Lena Funcke completed her doctorate at the Max Planck Institute for Physics at the age of just 23. For her outstanding doctoral thesis, she receives the Dieter Rampacher Prize, which is awarded annually by the Max Planck Society to its youngest doctoral researcher to obtain a PhD.

Having successfully accelerated electrons riding on a plasma wave, scientists in the AWAKE project continue to study and improve the underlying processes. Over the past few months a great deal of effort has been put into understanding how the 10-centimeter proton beam supplied by CERN’s SPS ring can...

When two particles meet ... On the first Saturday in June, the Max Planck Institute for Physics will again open its doors to the public. We will show experiments used by scientists to explore and explain the Universe, and the theories they apply to find answers to unresolved questions. In our...

On 19 December 2018, the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO) Council and European Southern Observatory (ESO) signed the final agreements needed for CTA’s southern hemisphere array to be hosted near ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile.

A new research group will be launched at the Max Planck Institute for Physics (MPP) in early January 2019. Its main focus will be on the analysis of decay of the tau lepton, an elementary particle related to the electron. The “Tautology Project” will be led by Max-Planck Fellow Stephan Paul,...

A few days ago, the final components were installed in Belle II. With the aid of special tracks, technicians very gently pushed the highly sensitive vertex detector into the correct position inside the Belle II detector. Over the coming weeks, the vertex detector will be linked via cables to the...

How does society benefit from basic research? Who can benefit, and in what format? These are the questions that Professor Helmut Schwarz from Technical University Berlin will explore in his lecture “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge”. The colloquium from the series “Science and Society” will take...

On 10 October 2018, the LST-1 (Large-Sized Telescope) will be inaugurated in the Canary Islands in La Palma. It is the first of over 100 planned telescopes overall in the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). The instruments are designed to capture objects and events that hurl out particles of maximum...

The German Research Foundation (DFG) has given its approval to the Excellence Cluster “From the Origin of the Universe to the First Building Blocks of Life”, or “ORIGINS”. The research network will start work on 1 January 2019. The Max Planck Institute for Physics (MPP) is represented in several...