This first edition focuses on Multi-Messenger Astrophysics. These past two years were marked by huge advancements in this field, with countless invaluable results such as the detection of first gravitational waves, also in correspondence with photons, as well as the simultaneous observation of photons with a 300 TeV neutrino from an active galaxy. The foundation of high energy astroparticle physics are shaken and new theoretical buildings are raised. This calls for additional focused experimental efforts, with careful planning of multi-wavelenght and multi-experiments coordinated observation, specially when pointing telescopes with limited field of view are involved.
This school aims to recall the cosmology and particle physics background needed to seriously frame the discussion about multi-messenger signatures. The school will be organized with key lectures, plus a series of topical lectures and seminars. Exercises will be organized throughout the school on all topics. Hands-on will be organized on a selection of codes. The school will be closed with a final exam for self-evaluation.
The school will be international and it will be held in the beautiful curtains of the Asiago plateau, where the DFA astronomical observatory is located. The observatory is currently hosting two 1m-class telescopes hosting several instruments.
Participants will be limited to 36 and selected on the basis of their CV and a reference letter.
Deadline for support request and for Visa request: November, 8 2019.
Deadline for registration: December 8, 2019.
With the development of CMB Stage-IV in North America and the selection of LiteBIRD in Japan, the European CMB community needs to put medium- and long-term CMB planning in place in order to consolidate, exploit and extend the CMB expertise it has acquired in the last decade.
The meeting “Towards the Coordination of the European CMB program”, held September 12-13, 2019 at the AstroParticle/Cosmology (APC) Labs in Paris, France, assembled experiment builders, observers and agency representatives in a continuing effort to chart the next steps towards European coordination on CMB experiments, including collaboration in technology development, and seeking synergy with similar efforts in other parts of the world.
In addition to presentations on recent CMB results and the scientific questions of the next decade, this meeting was unique in that it specifically targeted longer-term plans for different collaborations and countries. While the LiteBIRD satellite will help define the CMB “landscape” in the coming decade, national space agencies and ESA are working with European scientists now to define European involvement. For large, ground-based efforts such as the US DOE- and NSF-proposed CMB-S4, a unified European framework is proving more difficult to assemble.
This meeting is an effort to address this. There were presentation not only from the CMB-S4 spokespeople, but also from European groups proposing to work with American CMB-S4 precursor experiments as well as from current European CMB experiment.
This workshop was the 5th in the “Florence Process” meeting series, previous meetings being held in Florence, though scheduling conflicts made it easier to hold this meeting in Paris. The agendas of these previous meeting can be found here for 2018, here for 2017, here for 2016, and here for 2015. The workshop coordinators were Carlo Baccigalupi, François Bouchet, Michael Brown, Anthony Challinor, Ken Ganga, Eiichiro Komatsu, Aniello Mennella, Enrique Martínez-Gonzalez, Joe Mohr and José-Alberto Rubiño-Martín.
On the 18th and 19th of June the APPEC Scientific Advisory Committee came together at CERN. The purpose of the meeting was to bring everyone up to date and to discuss and distribute future tasks. This includes the activities of the neutrinoless double beta decay committee, who is currently planning an APPEC community meeting on October 31. Furthermore, the establishment of a Dark Matter direct detection committee is ongoing and a draft mandate document is sent to the APPEC General Assembly for approval. In the field of CMB, a common European strategy is still under discussion, therefore a meeting is planned for September. (https://indico.in2p3.fr/event/19414/)
The proposal of regular APPEC Town meetings was discussed with great interest and approved. It was agreed to aim for a meeting in Fall 2020 and the Scientific Advisory Committee will give input on the topics to discuss.
Gian Francesco Giudice, Teresa Montaruli, Eckhard Elsen and Job de Kleuver signing the official agreement for EuCAPT. Credits: CERN
On the 10th of July the European Center for Astro Particle Theory, EuCAPT was officially launched at CERN, which is also the first central hub for the next 5 years.
