Logo home

Research projects




You may jump directly to one of the following research topics:
  1. Visualization of molecules and Virtual Reality
  2. High energy physics




Visualization of molecules and Virtual Reality

Until January 2007 I was working at the Zentralinstitut für Angewandte Mathematik (ZAM) at the Research Center Jülich and was involved in the HFSP project "Fast rotational matching methods for the structure determination of mega-dalton subcellular machines". Within this project our group was working on SenSitus, a program for the interactive fitting of high-resolution structures (e.g. proteins) into low-resolution density distributions of macromolecular complexes. This program employs virtual reality techniques (namely "haptic rendering") to guide the user to the optimal docking position.
Slides of a talk given on the 2. workshop on virtual and augmented reality in Aachen can be found here (PDF). A poster which describes the Laplace filter enhanced fitting can be downloaded here (PDF).
This work is supported by the Human Frontier Science Program (Grant RGP0026/2003).

Slides of a presentation on the visualization of molecules in general can be found here (PDF, german).


High-energy physics

I have studied in Wuppertal and received my diploma and PhD in experimental particle physics, working for the DELPHI collaboration at CERN.
Given fair command of the german language you may enjoy reading my diploma or my PhD thesis. They are dealing with quantum chromodynamics (QCD) tests in electron positron annihilation, namely the measurement of inclusive spectra and of the coupling constant alpha_s from event shapes. They provide also a general overview about experimental (i.e. detector) techniques, the standard model of particle physics in general and QCD in particular.
The following publications and conference contributions grew out of this work:

  1. My PhD results are summarised in "The measurement of alpha_s from event shapes with the DELPHI detector at the highest LEP energies", hep-ex/0406011, published version: (Eur. Phys. J. C37 (2004) 1).

  2. A summary talk presented at the DIS03 workshop in St. Petersburg, titled "The present situation in the determination of alpha_s", can be found under hep-ph/0308314.

  3. A very brief review on the measurement of alpha_s and the beta-function was published in Nucl. Phys. B (Proc. Suppl.) 121 (2003). This talk was given at the QCD 2002 conference in Montpellier.

  4. In hep-ph/0101153 you find the write-up of a summary talk on multiparticle production at LEP presented at the ISMD 2000 in Hungary.

  5. The main results of my diploma are published in Phys. Lett. B459 (1999) 397, "Energy dependence of inclusive spectra in e+e- annihilation".


The full list of my high-energy publications (including the many for which the co-authorship was acquired through participance on measuring shifts) can be obtained most easily via the high-energy physics database SPIRES: SLAC Spires