Research Facilities

The Institute of Physics houses a variety of facilities from a wide range of research areas. Transnational access to research infrastructures like the FTD and ELSA is provided through the STRONG-2020 project FTD-Hadron.

Overview of the Research Facilities

Eine Wissenschaftlerin und ein Wissenschaftler arbeiten hinter einer Glasfassade und mischen Chemikalien mit Großgeräten.
© Daniel Jacobi / Universität Bonn

Bethe Center for Theoretical Physics

Founded in 2008, the Bethe Center for Theoretical Physics, named after Nobel Prize winner Hans Bethe, is an association of physicists and mathematicians from various institutes at the University of Bonn. In this community, research is conducted in a wide variety of research areas. In addition, the Bethe Center offers a variety of workshops, seminars and lectures and provides a forum for interdisciplinary research in the entire field of theoretical and mathematical physics.


Eine Wissenschaftlerin und ein Wissenschaftler arbeiten hinter einer Glasfassade und mischen Chemikalien mit Großgeräten.
© ELSA-Gruppe

Electron accelerator ELSA

For the main research area of hadron physics, currents of several nA can be extracted and transferred to the different experimental sites. Within national and international collaborations, sophisticated detectors with special sensitivity for photon-rich final states over large solid angle acceptance have been put into operation for spectroscopy of photo- and electroproduced final states: Crystal Barrel with TAPS and BGO-Ball with magnetic spectrometer. The expertise available locally and with partners for the construction and integration of polarized solid-state targets into the setups allows the performance of highly selective double polarization experiments to study the excitations of baryon resonances with high-energy photons. The ELSA facility formed the core of the DFG Collaborative Research Center SFB/TR 16 (Electromagnetic Excitations of Subnuclear Systems), which dealt experimentally and theoretically with baryon resonances.


Eine Wissenschaftlerin und ein Wissenschaftler arbeiten hinter einer Glasfassade und mischen Chemikalien mit Großgeräten.
© Daniel Jacobi / Universität Bonn

Research and Technology Center for Detector Physics (FTD)

The Research and Technology Center for Detector Physics, which was opened in November 2021, provides scientists at the Institute of Physics and the Helmholtz Institute for Radiation and Nuclear Physics with a center for basic research. The state-of-the-art infrastructure of laboratories and clean rooms offers ideal research conditions for the development of new detector technologies to study the smallest building blocks of matter.


Matter and Light for Quantum Computing (ML4Q)

The Cluster of Excellence "Matter and Light for Quantum Computing" (ML4Q) exists since 2019 and is funded within the Excellence Strategy of the German Research Foundation (DFG). It is a cooperation of the University of Cologne, RWTH Aachen University and the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. 194 members and associated members have set themselves the task of using quantum mechatronics to develop new computing and and network architectures, such as quantum computers, that can surpass anything classically imaginable.


Wird geladen