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Lectures @ 1st HGSFP Summerschool 2023

Lectures will be given on five days in the morning and the afternoon and generally consist of two parts. Every morning and afternoon session will have two lectures in parallel, thus every participant can choose four lectures to attend. Please note that it's not fixed yet which of the following lectures will be in parallel sessions. The special lectures will take place in a common session for all participants.

The left and the right brain: Lateralization from physics to neuroscience (Special Lecture, Elisa Frasnelli)

In this lecture I will introduce myself and my career pathway, from physics to neuroscience, showing the importance of an interdisciplinary and international dimension in science. I will then present some of the research projects I have been part of, with a focus on lateralization, i.e., the different functional specialization of the left and the right sides of the brain, a feature that is shared by several species from insects to humans. I will approach this subject both from a theoretical point of view, using mathematical models, and from an empirical point of view, going through the different studies that have allowed answering many questions about the mechanisms, the function, the development, and the evolution of this intriguing feature of the nervous system.

Realism, Locality and All That: Philosophical Explorations in a Quantum World (Special Lecture, Federico Laudisa)

In spite of the extraordinary success of quantum mechanics in predictive and experimental terms, there still is no consensus on what its proper interpretation should be as a ‘representation’ of the microworld. In the first part of my talk I will show why addressing this problem leads also to a philosophical analysis of the foundations of the theory; on the basis of the first part, I will focus in the second part on the conceptual implications of the Bell theorem, which motivated the Nobel Prize 2022 in physics but whose overall meaning is still a matter of dispute.

Geophysical Imaging of Active Deep Structures Underneath Europe (Joachim Ritter)

Imaging the Deep Earth - Seismic Tomography of the Eifel Mantle Plume

Earthquake waves or seismic waves are elastic waves with propagate through the Earth`s body. Their travel times and amplitudes are studied to image the Earth`s interior from the surface down to the center in the core. Reflected and refracted waves are used to outline discrete impedance contrasts or discontinuities at depth such as boundaries between layers of different rock types or fluid-bearing masses. Tomographic methods image seismic wave velocities and damping properties of the rock masses in 3-D. The basic principles of seismic imaging are explained and applied to the upper mantle underneath the Eifel volcanic fields, Germany. The database is the seismological Eifel Plume Experiment with more than 250 seismic recording stations. The petrophysical interpretation of the seismic images indicates a deep reaching (~400 km) anomaly with increased temperature and melt. About 1% of these melts can reach the surface and they generated the ca. 250 eruption centers in the West and East Eifel Volcanic Fields during the last 700.000 years.

Analysing Earthquakes – Tracking Rupture, Rising Melts, and Fluids below the Laacher See Volcano

Earthquakes are ground motions induced by failure of rock masses or, more seldom, impulsive motions of magmatic melts. Recordings at seismic networks allow us to determine the place (hypocenter) and origin time of seismic sources. The analysis of waveform properties (frequency, polarity etc.) further allow us to characterize the rupture process and deduce geodynamic mechanisms such as reactions to the tectonic stress field or magmatic processes. Since 2014 our group runs a seismic network in the East Eifel Volcanic Field around the Laacher See Volcano (LSV), ca. 20 km NW of the city of Koblenz. LSV erupted ca. 13.000 years ago with a massive explosion including a ca. 40 km high ash plume. The seismic recordings and earthquake locations outline the active Ochtendung Fault Zone southeast of LSV. It is one of the most active earthquake faults in Germany which are typically located in the brittle upper crust down to ca. 15 km depth. A spectacular finding are seismic events that reach down to about 45 km depth, so well into the uppermost mantle. The seismograms of these events have special characteristics, especially a low-frequency content and long duration, which are known world-wide from magmatic earthquakes in active volcanic regions. Our current results outline a translithospheric channel-like anomaly from the upper crust down the mantle in which magmatic melts and fluids seem to rise just southeast of LSV. Preliminary estimates point to 15,000–125,000 cubic meters of melt which are mobile and seismologically detectable in 2014-2021. This process may refill magma chambers at depth, however, another eruption may only take place within the next thousands of years.

Imaging the Alpine Mountains – The Deep Structure of the Alps and New Results from the AlpArray Experiment

The Alpine Mountains (Alps) are mainly the result of the collision between the northward moving African lithospheric plate with the Eurasian continental plate. The high peaks are due to 3-D stresses and dynamic as well as isostatic forces in the lithosphere-asthenosphere system. As many of the basic geodynamic processes operating at depth were controversially discussed between geophysicists and geologists until recently, a major geoscientific initiative has been conducted since 2016 – AlpArray. The heart of AlpArray was a 400 km E-W by 400 km N-S wide seismological experiment with 628 broadband recording stations. This is one of the largest simultaneously operated seismological networks. AlpArray Seismic Network has been deployed with contributions from more than 60 institutions from 11 countries. It was supplemented with additional smaller seismic networks as well as other geophysical measurements and geological field work. The main goal is to map physical properties of the lithosphere and asthenosphere in 3-D and thus to obtain new, high-resolution geophysical images of structures from the surface down to the base of the mantle transition zone (660 km depth). The first results and their implications will be presented as well as some geoscientific aspects of the region around Molveno.

Testing fundamental physics with highly-charged ions (Natalia Oreshkina)

In my lecture, I will discuss highly charged ions and muonic atoms. I will introduce the system and will tell about their special properties. I will present the main limitations of theoretical predictions and discuss whether and how they can be overcome. Finally, I will show how their structure can provide access to nuclear parameters, fundamental constants, new physics beyond the Standard Model and other fundamental concepts.

