About us
Our institute strives to describe and understand a broad range of physical phenomena, or in general: physical reality, by using a large variety of mathematical concepts and methods. Because the success of a theory is ultimately measured by its agreement with experiment, theoretical physics is closely linked to the field of experimental physics.
These experiments are not restricted to physics in the narrow sense; our work has strongly ties to chemistry and the life sciences, as well as to astrophysics and cosmology. Mathematics and computational science play a key role. They provide most of the basic tools that theoretical physicists rely on.
Our research is organized into two themes:
Condensed-Matter Theory, Statistical and Computational Physics
Our aim is to obtain a detailed understanding of the collective behaviour of many-particle systems from a fully microscopic point of view.
String Theory, Cosmology and Elementary Particles
We study of physics at the smallest distance scales to understand and describe the elementary constituents of matter and their interactions as well as their implications for cosmology. We develop physical models of the largest scales of the Universe as well as of its most extreme environments, which can be put to the test by existing and upcoming experiments in cosmology and gravitational waves.