Millions in Funding for Particle Physics in Heidelberg

Particle physicists at Heidelberg University have been awarded funding for their research at the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva. Over the next three years, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) will provide more than nine million euros for work on the ATLAS, ALICE, and LHCb experiments at the LHC. Related theory projects were also approved. After a two-year break, the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN European Nuclear Research Centre has resumed operations and has been delivering new data since the beginning of June. "The past two years were marked by very difficult and hard upgrade work," says Hans-Christian Schultz-Coulon of the Heidelberg Kirchhoff Institute for Physics. Now the LHC has been "relaunched" with increased energy, an improved accelerator and improved experiments. At a record energy of 13 teraelectronvolts (TeV), protons are once again colliding within the particle detectors.