The first director is Gianfranco Bertone who is chairing a steering committee of 12 partners. The aim of EuCAPT is to coordinate and favour the already existing activities in several European centers and institutions active in astroparticle theory. The main activities organised by EuCAPT will include:
a. An annual general meeting of the European theoretical astroparticle physics community at the central hub;
b. Thematic workshops to be organised by other participating institutions;
c. The central hub will host dedicated meetings for small groups of scientists to consolidate/finalize collaborative projects and common proposals;
d. Coordination of existing/planned activities of the participating institutions to prevent overlaps and enrich the overall portfolio. Activities that are part of the coordinated portfolio will be labelled as EuCAPT activities;
e. Contacts/coordination with ApP theorists from all over the world favouring collaboration/visits and bolstering common actions also with institutions not belonging to the EuCAPT;
f. Advice, referee support, training concerning funding proposals;
g. Create and operate an EuCAPT website, including an activity calendar.
Along with the official launch the first meeting of the steering committee took place. We are looking forward to a fruitful cooperation which will further advance the progress in the field of theoretical Astroparticle Physics.
Francesca Moglia, Antoine Kouchner, Antonio Masiero, Gian Francesco Giudice, Teresa Montaruli, Gianfranco Bertone, Eckhard Elsen, Job de Kleuver, Tony Riotto and Silvia Pascoli. Credits: CERN
Interview with Silvia Pascoli about the upcoming meeting and the roadmap on neutrinoless double beta decay
One of the recommendations on the neutrinos in the APPEC Roadmap sounds:
‘APPEC strongly supports the present range of direct neutrino-mass measurements and searches for neutrinoless double-beta decay. Guided by the results of experiments currently in operation and in consultation with its global partners, APPEC intends to converge on a roadmap for the next generation of experiments into neutrino mass and nature by 2020.’
Currently, APPEC aims to implement this recommendation. The adopted strategy for the future of neutrinoless double beta decay is the nomination of a panel, following the proposition by the SAC of a mandate document highlighting the panel duties, which was approved by the General Assembly in Granada on May 16, 2019.
The panel, is chaired by Prof. Silvia Pascoli (Durham U., UK) and it is composed by Andrea Giuliani (CNRS/IN2P3, France), J.J. Gomez Cadenas (DIPC, Spain), Ezio Previtali (Milano-Bicocca, Italy),Ruben Saakyan (UCL, UK), Karoline Schaner (GSSI, Italy) and Stefan Schönert (TUM, Germany). It is in charge of writing a document with a critical analysis on the technologies that Europe could pursue for establishing the new generation of neutrinoless double beta decay.
This document will be discussed and endorsed by the APPEC SAC until the APPEC Community Meeting on Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay in London, on October 31. There the inputs from the scientific community will be collected. Once the community comments are received and the document is updated, it will be discussed and approved by the APPEC SAC and General Assembly. The document will then be used in international fora to represent the Community view.
We briefly examine with Silvia the aim of the document and the meeting in London:
Silvia, you have provided an excellent service work to the community together with the panel by writing the 0νββ specific roadmap document and organising the APPEC Community meeting.
What scientific goal you see in the reach for the next 10 years?
Neutrinoless double beta decay plays a key role in the field as it is the most sensitive way we have to search for the violation of lepton number. This information is essential to hunt for the origin of neutrino masses. The next generation of neutrinoless double beta decay experiments will reach the decay rates relevant if the ordering of neutrino masses is inverted, covering a crucial area in the parameter space. I also do not discard the possibility of surprises as neutrinoless double beta decay is very sensitive to more exotic lepton number violating physics.
Which are according to you the major challenges that the 0νββ will have to face in this decade?
Neutrinoless double beta decay is an exceedingly rare process. The main challenges we face are the reduction of backgrounds to unprecedented levels and at the same time increasing the masses to the ton-scale. The community has devised new experimental ways to address this challenges and it is now the time to put them at work.
What theoretical and R&D efforts should we concentrate on to prepare for the successive decade?
From the knowledge of neutrino masses we have, we know that the predictions for the decay rates could be longer than the reach of the next generation of experiments, in particular if neutrino have a normal ordering of masses. This means that 10-ton scale experiments are needed with even further reduced backgrounds, ideally background-free, and excellent energy resolution. There are some preliminary ideas on how this could be achieved but substantial R&D is needed to turn these ideas into real experiments. On the theoretical side, an important aspect we need to make significant progress on is the computation on the nuclear matrix elements. New techniques are becoming available and we may be on the verge of a breakthrough. The collaboration with the nuclear theory community is essential for this purpose.
