Imaging of Matter
Four great days
26 June 2019
For four days, Hamburg's universities and science institutes turned the Rathausmarkt into a public campus. The Universität Hamburg had the largest program on site at the Summer of Knowledge from 20 to 23 June - including the cluster of excellence CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter, which presented itself with partners from the Bahrenfeld campus in the jointly designed high-tech tent and the culture pavilion.
Placed clearly visible in the middle of the large high-tech tent, the DESY accelerator model attracted visitors to the exhibition from the outside. For this purpose, CUI, DESY, MPSD, XFEL, EMBL and CSSB had designed a joint poster exhibition. It ran along the inner walls of the tent and described the research on the campus in Bahrenfeld under the heading "Light of the Future". For example, the guests learned how accelerators are used, how X-rays are generated, how and for what purpose the research groups use them, and what applications basic research can lead to.
In line with this, changing research groups presented their work: PD Markus Perbandt, for example, used 3D technology to explain the relationship between structure and function, Prof. Henning Tidow and his team showed protein crystals under the microscope. As always a crowd-puller: the group of Prof. Markus Drescher, who burst balloons filled with confetti on the heads of the guests, recorded the whole thing with a high-speed camera and processed it to take away by stick.
Next door, in the small high-tech tent, the "Light & Schools" school laboratory under the direction of Bastian Besner and Dr. Jonas Siegl had set up craft and experiment stations, where everything revolved around the topic of light. Even smaller children were able to build a spectroscope here and were introduced to physical research in a playful way. Just as creatively, a team from Prof. Henry Chapman's group approached high mathematics a few steps further in the Culture Pavilion: in "Painting after Fourier", a computer program created a highly complex diffraction image from a simple drawing in a matter of seconds - with the name and photo of the artist and wrapped in foil to take away.
A series of lectures also offered pure science: Dr. Philipp Wessels, for example, explained how a laser works, Dr. Hans Behringer talked about the world of ultrasound.
The Universität Hamburg alone had around 80 offers in its program. With this event - the largest knowledge event in Hamburg's history - the city honored the university for its centenary. More than 70 scientists from the Universität Hamburg gave visitors exciting insights into their research, invited them to try out and experiment and answered their questions. The response was overwhelming: more than 50,000 visitors came to the Summer of Knowledge.Text: CUI, UHH