Exploring extreme states of matter with an ultra-bright X-ray free-electron laser In this talk, we will review recent progress in high-energy density physics using the world’s brightest X-ray source, the Linac Coherent Light Source, SLAC's free electron X-ray laser. These experiments investigate laser-driven matter in extreme conditions where powerful X-ray...

The VO And Why It Matters To You In the most technical words, the Virtual Observatory (VO) is an effort to enable uniform and efficient access to astronomical data. With more glitz, it is like the Web and Google, only for data. In this talk I will try to convince...

Project 8 - towards a radio frequency measurement of the neutrino mass While neutrino flavour oscillations are a clear indication that neutrinos do have non-vanishing rest masses, their values have so far not been established experimentally. The state-of-the-art experiment KATRIN has recently set a limit for the effective electron neutrino...

The core of the matter – spatially resolving the nuclei of Active Galaxies with VLTI/GRAVITY One of the most exciting opportunities offered by the new VLT beam combiner GRAVITY is to directly resolve the immediate regions around the super-massive black holes (SMBHs) in the centres of active galaxies (AGN), i.e....

Measuring the properties of cosmic rays with the radio technique The radio emission from air showers is now routinely detected to measure the properties of cosmic rays. An overview is given on recent experimental activities, including observations with the LOFAR radio telescope and the Auger Engineering Radio Array at the...

Axions from Sun? Exploring the low-energy frontier with the IAXO experiment Axions are ultralight hypothetical particles originally postulated to explain the observed smallness of the neutron´s electric dipole moment and its connection with the so-called strong CP-problem, i.e. the fact that QCD allows for CP violation while Nature apparently does...

HAWC

Cosmic-ray acceleration - limits and laboratories I will review the current theoretical status of shock acceleration at supernova type shocks, with an emphasis on the plasma theory and implications for limitation on maximum energy. The current hypotheses will be put to the test in a surprising scaled down laboratory, the...

The Crab nebula and pulsar - particle acceleration at the limit The Crab Nebula is the front-page object of multi-wavelength astrophysics and an excellent object to study non-thermal emission and particle acceleration. The Crab Pulsar powers the extreme accelerator regions that inject an ultra-relativistic plasma into the surrounding nebula. The...

Up to two billion times acceleration of scientific simulations with deep neural architecture search Computer simulations are invaluable tools for scientific discovery. However, accurate simulations are often slow to execute, which limits their applicability to extensive parameter exploration, large-scale data analysis, and uncertainty quantification. A promising route to accelerate simulations...

Identifying sources of high-energy neutrinos of the AGN type: A theoretical approach Active galactic nuclei (AGN) have long been predicted to emit neutrinos if they host sites of cosmic-ray acceleration to very high energies. Until a few years ago neutrino astrophysics was merely a prediction by (some) cosmic-ray theorists. It...