The ancient Greeks already had the idea that the diversity of phenomena in the world could be traced back to indivisible atoms, the combination of which makes up the various substances in our everyday world. Indeed, chemists in the 18th and 19th centuries were able to trace all substances back to 92 different types of atoms. However, it turned out that atoms are not really indivisible but are made up of even smaller components, the electrons in the atomic shell and the protons and neutrons

The properties of elementary particles show regular patterns, especially in their electrical charges. How can these regularities be explained?

We have succeeded in finding a model that can explain the regularities in the charge values of the elementary particles from an internal connection. This model traces all fermions of the standard model back to a universal elementary particle.

Elementary particles such as the electron have the peculiar property that they only become identical to themselves after two complete rotations. Is there any clear explanation for this phenomenon?

Werner Ahrendt and Tom Becker attribute the puzzling phenomenon that most elementary particles are identical to themselves only after a 720° rotation to a four-dimensional shape of the universe.

The modern mathematical description of physics focuses on symmetries. Physical theories are considered beautiful because of their symmetries. What are these symmetries and where do they come from?

All elementary particles have a property called spin, which is interpreted as the intrinsic angular momentum of the particle. In classical mechanics, each angular momentum is associated with rotational energy. Is rotational energy also associated with the spin of elementary particles? If so, how big is it?

Die relativistische Mechanik lässt sich mittels eines vierdimensionalen Energie-Vektors reformulieren, sodass analog zur klassischen Mechanik sowohl gleichförmige als auch beschleunigte Bewegungen mit dem gleichen mathematischen Formalismus beschrieben werden können.

The principle of least action, also known as Hamilton's principle, is a fundamental principle of theoretical physics from which the laws of motion in many areas of physics can be derived. However, our current knowledge gives no indication as to why this principle is universally valid. 

Theoretical physicists use Hamilton's principle, according to which the effect always takes an extreme value, to derive the laws of motion. Richard Feynman applied this principle to quantum field theories using the path integral method, according to which a particle takes all possible paths, with each path weighted by its effect and integrated over all paths. But how can this fundamental role of the physical quantity “effect” be explained?

The goal of the experiment is to test whether photons created during the pair formation of a specific particle-antiparticle pair form the same particle-antiparticle pair again during the pair formation. A positive result of the experiment would indicate that there are different subtypes of photons that differ in the particle-antiparticle pair they are made of.