I came to Hamburg four years ago because of the scientific opportunities that I was going to get here.
I'm from India and I did my education back in India and then the UK and then the USA
and before I came here I also taught in India.
Hamburg I have found is very friendly and a very green place
and I want to tell you that I really enjoyed my time here and I find it an excellent place to live and work in.
Imagine there's something flowing through this room, through us and through the earth
and we can't see it and we can't feel it.
It has a mass five times all the matter that we know of
and it's gravity formed our galaxy and binds it together.
Welcome to the mystery of dark matter.
We the researchers in astrophysics at the University of Hamburg
we are trying to find out what is this dark matter
and also solve other sort of riddles in our universe.
We try to find and work on new theories for this mysterious dark matter
in some of which the dark matter may not be entirely dark.
For example it could be in the form of the axion a hypothetical very light new particle.
In theoretical astrophysics we made a prediction that this axion dark matter
will influence the light that comes to us from the earliest time in the universe just after the big bang.
And to do this kind of theoretical work we have to bring together astrophysics with particle physics.
But that's not all that there is to the hunt for dark matter here at the University of Hamburg.
I'm now on the campus of Hamburg-Barrenfeld standing in front of Shell, the shielded experimental hall
and we're going to go inside and see the Mad Max experiment in the lab of Professor Erika Garuti.
Hello, welcome Erika.
Thank you Antonio.
Experimentalists need to combine valuable materials like sapphire or lanthanum aluminate
with the strongest magnetic fields on earth to make the dark matter show itself.
This is part of the University of Hamburg's cluster of excellence called the quantum universe with links to daisy.
In fact this is one of many experiments right here in Hamburg searching for dark matter right at the cutting edge.
So come and join us at the University of Hamburg to explore the mysteries of the universe and search for dark matter.