Superconducting Quantum Sensors (Sebastian Kempf)

In recent years, superconducting quantum sensors have emerged as an outstanding tool to study various type of radiation. They have been and are still strongly advancing the state of the art of instrumentation intended to measure tiniest signals with greatest precision. For this, they combine superconductor-based quantum technology with unique solid-state properties and typically outperform conventional detectors by orders of magnitude in performance. For this reason, they are heavily used in science, society and industry. With that in mind, this lecture series will introduce the operation principles, performance and readout technology of selected types of superconducting quantum sensors and related derivates. It will also give an overview of the wide range of applications of such sensors and will highlight some of these applications like the investigation of the neutrino mass, the study of the cosmic microwave background or radiation metrology.

"Rare is precious" - Can we identify new physics before building more energetic colliders? (Martino Borsato)

The discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012 marked the end of half a century of experimental and theoretical efforts that led to the building of the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. While the SM is complete and as strong as ever, it still leaves some fundamental questions unanswered and fails to account for several observations of astrophysics and cosmology. Answers might be at a higher energy scale, but building a collider more powerful than the LHC will take decades. However, there is a chance we first identify the imprints of new dynamics using precise tests of lower-energy processes that are accessible at present colliders. This approach has proven successful in building the SM and has the potential to guide the future of particle physics. The rare decays of heavy quarks and leptons play a special role in this pursuit and will be the main focus of these lectures. Although they are expected to be forbidden or heavily suppressed in the SM, they could be greatly enhanced by physics beyond the SM and provide a clear sign of its existence. In particular, we will consider the opportunity provided by LHC collisions, where heavy quarks and leptons are produced with rates up to several MHz. We will then discuss the advanced detectors and experimental techniques developed in recent years to take advantage of these collisions to study rare decays, with a particular emphasis on the LHCb experiment.

An introduction to radiation biophysics (Francesco Tommasino)

Ionizing radiations (IR) are capable of interacting with the tissues of our body, and eventually induce modifications in their constituent cells. This has positive and negative aspects. Radiotherapy provides a classical example: on the one hand, we can exploit IR to kill cancer cells, provided that we deliver enough dose to interrupt cell proliferation; on the other hand, IR are not very selective and they can as well damage healthy tissues, resulting in different degrees of toxicity. Side effects related to IR exposure are of interest even outside the therapeutic context; for instance, it is important to know what to expect in case of a nuclear accident, as well as space exploration is affected by specific health risks for the astronauts associated with the exposure to galactic cosmic rays. During the lectures, we will learn the mechanisms that are responsible for IR- induced biological effects. We will show that these effects mostly arise with damage induced to DNA molecules, contained in the cell nucleus. This damage can be repaired (cells are very good in that), mis-repaired (sometimes happens) or not repaired at all (i.e. the goal to achieve for cancer treatment). Starting from the basic mechanisms, we will shortly discuss how IR are exploited in different forms for medical applications, and we will explore currently open research directions in this very interdisciplinary fields.

Quantensimulation of strongly-correlated systems (Philipp Hauke)

Recent years have seen a dramatic advance in the control over quantum devices. Machines consisting, e.g., of cold atoms, trapped ions, or superconducting qubits offer unique possibilities to build quantum many-body systems from the bottom up. These advances make it now possible to implement Feynman’s vision of a quantum simulator, a device that is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics and solves hard quantum many-body problems by measurement in the laboratory.

In these lectures, we will learn the basics of quantum simulators, including where they offer a potential advantage over classical numerics. We will get first experience with two common approaches to quantum simulation, digital and analog. For the digital approach, we will learn the algorithms of Trotterization and qdrift. For the analog approach, we will learn how low-energy effective Hamiltonians can be engineered using perturbative Schrieffer-Wolff transformation, enabled by suitable design of separation of energy scales. The approaches will be illustrated using examples from current research, including digital quantum simulation of gauge theories and analog quantum simulation of disordered strongly-correlated systems such as the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model.

With these lectures, you will obtain the necessary basics to understand how quantum simulation works, to judge its efficiency, and to design basic algorithms.

Chemical abundances of stars: how they shape astronomy from Galactic to planetary scale (Chiara Battistini)

The Milky Way is the Galaxy that we can study in more detail thanks to the access to detailed chemical abundances and kinematic information for part of its stars. Knowing the composition and the kinematics of stars is an essential tool to understand how our Galaxy formed and evolved and to compare computational models with the observations. Of course this is also important to understand how galaxies formed and evolved in general. On a smaller scale, in recent years, chemical abundances in stars turned out to be very important also to understand how planets formed and why certain exoplanetary systems look so different from our Solar System. Most of the information that we have regarding chemical abundances and kinematics of stars is usually coming from an area around our Sun (Solar Neighbourhood). Thanks to the instrumentation development and big observational campaigns we can now have data from a wider area and for many more stars. In this respect, big surveys are collecting or planning to collect spectroscopic data for millions of stars and the space mission Gaia provided accurate kinematics properties for a billion stars. These lectures will cover an introduction to stellar evolution and what information can be derived from stellar spectra with a focus on the properties of the different Galactic components and the connection stars-planets. Finally I will show how we can get useful data using Galactic surveys, with particular focus on 4MOST that will start next year and where Heidelberg is one of the key partners.

Active matter: patterns, self-propulsion, function (Falko Ziebert)

Active matter uses local energy sources or fluxes to perform processes that are not possible in thermodynamic equilibrium, like pattern formation and self-structuring governed by intrinsic processes, or self-propulsion of single, and collective motion of ensembles of particles. Prominent examples from the living world are swimming bacteria, or crawling and/or force-exerting animal cells on substrates or in tissues. Inspired by these biological examples, in the last 15 years a variety of synthetic model systems have been developed. I will give an overview of the mechanisms used in biology and of the underlying physics concepts. Then I will discuss how these can be used to design synthetic systems.