QURS Days 2025Quantum Universe graduate week brings together young scientists

22 April 2025

Photo: UHH/Michael Grefe

Participants actively participating at the poster session of the QURS Days

For the second time, the Research School of the Cluster of Excellence Quantum Universe QURS invited young talents from astro- and particle physics as well as mathematical physics from the University of Hamburg and the research centre DESY to a science and networking event. Highlights of the graduate week were a poster session including a prize for the best poster, and the annual presentation of Best Paper Awards for outstanding scientific contributions by early career researchers.

One of the primary goals of the Quantum Universe Research School is to foster the exchange and education of early career researchers within the Cluster of Excellence, and beyond its borders in closely related fields of research at University of Hamburg and DESY. The annual graduate week is the perfect platform for young talents to meet, learn from each other and senior scientists, present their research, and get insights into what else is happening beyond their groups in the areas of astro-, particle and mathematical physics in Hamburg. The QURS Days took place in mid-February and were extended by a Quantum Universe Day.

Learning from each other

On the schedule of the QURS Days were introductory and advanced courses on the research fields of Quantum Universe by local experienced scientists as well as external guests. Former Beate Naroska Junior Guest Professor Gudrun Wanner (Leibniz Universität Hannover) led through the world of Gravitational Waves. Jennifer Schober (University of Bonn), another Beate Naroska Junior Guest Professor, talked about the link between Dark Matter Research and Cosmology. Local scientists Katharina Behr (DESY), Hyungjin Kim (DESY), Johannes Braathen (DESY), Gudrid Moortgat-Pick (UHH), and Timo Weigand (UHH) gave lectures on Higgs physics, Dark Matter, Gravitational Waves and Quantum Theories, respectively. Beyond pure science, participants had the chance to learn about their role a young leader in a workshop with Mathias Meyer. DESY scientist Juliette Alimena offered a course on “Best practices of software development”.

Elevate your research

Fifteen early career researchers took the chance to give an elevator pitch of their work which was followed by a poster session showcasing their research in detail to the audience. The audience then voted for the best poster. Sarah Bianco from the DESY Theory Group received the “Best Poster Award” for her presentation of “Photo- and Hadrodisintegration constraints on relics decaying into neutrinos”.

Awards, awards, awards

Every year, the Cluster of Excellence Quantum Universe highlights a number of outstanding scientific contributions of early career researchers by awarding the “Best Paper Awards”.  This time, seven young scientists were selected by the committee and celebrated during a joint dinner:

• Valentina Guglielmi, Reweighting simulated events using machine-learning techniques in the CMS experiment, arXiv:2411.03023.
• Jonathan Kley, Small instanton-induced flavor invariants and the axion potential, JHEP 06 (2024) 156.
• Anna-Malin Lemke, Beyond the Background: Gravitational-wave Anisotropy and Continuous Waves from Supermassive Black Hole Binaries, Astrophys. J. 965 (2024) 2, 164.
• Florent Baume, On higher-spin points and infinite distances in conformal manifolds, JHEP 12 (2023) 163.
• Andrea Cardini, Search for bottom quark associated production of the standard model Higgs boson in final states with leptons in proton-proton collisions at √s = 13 TeV, Phys. Lett. B 860 (2025) 139173.
• Anna Hallin, OmniJet-α: the first cross-task foundation model for particle physics, Mach. Learn.: Sci. Technol. 5 (2024) 035031.
• Craig Lawrie, Intermediate defect groups, polarization pairs, and noninvertible duality defects,  Phys. Rev. D 109 (2024) 2, 026005.

Tricky questions

The second day of the QURS Days saw a fun and relaxed evening with a Pub Quiz organised by the Early Career Council. Here again, it was all about science but, as the crew from “Science Pub Quiz” proved and the participants witnessed, in a very different way.