Major science laboratories from around the world today announced a Global Physics Photowalk competition, open to amateur and professional photographers.
Photographer: Pietromassimo Pasqui. Laboratory: INFN National Laboratory of Frascati, Italy
Physics facilities in Asia, Australia, Europe and North America will open their doors for a rare opportunity to see behind the scenes of some of the world’s most exciting and ground-breaking science.
The photowalk will involve local and national competitions, with the winning national photos submitted to a global judging panel. Organised by the Interactions Collaboration, and supported by the Royal Photographic Society (RPS), the global shortlist will be announced in August, followed by a public vote.
Confirmed locations include CERN – the home of the Large Hadron Collider – as well as underground laboratories in the US, Australia and the UK; and labs and facilities in Italy, the UK, the US, Canada, and – for the first time – China.
Mark Richardson, Chair of the RPS Science Committee, said:
“This is a fantastic celebration of the stunning beauty of science on an international scale. The world’s best scientific research is based on international collaboration, a worldwide melting pot of expertise and technologies, each working for the benefit of our global society and economy. The photowalk is a rare opportunity to capture work behind the scenes at the world’s best international laboratories and capture it, frame by frame.”
International competition participating laboratories:
The Interactions Collaboration:
The Interactions Collaboration (Interactions.org) seeks to support the international science of particle physics and to set visible footprints for peaceful collaboration across all borders. Members of the Interactions collaboration represent the world’s particle physics laboratories and institutions in Europe, North America, Asia and Australia, with funding provided by science funding agencies from many nations. The collaboration also developed and maintains the www.darkmatterday.com website.
The Royal Photographic Society:
The Royal Photographic Society is a registered charity, supported by its 11,600 members. Founded in 1853, to promote the art and science of photography, its objectives today are to educate members of the public, promote the highest standards, and to encourage the public appreciation of photography. It does this through public events and activities, exhibitions, and its educational activities. See: www.rps.org
1) Your current position, field of activity and specific research interests I’m a professor of experimental physics at the Physik Institut of the University of Zurich. My field of research is astroparticle physics, in particular I’m interested in the nature of the dark matter in our galaxy, and in the nature and absolute mass of neutrinos.
2) When did you first become interested in physics, and in particular Astroparticle physics and cosmology? I became fascinated by astroparticle physics and cosmology as a student of physics and astronomy at the University of Heidelberg. In the mid-nineties astroparticle physics was a relatively young field and the existence of dark matter, for instance, wasn’t established as strongly as it is today. Embarking on a search for dark matter particles seemed an enormous challenge (it still is).
3) What was the major challenge(s) for you in your career? Were any of these challenges gender-related? Most likely I went through the usual set of challenges when one pursues a career in science, in a highly competitive field. Probably one of the major defining factors was to succeed in experimental physics, for in high school and even during the first two years at the university my main interests were in pure mathematics, and in computing. I wanted a family, children and a career in science, this was quite clear from the very beginning. But I never saw this as a gender-related challenge. I grew up in a household where both parents had a career, and shared the care and education of their three children equally. I could not imagine it otherwise.
4) How easy do you think is for young talented scientists to develop a successful career today?
I think it is not harder or easier than in the past. Talent is necessary, but not sufficient. Passion, courage, perseverance, dedication and focus are as mandatory for young scientists today as ever.
5) Is it difficult for female researchers to reach a leading position in comparison to their male colleagues in this field?
There aren’t many female researchers in leading position, albeit their number is growing. I have no overall recipe on how to improve the situation; I believe it is due to a combination of many factors: the way science is taught in schools, the regard of science in the society as a whole, the role of female researches in their own families. The implicitness that I just mentioned, that females and males jointly work towards their career, and equally share the work related to children and a household – it seems not to be widely established, not even in the 21st century.
6) What suggestions would you have for young women who would like to follow a similar career path as yours?
