The existence of dark matter and the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the Universe point to gaps in our understanding of the world around us. Even though virtually all the measurements that we can make in particle physics can already be described in detail by the Standard Model, deciphering the structure of subatomic matter is one of the most pressing questions in fundamental physics. Specifically, researchers are wondering where new phenomena of fundamental physics might be hiding.
Some of the most intriguing measurements in recent years have involved interplay between the strong (“color”) and weak (“flavor”) interaction. It is this interplay that the researchers in the Cluster of Excellence "Color meets Flavor" being proposed together with TU Dortmund University, the University of Siegen and Forschungszentrum Jülich now want to investigate in more detail in a close partnership between theory and experimentation. They will focus on the physics of quarks and the question of how these fundamental building blocks of matter form complex bonding states and are also intending to explore the properties of the Higgs boson and continue the hunt for the axion. With the masses of the six known quarks spanning several orders of magnitude, the experimental infrastructure needed to study them ranges from experiments at low-to-medium energy levels at the ELSA particle accelerator in Bonn all the way through to ultra-high-energy experiments using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, which will also offer an opportunity to investigate the Higgs boson.
Spokesperson for "Color meets Flavor" is Jochen Dingfelder, Professor at the Physikalisches Institut of University of Bonn and spokesperson of the Research and Technology Center for Detector Physics. The cluster initiative is among the 41 chosen from the 143 draft proposals in all from across the country that were evaluated.
The University of Bonn is also entering the next round of the Excellence Competition with another new cluster initiative ("Our Dynamic Universe"). All cluster of Excellence applications must be submitted by August of this year. The funding decision is slated for May 2025, with any funding set to start in early 2026.
