The inauguration of the Guest and Seminar Center today marked the official opening of the Mainz Institute for Theoretical Physics (MITP) on the campus of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). The institute was founded in 2013 as part of the Precision Physics, Fundamental Interactions and Structure of Matter (PRISMA) cluster of excellence. The Mainz Institute for Theoretical Physics is an international research center whose concept is based on globally successful theory institutes such as the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) in Santa Barbara or the Galileo Galilei Institute for Theoretical Physics (GGI) in Florence. The MITP has quickly established itself within the international scientific community in the field of physics and has taken on the role of a world-renowned theoretical center.

MITP provides resources in the form of rooms as well as personnel and financial support that allow external scientists to organize multi-week scientific programmes or shorter workshops in Mainz on the diverse current and important issues of theoretical elementary particle, astroparticle and hadron physics. The focus is on networking between the different fields of theoretical physics, but also on the exchange with co-workers working experimentally. The newly created premises of the guest center provide offices for 33 external scientists, a seminar room equipped with modern Technics Department and an attractive discussion area (“lounge”). Everything is designed to enable efficient and pleasant working conditions and to stimulate scientific exchange and cooperation between the various disciplines. As part of the MITP guest program, individual guests are also offered the opportunity to live and research in Mainz for a longer period of time.

The theory center is organized by the scientific community for the scientific community: The external organizers are responsible for the scientific program, the MITP provides the necessary infrastructure for its implementation. From the proposals submitted for the scientific programs, an international body (“Advisory Board”) of renowned scientists selects those that are most convincing in terms of content and concept.

Seven programs and five workshops have been held since 2013. In 2014, more than 250 scientists visited the MITP and exchanged ideas on current topics such as dark matter, physics beyond the standard model and string theory. The support provided by the MITP was acknowledged by the participants of the scientific programs and workshops held in 2014 in 75 publications and preprints. A further six programs and four workshops will be held in 2015. Thematically, the scientists will then deal with neutrino physics and its growing importance for astroparticle physics, the search for new particles at the LHC and the contributions of lattice QCD to the verification of the Standard Model of Particle Physics, among other topics. Together with the Research Training Group funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), “Symmetry Breaking in Fundamental Interactions”, the MITP organized an international summer school in September 2014.

With the extremely popular public lecture series “Physics in the Theater”, the MITP is also actively involved in knowledge transfer on site. For this format, topics from current research are prepared in a generally understandable way and presented to the interested public by top-class scientists. The lectures are deliberately held off campus in order to literally “take science outside”. In May 2014, for example, Professor Dr. Rolf Heuer, Director General of the European research center CERN near Geneva, shared the discovery of the Higgs particle with more than 900 guests in the main auditorium of the Mainz State Theater and inspired them with his exciting insights into CERN’s research activities and its role in the transfer of knowledge and international understanding. The next lecture in this series will take place on June 27, 2015. Dr. Paolo Ferri, head of the Rosetta mission of the European Space Agency ESA, will explain in his lecture how the Rosetta mission was the first time in the history of space travel that a rendezvous with a comet took place.