50 Years of Physics Institute III at RWTH
Around 200 guests celebrated the 50 year anniversary of the RWTH Physics Institute III during a celebratory colloquium. Even Ranga Yogeshwar, who completed his Diplom at the institute in 1984, made a guest appearance. After Professor Helmut Faissner founded the Institute of Physics III in 1963, the institute's research focused on elementary particles and their interactions at the highest energies.
In the following years, the physicists actively shaped a number of international experiments at the biggest collider facilities around the world, such as the LHC at CERN in Genf, and observations for cosmic particles, like the IceCube Experiment at the South Pole and the Pierre Auger Observatorium in the Argentinian pampa.
The institute, currently headed by Professors Thomas Hebbeker and Achim Stahl, has contributed to the fields of colliders, detectors, computing, data analyses, and theoretical calculations. Research successes range from the discovery of the neutral weak interaction in the 70s to a new particle in 2012 – likely the long sought Higgs particle.