School/University

She comes from the coast, and soon she’ll see nothing but the sea for two whole months. We’re talking about Rieke Schäfer, who is 26 years young, and a doctoral student at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB). On 14 April 2023, she’ll be swapping her desk job and lab work for life on the high seas. Her new place of work will be a large research ship that is going to sail about 16 000 km across the Pacific. She’ll be sharing this rocking and rolling vessel with around 40 other researchers who will also be on board. They are going to work on a large variety of burning questions for two months. The question that interests Rieke Schäfer the most is this: How acidic is the ocean now? And how can we measure this even more accurately and reliably? This question has to do with how strongly global warming is affecting marine organisms – above all those that have calcium carbonate shells or build coral reefs. Rieke Schäfer is going to...

The aim in an international research project called AQuRA (Advanced Quantum Clock for Real-World Application) is to build an optical atomic clock that is based on neutral atoms and is both accurate and robust within 3.5 years. With this clock, using complicated laboratory setups or relying on atomic clock specialists will be a thing of the past for everyday practical applications, such as when geodata needs to be collected to measure sea level rise due to global warming. The EU is providing 7.5 million euros in funding for the project. Eight further partners from metrology institutes, universities and industry in six countries are also participating in the project in addition to PTB. The University of Amsterdam is tasked with coordination.