As far as the physical sciences are concerned, the last day of the Falling Walls conference was, first of all, the day of quanta.

The physicist Simon Gröblacher, who works in Delft and who once wrote his master’s thesis in Vienna with today’s Nobel Prize winner Anton Zeilinger, had to rebook his return flight at short notice after his start-up QphoX was awarded the breakthrough prize in this category (see “Internet for quantum computers” ).

But the prize in the Physics category also went to an innovation that made it possible to explore the world of the very young, which took some getting used to.

Ulf von Rauchhaupt

Editor in the “Science” section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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The French physicist Nathalie Picqué from the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching near Munich presented her award-winning development: It promises to solve a metrological task that arises as a result of the massive anthropogenic input of a wide variety of gases into the earth's atmosphere.

A sensor technology is sought that is able to monitor gas concentrations quickly and highly sensitively for many different trace gases at the same time, but which is also robust, compact and inexpensive to produce.

The first part of this requirement is met by an existing technique called Fourier transform spectrometry.

But these devices are complex, unwieldy and very expensive at several thousand euros each.

Frequency combs in miniature

Picqué and her team have now found a way to solve the task using a different technique.

It is based on the combination of two so-called frequency comb lasers.

The light of one passes through a chamber containing the gas mixture to be sampled before it is combined with that of the other in a so-called interferometer.

With a few tricks, the spectra of the various gas atoms can be resolved with extremely high resolution.

Above all, however, it is possible to miniaturize instruments that work according to this principle: the components of Picqué's quantum optical sensors fit on semiconductor chips.

Perhaps the most surprising short lecture of the last Falling Walls day was given by the Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska (see interview on the following page), who managed to explain in just 15 minutes in an entertaining way what she received the Fields Medal for this year won, an honor at least equal to the Nobel Prize in the field of mathematics.

254 hours with the James Webb Telescope

Finally, under the heading "Physical Sciences", perhaps the biggest topic in this field in 2022 was not missing: the James Webb Space Telescope, which was unfolded on New Year's Eve after the start on Christmas Day of the previous year and scientific data since the summer delivers.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the new workhorse for astronomer Jeyhan Kartaltepe of the Rochester Institute of Technology near New York, because she is particularly interested in the earliest galaxies whose light reaches us, showing how such islands of stars are only a few hundred million years old after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.

In this field, Webb has already delivered not only beautiful pictures, but also tangible scientific surprises:

"We're seeing more bright galaxies in the early Universe than expected," Kartaltepe said.

"And the early galaxies show a wide variety of shapes and structures."

Such findings are still somewhat cursory.

For a statistically clean census of galaxies in the early Universe, Kartaltepe and Caitlin Casey from Tufts University in Massachusetts dared to apply for an incredible 218 hours of observation time with the James Webb Telescope - and in the end even got over 254 hours.

The COSMOS-Webb survey of the two researchers - with the participation of about a hundred other astronomers - is thus the largest program of the first observation cycle and will search for galaxies in a section of sky 1.4 times the size of the full moon disc in the near and partly also in the mid-infrared.

Data acquisition will begin in December.

In a year, our picture of the epoch shortly after the Big Bang could have changed again.