Summary of the Hungarian-German WE-Heraeus Seminar
About 50 participants from Hungary, Germany and beyond filled the four-day event with thrilling talks and lively discussions. From 2022 to 2024, the Hungarian specialists met in Budapest. Organizing the event with German partners as a Hungarian-German WE-Heraeus Seminar this year surely was a signal to be available for more collaborations. A signal that was certainly noticed and has already led to promising first exchanges.
The topic of the seminar, “Particles and plasmas in strong fields”, is highly relevant. It outlines the scientific basis for investigating matter at high energy densities. Such states of matter at extremely high temperatures and densities occur in thermonuclear fusion plasmas (in stars and in laboratories), in planetary interiors as well as in the early Universe and in the final stages of stellar evolution. They can be recreated in terrestrial laboratories, e.g., with ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions and with ultrashort, ultrahigh intensity laser collisions.
With experts from these areas present in Görlitz, some new research endeavors have been discussed and initiated. A case in point is a project kicked off by Dr. Gergely Gábor Barnaföldi (group leader at HUN-REN Wigner Research Centre for Physics, Budapest, Hungary) and Prof. David Blaschke (University of Wrocław and Visiting Faculty at CASUS) who plan to search for signals of the quark deconfinement transition in dense matter.
Additional information:
Prof. David Blaschke
CASUS Visiting Faculty
Center for Advanced Systems Understanding at HZDR and University of Wrocław
Media contact:
Dr. Martin Laqua
Officer Communications, Press and Public Relations Center for Advanced Systems Understanding (CASUS) at HZDR
Click on the pictures to read the captions / Source of all images: CASUS/Marek Koprowski
However, it wasn’t just the established experts who had the opportunity to exchange ideas at the event. Young researchers were also offered a platform, which they gladly accepted. In addition to a best poster award, the organizers awarded a prize for the best presentation by a young scientist. The prizes were sponsored by the WE-Heraeus Foundation and the MDPI Journal “Particles”. The decisions were made on the basis of votes from a jury of six experts.
The seminar, held partly in Dresden, partly in Görlitz, also included two excursions. The first one was organized at the Institute of Radiation Physics at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf where the participants were introduced to the different laser systems available. Here, Brazilian physicist Constantino Tsallis, a keynote speaker of the event, encountered experimental data that might once more verify the predictions made by q-statistics (by now also known as Tsallis statistics). The scientists agreed to follow up on this. The second excursion led the participants to the German Center for Astrophysics in Görlitz where Prof. Günther Hasinger, the designated Founding Director, gave an introduction to the main goals and the structure of the newly established research center. Hasinger and his team were also present at the seminar discussing new research avenues into the quark gluon plasma phase transition to hadronic matter in cosmology with specialists from University of Rostock, Wrocław University, CASUS and others.
“We have especially enjoyed this well-organized bi-national seminar very much,” says Prof. Tamás S. Biro (HUN-REN Wigner Research Centre for Physics, Budapest, Hungary). As part of the government-funded Hungarian Research Network HUN-REN, the Wigner Research Centre for Physics (Wigner RCP) is one of the best places for physical science in Hungary. The HUN-REN Wigner RCP operates a large high-performance computing cluster and is embedded in the global scientific network, e.g. via the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN and the European Space Agency ESA. Biro adds: “Thanks to this event, we could enrich our network and build new ties with German institutions. We could inform each other about actual research progress and unsolved problems, too.” Prof. David Blaschke, like Biro part of the event’s organizing committee, never tires to mention the necessary backing needed to hold such an event: “We would like to express our gratitude to the WE-Heraeus Foundation, whose generous support made this bi-national seminar a successful and unforgettable event for all participants.”
For more impressions of the event, head over to our YouTube channel and watch the event videos (1, 2).
