Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)

The research and development activities of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) are embedded in the superordinate program structure of the Hermann von Helmholtz Association of National Research Centers and concentrate on 13 programs in four research fields.

Research Field Energy

The KIT Renewable Energies Program focuses research and development on the topics biomass as chemical energy carrier and geothermal technologies. Within the framework of the European Fusion Programme, the Research Center's Nuclear Fusion Program addresses basic technical issues related to the development of a fusion power reactor. Research focuses on superconducting magnets, gyrotron development, the solid blanket, tritium technology, and materials research. The Nuclear Safety Research Program studies scientific aspects of the safety of nuclear reactors and the safety of nuclear waste disposal. Long-term maintenance and constant development of competence in nuclear engineering are required for the operation of nuclear reactors, the decommissioning of nuclear facilities, and the disposal of radioactive waste. The Efficient Energy Conversion and Use (REUN) Program covers the activities with respect to non-nuclear energy technology. In particular, it is focused on superconductivity, processes for energy-efficient conversion of fuel, the co-combustion of heterogeneous feedstocks and innovative processes based on microwave, micro process, and catalytic technologies. The interdisciplinary research programme "Technology, Innovation, and Society" was established to study aspects such as political and economic framework conditions, acceptance by the population, or ethical questions by systems analysis and socio-scientific approaches, mostly in close cooperation with the technical institutes at KIT.

Research Field Earth and Environment

The Programme "Atmosphere and Climate"investigates the Earth's atmosphere as the central component of the climate system with advanced technologies of observation and numerical modeling. The atmosphere is the primary driver of climate change, affecting living conditions on Earth, and in turn, it is strongly affected by climate change effects in the Earth system. Changes of climate, natural hazards, and air quality represent major challenges to humankind over many generations. Growing economies drive significant changes in atmospheric composition, with ramifications on the climate system, human health, water resources, ecosystems, and biodiversity. Global climate change results in regionally diverse modifications of the water cycle and affects extreme weather events, such as heat waves, severe droughts, tropical storms, or heavy precipitation. Global deterioration of air quality, water resources, ecosystems and biodiversity pose a threat to the well-being of humankind. While the overall increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations is being monitored by routine observations, and its principal drivers (e.g., global energy production, sources and sinks in oceans and biosphere) are reasonably well quantified, the level of understanding for other trace gases and for aerosol particles is much lower. Large uncertainties exist in the understanding of complex feedback mechanisms in the climate system, particularly with respect to aerosols and clouds, land-use/land-cover change, and the roles of reactive trace gases and of chemical and physical processes in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere.

Research Field Key Technologies

The BioInterfaces program brings together biologists, chemists, physicists, IT specialists, engineers, and material scientists with the common goal of controlling living systems, and bridges the gap between fundamental research and development of application-oriented technologies and products. The NANOMICRO: Science, Technology, Systems Program is dedicated towards research and development of quantum size effects and molecular building blocks, new and novel functional materials beyond IC-materials, reliable processing and characterisation technologies, new optical and photonic systems and energy storage systems. NANOMICRO operates the Karlsruhe Nano Micro Facility (KNMF). The Supercomputing Program focuses on linking innovative services with research-driven tasks. It investigates research-relevant issues in order to derive general and sustainable structures. These are made available to the entire KIT community and shall also be acknowledged and used by national and international partners. Apart from integration of supercomputers, clusters, and heterogeneous stores in distributed structures, the software of scientific applications is optimized such that supercomputers, grids, and clouds can be used efficiently.

Research Field Structure of Matter

Worldwide, the potential of astroparticle physics is estimated to be very high. On the international level, the Astroparticle Physics Program of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology is operating the KASCADE facility and is involved in the Pierre Auger Observatory for the investigation of cosmic radiation, the EDELWEISS experiment for direct search for dark matter and the KATRIN facility in neutrino physics. The Synchrotron Radiation ANKA Program is dedicated to improving the performance of medium-energy synchrotron radiation sources, in particular of ANKA (Angstroem source Karlsruhe), as well as to developing the superconducting mini undulator and establishing the synchrotron environmental laboratory. As one of eleven tier-1 centers worldwide the Grid Computing Centre Karlsruhe (GridKa), located at the Steinbuch Centre for Computing (SCC), is responsible for the storage and analysis of a significant part of data from the LHC experiments "ALICE", "ATLAS", "CMS" and "LHCb". Furthermore SCC provides compute and storage capacity for other high energy physics experiments as well as the astroparticle physics experiment "Auger".