Michael Krämer Fest

Monday 19 Oct 2026, 13:00 → 20:00 Europe/Zurich

MBP1 026 (Physikzentrum )

To celebrate Michael Krämer's 60th birthday, we are organizing a half-day workshop on 19 October 2026, highlighting some topics related to Michael's broad range of scientific activities in a few selected talks. The workshop at the Physikzentrum in Aachen will start at 13:00h and will be followed by a Festkolloquium at 16:30h and a subsequent reception.

We very much hope that many friends, collaborators, students, and colleagues will be able to join us on this occasion. 

Workshop

1 Dark Matter

Speaker: Dr Jan Heisig (Université catholique de Louvain (UCL))

2 SUSY Fits

Speaker: Herbi Dreiner

3 Precision and Resummation

Speaker: Anna Kulesza (University of Muenster)

4 Philosophy of Science

Speaker: Florian Boge (TU Dortmund)

14:20 Coffee Break

Workshop

5 Statistical Mechanics for Neural Networks

Speaker: Moritz Helias (RWTH Aachen University)

6 Machine Learning for LHC physics

Speaker: Tilman Plehn (Heidelberg University)

7 Quarkonium

Speaker: Martin Beneke (Technische Universitaet Muenchen (DE))

16:00 Coffee Break

Colloquium

8 To see or not to see: the physics of what we don't observe

Every measurement in particle physics is shaped as much by what
escapes detection as by what is recorded. Soft gluons and photons can
go unseen, but they leave a universal imprint on the theoretical
predictions for almost all observables at the Large Hadron Collider
(LHC), for example. I will discuss how far this universality extends,
from the classic "soft theorems" to regions where the radiation begins
to resolve the structure of the underlying hard process, and what this
means for precision predictions at the LHC. Color, never observed
directly, decides how heavy quarks bind into quarkonia. And particles
that leave no trace at all may reveal the nature of dark matter
through the energy they carry away. Along the way I reflect on what we
learn from both seeing and not seeing, a question that has run through
Michael Krämer's work for three decades.

Speaker: Eric Laenen (Nikhef National institute for subatomic physics (NL))

17:30 Reception