What do you hope for this community meeting?
Following a long tradition, Europe is playing a leading role in neutrinoless double beta decay with experiments such as GERDA, CUORE and NEXT. It is essential that this leadership continues in the future. It is an opportunity that we should not miss. To this aim, strong support is needed for this field, focusing on the most sensitive and most promising experiments. At the community meeting we plan to discuss the options for the next generation and to consolidate the wishes of the community for a strong European programme.
Silvia Pascoli is professor at Durham University. After getting her ‘laurea” in theoretical physics at the University of Trieste under the supervision of Antonio Masiero, she obtained her PhD at SISSA (Trieste, Italy) studying the properties of neutrinos with Serguey Petcov. She then moved to UCLA for her postdoc and then at CERN. Since 2005 she is at Durham University where she continues to work on neutrino physics, in all relevant areas, Theory, Phenomenology, Astroparticle Physics and more recently Cosmology. In 2016 she was awarded a Wolfson Research Merit Award by the Royal Society.
Silvia Pascoli is professor at Durham University. After getting her ‘laurea” in theoretical physics at the University of Trieste under the supervision of Antonio Masiero, she obtained her PhD at SISSA (Trieste, Italy) studying the properties of neutrinos with Serguey Petcov. She then moved to UCLA for her postdoc and then at CERN. Since 2005 she is at Durham University where she continues to work on neutrino physics, in all relevant areas, Theory, Phenomenology, Astroparticle Physics and more recently Cosmology. In 2016 she was awarded a Wolfson Research Merit Award by the Royal Society.
Sun setting behind the IceCube Lab at the South Pole. Credits:Kathrin Mallot, IceCube/NSF
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole, which in 2017 found probable evidence of a first source of high-energy cosmic neutrinos, is now being expanded into a neutrino laboratory.
The plans to extend the IceCube detector to lower energies in order to precisely measure the properties of neutrinos have now been approved by the international sponsors of the collaboration. As part of this IceCube upgrade project, seven additional cables (“strings”) equipped with optical sensors, will be installed in the deep ice in the center of the existing 86 strings. Thus, 700 improved sensors will be added to the existing 5160 optical modules in the glacier ice at the geographical South Pole.
A prototype of one of the IceCube Upgrade project’s new sensor module designs, called the mDOM, which has multiple photomultiplier tubes arranged for uniform sensitivity. Credits: DESY, IceCube Collaboration
The $37 million IceCube upgrade project, which will be installed in the Antarctic summer of 2022/23, has now received a $23 million NSF Mid-scale Research Award. The planned IceCube upgrade detector will consist of different types of optical modules, which will also be tested for a ten times larger future expansion of IceCube, IceCube-Gen2. One of the new optical sensors, inspired by the KM3NeT optical modules, is the multi-pixel Digital Optical Module (mDOM). The mDOM was developed in Europe by research groups at the Universities of Erlangen-Nuremberg and Münster and by DESY, Germany. The German Electron Synchrotron DESY and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), as research centres of the German Helmholtz Association, are funding the construction of 430 mDOMs with a total of $6.4 million. Compared to the previous modules, the mDOM impresses with its significantly larger and segmented detection surface, which significantly increases its sensitivity. Beside NSF and Germany the upgrade project gets additional support from partners in Japan as well as from Michigan State University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Also involved in the preparation of the Upgrade are further 18 European university groups from Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark and the UK. Sweden is still waiting for a decision on its application for a significant contribution to the Upgrade’s investments, and Belgium has pledged to finance a multi-million contribution to IceCube-Gen2.
“Neutrinos are the least understood particles in the standard model of particle physics,” explains Alexander Kappes, professor at the University of Münster and head of the mDOM project, referring to the scientific model that describes the behaviour of subatomic particles with unprecedented accuracy. “Neutrinos have properties not covered by the Standard Model.”The principal goal of this IceCube extension is to enhance the cubic-kilometer detector to gain precision in studies of the oscillation properties of neutrinos, which can transform – or oscillate – from one type of neutrino to another as they interact with other particles and travel through space.
