sensitive superconducting quantum sensors – which are to be continuously developed and improved.

“PIRATES offers us the opportunity to significantly advance our low-temperature sensors and explore new technological approaches,” says Karoline Schäffner. “Our goal is to make production reliable and scalable, with the goal to produce large sensor arrays in the future. This is an important step in the search for dark matter and other events that are difficult to measure.” In addition, the group will test novel crystalline materials that could significantly increase the sensitivity of future detectors and thus overcome previous limitations.

Karoline Schäffner has been leading a Max Planck research group on dark matter since 2019 and is a principal investigator in the ORIGINS Cluster of Excellence. She was recently honored in the Max Planck Society's Lise Meitner Excellence Program. Since October 2025, she has also been a Professor for Experimental Dark Matter and Neutrinos at the Technical University of Munich.

UPGREAT-LHC: Precise simulations for new physics

Since 2008, researchers at CERN have been using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to investigate the fundamental building blocks of matter and their exchange forces. In doing so, they are recreating the conditions that prevailed at the Big Bang. In the LHC, high-energy protons collide with each other. In the debris of the particle collisions, scientists search for new particles and phenomena beyond the known particle physics described in the Standard Model. 

This requires precise theoretical models that form a kind of guardrail for the LHC experiments. They point the way to where new physics might be found. With UPGREAT-LHC, Marius Wiesemann plans to develop novel theoretical methods that can be used to perform high-precision simulations. 

“The LHC's greatest success to date was the discovery of the Higgs particle in 2012,” says Marius Wiesemann. “However, we have not yet found any evidence of ‘new physics’. With UPGREAT-LHC, we will ensure that theoretical predictions are precise enough to get everything out of the collision data, search it even better, and understand it.”

The new, highly accurate simulation techniques will be used to run through scenarios that will enable researchers to detect even the slightest deviations from the standard model of particle physics. The simulations use complex theoretical principles to accurately predict collision events. This allows experiments to search specifically for previously unknown processes.

Marius Wiesemann received his doctorate with honors from the University of Wuppertal in 2013. After positions at the University of Zurich and CERN, Marius Wiesemann joined the Max Planck Institute for Physics in 2019. He has held a permanent position as group leader here since 2022. He is also an associate investigator in the ORIGINS Cluster of Excellence.