Department of Physics and Astronomy, Aarhus University

Three Carlsberg Foundation grants awarded to researchers at our department Carlsberg Foundation has awarded grants to 188 new scientific activities. Three of these have been given to our researchers. Jesper Olsen and Søren Ulstrup have received Infrastructure grants to develop Accelerator Mass Spectrometry and femtosecond photoemision spectroscopy and PhD Anders Nygaard has been given an Internalisation fellowship grant for optimising cosmological emulators. https://lnkd.in/dpmFvvNd Congratulations all 🎉 Faculty of Natural Sciences - Aarhus University

Building Labs, Inspiring Minds: Cheers to Lars H. Andersen's Remarkable Career 🎉 Yesterday, we celebrated Lars Andersen, who has been a part of our department in almost 50 years 👏. Since Lars first set foot in the department as a young student in 1976, he has come a long way as a researcher, a colleague and a leader. Starting in a time, when articles were drafted by hand, Lars built his research, his laboratory, and his group. Alongside his research, Lars spent 7 much respected years as Head of Department and stepped in as Dean of Faculty of Natural Sciences - Aarhus University. To celebrate Lars, our department held a symposium with entertaining and interesting presentations from colleagues Henrik Pedersen, Henning Schmidt and Steen Brøndsted, followed by a reception where Lars demonstrated one of the traits he is well known for - the ability to capture an audience. We are happy, that when Lars retires, he will continue as an emeritus of the department 😊.

Our department will soon have brand new teaching laboratories with a focus on quantum technology! Novo Nordisk Foundation recently granted 8.4 million DKK to the project QTLab: Quantum Teaching Lab at Aarhus University, led by Aurelien Dantan, for the establishment of ten quantum experimental setups at the department.   These setups, inspired by the local state-of-the-art research activities within photonics, trapped ions and quantum gases, will allow us to offer various pedagogical activities to a broad audience - from high-school students and teachers to bachelor/master/PhD students. The activities let the audience get acquainted with the counter-intuitive world of photons and atoms and to get hands-on experience with the workings of quantum computers and simulators.   We are looking forward to starting the activities 🙂 Faculty of Natural Sciences - Aarhus University

🎵 It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas 🎵 Last week was marked by Christmas and traditions. 🌲 We have had both children's Christmas, seen Tågekammeret walk Lucia and held a Christmas party for all employees. At the latter, "The Silicon Conductors" performed to everyone's great pleasure. Thank you for a festive week

Just as our associate professor Christoffer Karoff describes, we very much enjoy the beauty of the yellow bricks and the green park surrounding the buildings of our campus. We are fortunate to have a great view of the park from our tallest building🙂.

Last week we said a warm farewell and sincere thank you to leader of the Mechanical Group Anders Damgaard, following his many years as a dedicated part of our department.   Anders is known to be organized, committed and a keen cyclist – he will ride his bike 30 km to work and actually enjoy it🚴♂️.   We celebrated Anders, as tradition prescribes, in the our workshop, while enjoying hotdogs prepared in the homemade barbecue.

Low Pressure Wind Tunnel crew prove prediction made over 100 years ago   Under our car park Jens Jacob Iversen, Keld Rasmussen and Jon Merrison run the wind tunnel, which supports research in a wide range of fields such as planetology, volcanology, meteorology and the study of aerosols.   The discovery was made as a result of what was initially thought to be a measurement error but was later identified as an intriguing physical effect in fluid dynamics. The authors believe that this work contributes to a better understanding and improved implementation of Pitot tube wind sensors, which are widely used in both industry and research.

Two exciting days in the Aualen with focus on space research and technology are over. Aarhus Universitet hosted this year's National Space Conference arranged by Uddannelses- og Forskningsstyrelsen, CenSec - Center for Defence, Space & Security and our very own Aarhus Space Centre. There were exciting talks about the new space strategy with Poul Nissen, Lone Ryg Olsen, Mikkel Haarder and Gorm Kofoed Petersen, key note speakers from ESA Professor Carole Mundell and Andreas Mogensen and much more - all moderated by Tine Gøtzsche. Thank you to all participants for joining!

Tours, talks and chats - our junior researchers meet at the annual Get-Together Last week, our postdocs gathered for the annual Postdoc Get-Together event, where our young researchers enjoyed networking, sharing research, and explored new collaborations. The program featured nice presentations and a guided tour of our computer cluster. Particularly the lab tours were popular, as a window into the work the different groups do. This year’s Postdoc Get-Together was organized by our two postdocs Chakradhar Sahoo and Gesa Siemann and supported by the department Committee for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

The government's new space strategy has been presented, and Hans Kjeldsen gives his take on why it is important and what it means for AU to host the Space Conference on 26-27/11.