Extension for Transregional Collaborative Research Center

The transregional collaborative research center focused on "Particle Physics Phenomenology after the Higgs Discovery” was first launched in 2019. The German Research Foundation (DFG) has now officially announced a four-year extension.

The University of Siegen will maintain its top-level international research in the field of elementary particle physics for years to come. Transregional Collaborative Research Center 257 (TRR 257), centering on "Particle Physics Phenomenology after the Higgs Discovery," has been extended. The new funding was officially announced by the German Research Foundation (DFG). TRR 257 began in 2019 together with their colleagues at partner universities Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (lead university) and RWTH Aachen. The grant renewal will fund the highly successful TRR 257 cooperation for at least four more years.

"After establishing two collaborative research centers in the media sciences in recent years, the extension of the physics collaborative research center shows how the University of Siegen is well positioned to conduct research in multiple fields at the highest level, and to raise the university’s international profile. This speaks volumes about the strength of Siegen’s overall research portfolio. Our gratitude goes first and foremost to our colleagues, whose hard work has certainly paid off," praised University Rector Dr. Holger Burckhart. "I’m grateful that the assessors saw the value of our work during the first grant period and that the DFG is providing continued funding," says Prof. Thomas Mannel, co-spokesman of the transregional collaborative research center.

As part of ""Particle Physics Phenomenology after the Higgs Discovery," researchers are exploring questions related to the fundamental makeup of the universe itself. The discovery of the "Higgs boson" by CERN in 2012 completed the so-called standard model of particle physics. This standard model describes all microcosmic phenomena currently known to humankind, including fermions, bosons — and the Higgs particles. Yet there remain cosmological phenomena that the standard model cannot explain, such as dark matter, which makes up roughly one-quarter of the matter in the universe. This is where TRR 257 has focused its attention, with researchers seeking to form a comprehensive image of potential physics beyond the standard model.

One key element in this effort is CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. Using cutting-edge theoretical methods, the researchers in Siegen, Karlsruhe, and Aachen are seeking to create theoretical predictions for future data analysis on the LHC — with the hope of shedding more light on the nature of dark matter.

The foundation for the pan-regional collaborative research center was laid almost ten years ago. From 2013 to 2019, researchers in Siegen and the TU Dortmund worked under the title “Quark Flavor Physics and Effective Field Theories,” researching the properties of the fundamental building blocks of matter. TRR 257 has built on that successful research — and will continue to do so for the next four years.