Neutrino oscillations – a quantum effect that earned its discoverers the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics – proved neutrinos have small but well-defined mass. The three neutrino mass states are not exactly the same as the electron, muon, or tau flavors, but rather mixtures of the three. The mixing phenomena are not fully understood, but they are related to what physicists call the neutrino mass ordering, i.e., which of the neutrinos is the heaviest and which is the lightest.
This side-by-side comparison of a simulated muon neutrino event shows how the Upgrade will be able to detect events of lower energies than the current detector. Credits: IceCube Collaboration
The IceCube Upgrade, will provide world-leading measurements of the tau neutrino appearance, which if found to be different from standard oscillations would point to new physics, such as the existence of a fourth type of neutrino – the so-called sterile neutrino.
Another goal is to better characterize the ice around IceCube sensors and thereby obtain better performance with the existing detector, thus yielding more precise reconstructions of neutrinos at all accessible energies. Most notably, this will give high-energy neutrino astronomy a boost, as IceCube will be able to resolve the neutrino sky more sharply. Furthermore, understanding the ice better will enable the collaboration to improve the reconstruction of archived data collected over the past years.
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is located at NSF’s Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Management and operation of the observatory is through the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center at UW–Madison. The scientific program is run by the international IceCube Collaboration, with more than 300 scientists from 52 institutions spanning 12 countries, thereof 6 from Europe.
The meeting “Towards the Coordination of the European CMB program”, September 12-13, 2019 at the AstroParticle/Cosmology (APC) Labs in Paris, France, will gather experiment builders, observers and agency representatives in a continuing effort to chart the necessary steps towards European coordination on CMB experiments, including collaboration in technology development, and seeking synergy with similar efforts in other parts of the world.
This workshop is the 5th in the “Florence Process” meeting series, previous meetings being held in Florence. Registration is free of charge, and is open now. The meeting is open to all interested participants but registration is necessary as seating is limited.
More information is available here: https://indico.in2p3.fr/event/19414/
The APPEC Community Meeting on Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay will take place on 31 October 2019 at the Hallam Conference Centre, London, UK.
This meeting aims at discussing and collecting the input of the community on the roadmap document (to follow) prepared by the Double Beta Decay APPEC Committee for the APPEC SAC on the future neutrinoless double beta decay experimental programme in Europe. The ultimate goal is to maintain a leading role in this scientifically important quest, in line with APPEC Roadmap recommendations. We will assess the existing, planned and proposed technologies, their discovery potential and technical challenges, making a critical examination of resources and schedules. We will also review the theoretical issues and the status and uncertainties on the nuclear matrix element evaluation.
Interview with Paschal Coyle on the recent deployment campaign for KM3NeT
During the last month Paschal Coyle and his colleagues from the deployment team were busy installing additional Detection Units (DUs) in the Mediterranean Sea.
The most recent campaign was from 29th of June until 1st of July 2019 and since then the KM3NeT/ORCA deep-sea neutrino detector is continuously taking data with its first four neutrino detection units.
What is the current status in the two KM3NeT sites, in front of Toulon and Capo Passero?
KM3NeT is an ESFRI roadmap project aimed at constructing a neutrino telescope with sites in France and Italy. The project has the dual goal of high-resolution, multi-flavour neutrino astronomy and the study of neutrino oscillations in the GeV range to establish the neutrino mass ordering.
After some delays related to issues with the seafloor network, four DUs are now operational at the French site. The Italian site also hosts one operational DU, which has been working now for 3 years. The data from the first DUs have provided an important validation of the KM3NeT technology. In particular, we have demonstrated the capability to precisely position (less than 1 m) the detection units on the seafloor and measure the real-time position of the optical modules to a few centimetres using the acoustic positioning system. We have also confirmed that we can determine in real-time the in-situ time/gain/efficiency calibrations based on signals from the radioactive decays of the potassium isotope 40K present in the seawater. Combining data from both the ARCA and ORCA detectors we have recently published the depth dependence of the atmospheric muon flux over a depth of more than one kilometre (arXiv:1906.02704). At the ICRC 2019 conference we will present our first detection of atmospheric neutrinos with these DUs.
What are your future milestones?
