As the Earth moves through space, it wobbles slightly. A team of researchers from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the University of Bonn has now succeeded in measuring these fluctuations in the Earth's axis using a completely new method – until now, possible only through complex radio astronomy. The team used the high-precision ring laser at TUM's geodetic observatory in Wettzell, Bavaria. The results of the 250-day experiment have now been published in the renowned journal Science Advances.

Beamline for Schools (BL4S) is a physics competition that was initiated by CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, and is open to secondary school pupils from all around the world. Participants are invited to submit a proposal for a physics experiment to be undertaken at the beamline of a particle accelerator, either at CERN or at one of the partner institutes: DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron in Hamburg, Germany) and ELSA (Elektronen-Stretcher-Anlage of the University of Bonn, Germany). In 2025, a record number of five winning teams have been chosen, based on both the scientific merit of their proposals and the communication merit of their submission video.

The Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Bonn will be represented in three Clusters of Excellence in the future - an impressive success that underlines the breadth and international visibility of its research. The University of Bonn was successful with a total of eight approved clusters in the nationwide Excellence Strategy and is therefore once again one of the absolute leaders in the German science system.

Technology is being pushed to its very limits. The upgrades to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN slated for the next few years will increase data transfer rates beyond what the current neutrino detector for the FASER experiment can cope with, requiring it to be replaced by a new kind of more powerful detector. This is a task that physicist Professor Matthias Schott from the University of Bonn will be tackling with the help of €1 million in Reinhart Koselleck funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG).

On Weiberfastnacht, after a 10-year break, the Physics Institutes once again held a carnival party in the foyer of the Wolfgang-Paul-Hörsaal.

From Monday, January 27 to Wednesday, January 29, 2025, 31 employees from the various workshops, the FTD and the Institute's administration traveled to CERN together. The aim of the excursion was to give non-scientific staff an insight into the experiments at CERN in which the Physikalisches Institut is involved.

Professor Simon Stellmer,  a member of the Cluster of Excellence ML4Q, receives a ‘Proof of Concept Grant’ from the European Research Council (ERC) for his project „GyroRevolutionPlus“. With the funding of €150,000 for up to 18 months, the physicist will continue to prepare his research results from previous ERC projects for commercial application. This is the second time that Professor Stellmer has been successful in this funding program after having received a grant for his previous project ‘GyroRevolution’ in 2023. The precision instruments he and his team are developing can be used to improve natural disaster early warning systems.

Physics professor Scrooginger doesn't think highly of other people: Colleagues are ungrateful, PhD students are lazy and students are dumb. So what should Scrooginger think of all the ghosts who appear just before Christmas, along with physics experiments? The show “Eine physikalische Weihnachtsgeschichte” (“A Physics Christmas Carol”) will be performed on 19.12.2024 at 5 pm in the Wolfgang-Paul lecture hall.