Dr. Fuchs officially started her position as a Junior Professor on the topic of “Theoretical High Energy Physics with Cold Atoms”, with a joint appointment at LUH and PTB on June 1st, 2021. She will be integrated into the Institute for Fundamental Physics of Metrology at PTB, the Institute for Theoretical Physics in the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics and the QUEST Leibniz Research School at the Leibniz University of Hannover. She was hired in the framework of the Cluster of Excellence QuantumFrontiers. In addition to beginning her Junior Professorship, she will carry out a distinguished Senior Research Fellowship at CERN until October 2022 and further establish her international standing as a theoretical particle physicist. She can also use this opportunity for strengthening collaborations between LUH, PTB and CERN, while serving as an ambassador at CERN for precision studies of new physics at low energies.
Jun. Prof. Dr. Fuchs grew up in Hannover, completed her B.Sc. and M.Sc. at the University of Göttingen and her PhD at DESY and the Universität of Hamburg on the topic of “Interference effects in new physics processes at the LHC”, especially in the context of Higgs physics. After her PhD, she carried out research as a Minerva Fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and after four years started a Feodor-Lynen Fellowship at Fermilab and the University of Chicago in the USA. Her research has consistently focused on particle physics beyond the Standard Model with atoms and colliders, which makes her predestined and ideally suited to carry out research on the topic of “Theoretical High Energy Physics with Cold Atoms”.
Research on precision measurements for particle physics
This new Junior Professorship is an important strategic development for the Excellence Cluster QuantumFrontiers. The research of Jun. Prof. Dr. Fuchs will support and guide the future directions of various precision experiments with optical clocks and matter wave interferometers within the Excellence Cluster QuantumFrontiers collaborating within the Topical Group “Tests of Fundamental Physics”. Namely, Jun. Prof. Elina Fuchs’ research will interpret models of particle physics in the context of these precision measurements and will pursue new models at the boundaries of the current theories, which can be tested by these precision measurements. For example, her research work will synergistically augment research on optical clocks based on highly charged ions and the advances anticipated within the ERC Advanced grant FunClocks recently received by Prof. Dr. Schmidt at PTB and LUH.
Strengthening collaborations between LUH, PTB and CERN
Furthermore, Jun. Prof. Dr. Fuchs looks forward to working on both low-energy, high-precision observables, and high-energy collider physics for New Physics searches, both at CERN and in Hannover/Braunschweig. Within the CERN Quantum Technology Initiative (which includes Quantum Sensing for New Physics searches) there is also a theory initiative, and she plans to hire new PhD students and integrate them as well as collaborators in QuantumFrontiers into joint projects within this initiative. She will not only initiate new collaborative ties between CERN and QuantumFrontiers, but also within QuantumFrontiers she will be a keystone collaborator in joint projects between LUH and PTB.
During her initial time at CERN as a Senior Research Fellow, she will already start to involve the students and PhDs from LUH, with a block lecture on Particle Physics and research projects, respectively.