6 April 2022

Photo: UHH/Quantum Universe

Best Paper Award winners (from top left to bottom right): María Olalla Olea Romacho, Paul Frederik Depta, Quentin Bonnefoy, Adinda de Wit, Niklas Henke, Sascha Diefenbacher.

From March 29 to 31, 2022, the third annual meeting of the Cluster of Excellence Quantum Universe took place. Along with scientific presentations, the program included contributions on future perspectives of the four research areas of the Cluster, the honoring of the Beate Naroska Guest Professors and the awarding of young researchers for outstanding scientific publications.

Every year at the end of March, researchers from all career stages of the Cluster of Excellence Quantum Universe come together at the annual meeting which lasts several days. In addition to parallel scientific sessions from the four research areas Higgs physics, quantum theories, gravitational waves and dark matter, the researchers discussed visions for the future of the research areas. For the first time, the program included a "What is...?" session, a format exclusively by and for young researchers, in which they exchanged ideas about their research areas across disciplines. In the future, this format will be an integral part of the Cluster of Excellence's project meetings which take place several times a year.

The recipients of the Beate Naroska Senior and Junior Guest Professorships 2021 were honored during a ceremonial colloquium. Prof. Dr. Halina Abramowicz (Tel Aviv University) and Dr. Emanuela Dimastrogiovanni (University of Groningen) received the award for pioneering research in particle physics and cosmology as well as for their commitment to gender equality in physics. The Guest Professorship Program is named after particle physicist Beate Naroska (1943-2008), who taught and conducted research at the Universität Hamburg and the DESY research center.

Once a year, Quantum Universe honors six outstanding scientific publications by young researchers in astrophysics, particle physics and mathematical physics in Hamburg with the Best Paper Awards. This year the awards went to

• Quentin Bonnefoy: The seeds of EFT double copy, arXiv:2112.11453 (submitted to JHEP).
• Paul Frederik Depta: Dark Matter from Exponential Growth, Phys. Rev. Lett. 127, 191802 (2021).
• Sascha Diefenbacher: GANplifying event samples, SciPost Phys. 10, 139 (2021).
• Adinda de Wit: Search for decays of the 125 GeV Higgs boson into a Z boson and a ρ or ϕ meson, JHEP 11 (2020) 039.
• Niklas Henke: Singularities of eight- and nine-particle amplitudes from cluster algebras and tropical geometry, JHEP 10 (2021) 007.
• María Olalla Olea Romacho: Fate of electroweak symmetry in the early Universe: non-restoration and trapped vacua in the N2HDM, JCAP 06 (2021) 018.