Energy Lab
As Europe's largest research infrastructure for renewable energy, the Energy Lab is part of Germany's ambitious energy transition. It investigates for example the the intelligent networking of environmentally friendly energy generators and storage methods. Energy systems of the future are simulated and tested on the basis of real consumer data. A system network links electrical, thermal and chemical energy flows as well as new information and communication technologies. The Energy Lab is a project of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in cooperation with the Helmholtz Centers German Aerospace Center (DLR) and Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ).
HoreKa Supercomputer and GridKa
In this guided tour we will visit KIT's large-scale computational research facalities.
HoreKa is an innovative hybrid system with almost 60.000 Intel Xeon "Ice Lake" Scalable Processor cores, 220 terabytes of main memory as well as 668 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. HoreKa integrates HAICORE@KIT.
GridKa- As a Tier 1 centre of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), GridKa is responsible for processing, preparing and archiving the raw data from the LHC and future HL-LHC experiments.
Karlsruhe Research Accelerator (KARA) & Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino Experiment (KATRIN)
The research infrastructure (RI) Karlsruhe Research Accelerator (KARA) provides a 2.5-GeV storage ring and light source for experiments with electron beams and intense electromagnetic, synchrotron radiation for deep insights into matter, in biological structures and materials.
The Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment is a large-scale international project in fundamental physics research investigating the question of the neutrino mass. Among all known particles in the universe, neutrinos are the most abundant and the lightest. They are electrically neutral and interact with their surroundings only through gravity and weak interaction. Due to their lightness, neutrinos were long considered massless in the Standard Model of particle physics. However, observations of atmospheric and solar neutrinos have unequivocally proven that neutrinos do have mass. The exact weight of neutrinos remains unknown, with only upper and lower limits established so far. The best kinematically determined upper limit on the neutrino mass (0.45 eV/c²) comes from the KATRIN experiment. KATRIN determines the neutrino mass by measuring the endpoint spectrum of tritium beta decay. Compared to previous experiments, KATRIN features a stronger source and a higher-resolution detector. Upon completion of the current measurements, the experiment is expected to achieve a sensitivity of less than 0.3 eV/c².
Forschungsreaktor 2 - On The Trails of Nuclear Research
The Forschungsreaktor 2 (Research Reactor 2) was the first German-built nuclear reactor with an initial thermal output of 12 megawatts, later increased to 44 megawatts. It began operation in March 1961 and was permanently shut down in December 1981.
Carbon Cycle Lab
At the Carbon Cycle Lab we are researching the chemical recycling of mixed plastic waste. Few of today's products are made of only one type of plastic, which could be recycled by simple mechanical collection by type. The processing of multiple types of plastics with additives for specific functions in laptops, cars, packaging and construction plastics makes it necessary to separate them back into their basic chemical building blocks. Pyrolysis is a chemical recycling process that converts plastic waste into gaseous, liquid and solid products in an inert atmosphere and at elevated temperature to replace fossil petrochemical feedstocks.