With the advent of recent new funding in France, Italy and the Netherlands, the Collaboration currently has the means to build a total of about 100 DUs, along with the seafloor infrastructure to accommodate more DUs. At this moment, the optical modules for 20 DUs have been assembled; these will be deployed at the Italian site once refurbishment of its sea floor network will be completed summer 2020.
With several optical module and detection unit construction sites across Europe, the completion of the 115 (230) DUs for the French/ORCA (Italian/ARCA) sites could be achieved in 2024(26), assuming timely availability of the full funding. The Collaboration has also started the process to set up a legal entity in the form of an European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC).
Deployment of the furled detection unit.
KM3NeT is an infrastructure that can be used in other fields of science– tell us about those activities.
The KM3NeT research infrastructure is also a cabled deep-sea marine observatory and will provide open access to instrumentation from the Earth and Sea science community. Until now, measurements in the deep sea are typically performed by deploying and recovering autonomous devices that record data over periods of months to years. This method is severely constrained by bandwidth limitations, by the absence of real-time interaction with the measurement devices and by the delayed access to the data. A cabled observatory like KM3NeT remedies these disadvantages by essentially providing a power socket and high bandwidth Ethernet connection at the bottom of the sea. This is an important and unique opportunity for performing deep-sea research by scientists from the fields of marine biology, oceanography, environmental sciences and geosciences. To this end, both the French and Italian KM3NeT sites are nodes of the European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and water column Observatory (EMSO).
For example, an EMSO sea science instrumentation module was recently connected to the KM3NeT-France infrastructure. This module hosts sensors that provide real-time monitoring of a plethora of environmental parameters including temperature, pressure, conductivity, oxygen concentration, turbidity and sea current. Soon additional instrumentation including a benthic crawler, a seismograph, a deep-sea Germanium gamma detector and a high-speed, single-photon video camera for bioluminescence studies will also be installed. Furthermore, the KM3NeT optical modules themselves provide invaluable data on deep-sea bioluminescence and bioacoustic monitoring of the local cetacean populations. A recent nice spinoff is the exciting possibility to use the optical fibres in the main electro-optical cables, that run for many tens of kilometre along the seafloor, for seismological studies via the technique of laser Distributed Acoustic Sensing (https://eartharxiv.org/ekrfy/).
We have now three major efforts in the world: KM3NeT and Lake Baikal with infrastructure located in countries belonging to APPEC, and IceCube at South Pole to which some European countries contribute. What are common activities? Do you think this cooperation could become a real network of detectors such as in the case for gravitational waves, namely LIGO and Virgo, who publish common papers?
In 2013, the Antares, IceCube, KM3NeT and Lake Baikal collaborations signed the Memorandum of Understanding for a Global Neutrino Network (GNN). This step formalised the already active cooperation between the different groups. Once infrastructures of similar scale are operational on the three continents, the stated aim of the GNN is a worldwide Global Neutrino Observatory. Within the framework of the GNN we have published a number of joint papers combining the data from ANTARES and IceCube resulting in improved limits on point sources and dark matter searches. A joint paper was also made on the follow up of the GW170817 gravitational wave alert. Furthermore, GNN organises yearly common meetings of the four collaborations and the biennual Very-Large Volume Neutrino Telescope conference (VLVnT).
Dr. Paschal Coyle is a Director of Research, CNRS, at the Centre de Physique des Particules de Marseille (CPPM). Since 2000 he has been involved in the ANTARES deep-sea neutrino telescope and during 2008-2014 was the Spokesperson of the Collaboration. He was the Deputy Spokesperson of the KM3NeT Collaboration (2013-2016) and is currently the Physics and Software Manager of KM3NeT.
This first edition focuses on Multi-Messenger Astrophysics. These past two years were marked by huge advancements in this field, with countless invaluable results such as the detection of first gravitational waves, also in correspondence with photons, as well as the simultaneous observation of photons with a 300 TeV neutrino from an active galaxy. The foundation of high energy astroparticle physics are shaken and new theoretical buildings are raised. This calls for additional focused experimental efforts, with careful planning of multi-wavelenght and multi-experiments coordinated observation, specially when pointing telescopes with limited field of view are involved.
With the development of 
