GIST – Girls In Space-Time

On Monday, October 24, 2011, the workshop "GIST - Girls in Space-Time" took place at the Leibniz Universität Hannover within the frame of the autumn university, which was organized by the school portal uniKIK. The GIST workshop was conducted as part of the Cluster of Excellence QUEST - Centre for Quantum Engineering and Space-Time Research.

After a lecture by Professor Silke Ospelkaus about physics in QUEST and their personal experiences as a scientist, a lively discussion with the 29 students has developed with an intensive exchange of information between students and scientists of QUEST. Afterwards, the guests were guided in smaller groups through four laboratories of QUEST, in order to see live experiments at the quantum limit.

In QUEST, highly motivated scientists from various disciplines try to answer basic physical questions such as: "How did the big bang work?" or "Are fundamental constants really constant?".

The basic research findings and methods are also used to develop new applications.

Particular attention is devoted to the investigation of space and time. So here is the most accurate clock in the world to be developed as well as the most accurate measurements of length changes to be done as a consequence of gravitational waves. It is necessary to develop novel sensors, which operate at the limit of what can be describe by today's theories in quantum physics.

During the lab tour, experiments were shown in which the coldest matter in the universe can be generated. In this particular state, atoms no longer behave as particles, but much more like wave packets. So it is possible to produce the so-called matter waves. These are then examined under conditions of zero gravity towards their special behavior. The main goal is to learn more about the behavior of the universe as is, for example to check Einstein’s equivalence principle, and to use the obtained results and knowledge for the development of future sensors.