News Items

Since anti-matter could be interpreted as a dark matter annihilation signal, satellite and balloon experiments are currently hunting for dark matter particles near Earth. But anti-matter could also be produced by interactions of high-energy cosmic rays with the interstellar medium. To better…

In the fight against Covid-19, an interdisciplinary research team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has developed a model for a contact tracing app that protects personal data. The concept is based on an encryption process that prevents the temporary contact numbers (TCNs) of infected…

How do astrophysical uncertainties influence the expected signals in dark matter detection experiments? The impact of sub-structures of the Milky Way dark matter halo has now been re-investigated by a small team of scientists around Alejandro Ibarra from the Technical University of Munich. The…

Because of their extremely small mass, neutrinos play a key role in cosmology and particle physics. After evaluation of the first measurement results in the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino Experiment (KATRIN), it is now clear: The previously unknown mass of the neutrinos must be less than 1 electron…

Why is there so much more matter than antimatter in the universe? To proof the conjecture that matter can be created without balancing antimatter, the GERDA experiment in the Gran Sasso underground laboratory is the first to have now reached a sensitivity for the half-life beyond 10²⁶ years, 10 000…

Another prestigious award for a principal investigator of the SFB1258: Susanne Mertens, professor at the TUM and a research group leader at the Max Planck Insitute for Physics, receives an ERC starting grant for searching for sterile neutrinos within the KATRIN experiment.

How does matter behave under extreme conditions, as expected for example in neutron stars or neutron star mergers? The HADES collaboration now reports of the first observation of a state of matter produced in a heavy ion collision that resembles the matter expected to be formed in a binary neutron…

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, the Antarctic neutrino detector that identified the first likely source of high-energy neutrinos and cosmic rays, is getting an upgrade. Seven strings of optical modules will be inserted at the bottom center of the 86 existing strings, adding more than 700 new,…

Neutrinos are exceptionally light particles whose mass requires an update to our theory of particle physics. A new idea to explain their properties has now been published by a team of physicists of the SFB1258 around Alejandro Ibarra, professor for theoretical elementary particle physics at the…

The most comprehensive analysis of neutrinos from core processes inside the Sun has been published by the researchers of the Borexino experiment. For the first time, the scientists have presented a complete assessment of the Sun’s full neutrino spectrum. In a further novelty, they detected neutrinos…