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Studierende sitzt am Arbeitsplatz und schaut auf den Laptop. © Aliona Kardash​/​TU Dortmund
Particle and astroparticle physics

Physicists publish review in Nature Reviews Physics

© Daniel Lopez
Common issues in particle and astroparticle physics, which use large telescopes such as MAGIC, are to be systematically investigated in future.
Particle and astroparticle physics researchers at TU Dortmund University, together with colleagues from Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) and Bergische Universität Wuppertal (BUW), have published a comprehensive review in the renowned journal Nature Reviews Physics. The publication presents an approach to systematically investigate common questions in particle and astroparticle physics. In future, this could help to significantly improve both the understanding of fundamental interactions and the interpretation of astrophysical observations.

The publication is related to the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 1491 "Cosmic Interacting Matters", which is based at RUB and combines theoretical astrophysical models with experimental observations. TU Dortmund University and the University of Wuppertal are also involved in the CRC. The research combines two central questions of modern physics: How well do the laws of particle physics, which we know from the laboratory, describe the processes in the universe? And are the differences between measurements of cosmic particle collisions and the predictions from laboratory experiments indications of new physical phenomena?

In the current review, which emerged from a meeting of experts at BUW, the authors shed light on how so-called event generators - programs for simulating hadron collisions - can be used both in accelerator experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and in astroparticle experiments. While these generators are successfully used to describe collisions in the laboratory, they often reach their limits when interpreting data from cosmic ray experiments. The review shows that the complementarity between accelerator and astroparticle experiments can be exploited by uniformly fitting these models to data from both research fields. This can provide new insights into the nature of hadron collisions and increase model accuracy for both laboratory experiments and astrophysical observations.

Several working groups from TU Dortmund University are involved in the research: Astroparticle physicists led by Professor Wolfgang Rhode, who use data from several large experiments such as IceCube in Antarctica or MAGIC on La Palma, as well as particle physicists led by Professors Johannes Albrecht and Kevin Kröninger, who are involved in the LHCb and ATLAS experiments at CERN in Switzerland, and Dr. Felix Riehn, who is researching the modelling of hadron collisions in accelerator and astroparticle experiments.

To the review

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