Mainz-Frankfurt CosmoCoffee 2026

Tuesday 21 Apr 2026, 08:00 → 21:30 Europe/Berlin

Room (FIAS, Campus Riedberg, Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main)

Laura Sagunski, Julia Harz (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz), Daniel Schmitt (Goethe University, Frankfurt), Pedro Schwaller, Carlos Tamarit (Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz), Christopher Gerlach (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz)

We are happy to announce that the fifth Mainz-Frankfurt-CosmoCoffee workshop will take place on April 21st, 2026, from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. in Frankfurt a.M.

The goal of the Mainz-Frankfurt-CosmoCoffee is to bring together the researchers from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and Goethe University Frankfurt working on cosmology and enhance our current and future exchange. 
The program will include a plenary talk by Kim Berghaus (KIT) and three sessions of shorter contributed talks.

We will close the workshop with a common dinner at 6.00 pm. We will announce the restaurant once we have confirmation.

 
For the registration for our Mainz-Frankfurt-Münster CosmoCoffee workshop, please sign up until 10th April 2026 at 11.59 pm.

We’re looking forward to seeing you there! 

09:30 Coffee and Snacks

1 Welcome

Speaker: Daniel Schmitt (Goethe University, Frankfurt)

2 CONTRIBUTED

11:15 Break

3 CONTRIBUTED

12:30 Lunch Break

13:30 Coffee

4 The strong force could have heated the Universe’s first moment

In a recent breakthrough we showed that the strong nuclear force of the Standard Model may have generated the heat of the hot Big Bang itself. It is widely believed that cosmic inflation, the era of accelerated expansion in the infant universe, occurred while the cosmos was cold and empty, requiring some unknown process to subsequently generate the hot plasma we observe. Our work demonstrates that the early universe may have instead been immersed in a hot bath of known elementary particles during inflation. The proposed mechanism couples gluons, which mediate the strong force in atomic nuclei, with an axion-like particle that drives inflation. This coupling induces friction that provides the energy to heat the inflating universe. In this talk, I will show that “warm inflation” (a hypothesis first proposed in 1995) is viable using Standard Model particles and yields testable predictions for upcoming observations. Implications for strong CP and dark matter will be discussed.

Speaker: Kim Berghaus

15:00 Break

5 CONTRIBUTED

18:00 Common dinner