VDSP Career Prospect Excursion 2024: Hamburg
For the 2024 VDSP Career Prospect Excursion, our students spent three wonderful days in the city of Hamburg, which was reached via train to keep the carbon emissions to a minimum.
The journey kicked off with a guided tour of the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY), a renowned center for particle accelerator research. Students got an inside look at LINAC II and DESY II, which power the PETRA III storage ring and the FLASH free electron laser, offering unique insights into photon research. They also learned about the European X-ray Laser XFEL, stretching from DESY to Schenefeld.
The following day, students visited the NXPSemiconductors facility, home to a collaborative Quantum Computing project funded by the German Space Agency (DLR). They met with managers from EleQtron, NXPSemiconductors, and ParityQE, who presented their roles in the project. The excursion concluded with a tour of Nexpiria's clean rooms and a firsthand look at EleQtron's quantum computer. In the evening, students had dinner with a project leader at Eleqtron and Claus Gärtner, a former doctoral student of our university (Aspelmeyer group) and now engineer in the same company. We thank Claus for the precious help.
With a day of leisure ahead, students had ample time to explore Hamburg and its attractions including the famous famous Miniatur-Wunderland.
By Luigi Ranalli & Umair Javed
