Climate change is one of the most pressing societal and economic issues, but also one of the most complex scientific challenges. While there is overwhelming evidence that anthropogenic climate change is already happening, uncertainties in climate change projections have remained very large. For instance, current estimates of the equilibrium global-mean warming in response to a doubling of...
The current energy system finds itself at the beginning of a transformation process of which until now only targets and fundamental determinants are known. To meet the strategic goal of a medium global warming of under 1.5-2 K, a drastic reduction of greenhouse gases until 2050 is necessary. The energy system in the long run will have to work without fossil hydrocarbons. Some industrial...
Quantum-mechanical simulations have become massively used tools for scientific discovery and technological advancement: thanks to their predictive power they can suggest, accelerate, support or even substitute actual physical experiments. This is a far-reaching paradigm shift, replacing the cost- and time-scales of brick-and-mortar facilities, equipment, and personnel with those, very...
Flavour physics represents one of the most interesting and, at the same time, less understood sector of the Standard Model. After a brief introduction to this filed, I will focus the attention to a series of recent results in B physics which seem to indicate a coherent pattern of deviations from the Standard Model predictions. I review these hints, addressing theoretical uncertainties and...
The early development of highly segmented and very precise silicon particle detectors happened historically in field of high energy physics in the early 1980’s. At the time this was very much driven by the needs in particle physics experiments to detect and identity pico-second long lived particles, containing beauty and charm quarks. The presentation will give a brief historical overview of...
The European Physical Society celebrates its 50th anniversary. With a series of events and actions, the EPS remembers this year its foundation that took place in 1968 at CERN and at the University of Geneva. Under the impulsion of the Italian physicist Gilberto Bernardini, the creation of this truly international cooperative venture in physics became reality with the aim to contribute to the...
In the 1980s, femtosecond ultrafast lasers enabled optical generation of electric fields at terahertz frequencies. With the recent progress in few-optical-cycle femtosecond and attosecond pulse generation with full electric field control, the frequency regime can be extended into the petahertz. The electron motion under the influence of such a high-frequency electric field ultimately...
Photonic quantum devices based on atomic vapours at room temperature combine the advantages of atomic vapours being intrinsically reproducible and highly nonlinear with scalability and integrability. We show the integration of photonic and electronic components into vapour cells and a first demonstration of an on-demand single-photon source based on four-wave mixing (FWM) and the Rydberg...
Modern cosmology postulates dark matter and dark energy. They may be bypassed with generalised theories of gravity, inevitably introducing new scalar, vector, or tensor fields. The gauge fields of particle physics motivate bosonic vector fields. Promising candidates result in Proca-like theories, which can be generalised to scalar-vector-tensor theories. These will have rich cosmological and...
Fusion reactions hold enormous potential for clean, sustainable energy production from more equitably distributed resources, but a demonstration of technical and economic viability remains to be carried out. The ITER tokamak, now under construction in France, represents an essential step toward a practical technical demonstration of fusion energy. This talk will provide a perspective of where...
The International System of Units (SI) is the modern form of the metric system. It is today the authoritative basis for measurement all over the world.
The definitions of the SI base units require periodic revision in order to take scientific and technical developments into account. This is the only way in which the increasing demands on measurement accuracy can be satisfied.
Work on a...