If they want to succeed, they must choose a subject that they are genuinely passionate about. An academic career demands not only scientific curiosity and hard work, but also passion, flexibility, mobility and the ability to learn from ones failures. Most importantly, they must have the confidence that “a life in science” can be compatible with many lifestyle choices, including having a family.
Women in research have changed the world. From the advent of computer programming to the discovery of dark matter, female researchers have shaped the course of history.
During Women’s History Month and to mark International Women’s Day (8 March) APPEC will highlight the achievements of some of the female researchers past and present who have inspired us.
APPEC is fully committed to promoting an inclusive, gender-neutral working environment. Historically physics is a field with low representation of female researchers, especially in leading positions. Despite prominent role models, women still remain underrepresented in our field of research.
Inspired by the H2020 project GENERA, APPEC will develop a gender balance policy for all its activities and will urge projects to develop and implement Gender Equality Plans.
Science is at its best when it is inclusive and draws from the widest possible pool of talent, because when great minds are allowed to prosper, we all benefit.
Women in STEM are making history – here are just some of the inspiring women working in our field of astroparticle physics in Europe who are doing incredible work:
Professor Sheila Rowan MBE
Credit: http://www.suzanneheffron.com
Chief Scientific Adviser for Scotland and Director of the Institute for Gravitational Research, University of Glasgow, UK “Making progress in science means being able to work at the edge of what’s possible – that’s a thrilling place to be.”
Sheila’s research is targeted at developing optical materials for use in gravitational wave detectors. Her recent work has been a crucial part of the Advanced LIGO upgrades, carried out between 2010 and 2015, that contributed to one of the most significant scientific breakthroughs of this century: the first detection of gravitational waves announced in February 2016.
What inspired you to go into physics? From a young age – about 10 years old – I wanted to be a physicist. I was very interested in questions that I think young people often ask, (some of which still puzzle scientists now): If I set off in a spaceship how far could I go? What’s out there in our Universe? Where did the ‘stuff’ of our Universe come from? I couldn’t think of anything more interesting than being able to try to work on our answering those questions. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to do that.
What is your advice to young women considering their career choices? The same advice actually that my mother consistently gave to me – you can do anything you want if you set your mind to it. I would add that I think it is important to choose to do what you think is the right thing for you. People will give you lots of advice. Listen carefully to everyone, then make your own choices as to what you think is right.
What are your hopes for the field? That gravitational astrophysics changes and widens our understanding of the Universe beyond what we can imagine now. Often in astronomy, when a new kind telescope has been created, it has found really unexpected new phenomena. I believe the same will be true of gravitational wave astronomy – I’m sure nature has some surprises for us still to come.
Elisabetta Baracchini
Credit: INFN
Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) associate and Assistant Professor at the Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI) “Questioning everything rather than blindly believing in what you’ve been told: this is why being a scientist investigating the fundamental questions of humanity is the most exciting job in the world for me.”
Elisabetta Baracchini, Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) associate and Assistant Professor at the Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI), is leading an innovative project for a Dark Matter detector to be possibly hosted at INFN Gran Sasso National Laboratories. The Marie Curie Individual Fellowship she received in 2015 for an original time projection chamber prototype has in fact evolved today into a real experiment and collaboration. Elisabetta believes that a change in people mindset and perception of what being different means is needed to fight gender and any other discrimination.
Tell us about yourself I started my scientific career as a PhD student on BaBar, one of the most advanced particle physics experiments studying CP violation. I then moved to Switzerland where I worked for 7 years as a researcher for US and Japanese Universities on MEG, a high precision experiment looking for physics beyond the Standard Model. Thanks to these varied and complementary experiences, in 2015 I was awarded a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship for an original proposal for a Dark Matter detector prototype, allowing me to return to Italy and INFN. Since then I have managed to gather a small research team for my project and I am now proposing an innovative directional Dark Matter experiment to be hosted at Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso. Since January 2018 I am also Assistant Professor at the Gran Sasso Science Institute, one of the best places to carry on my project and develop new ones.
What does it mean to be a researcher? In my opinion, being a scientist is the most exciting and entertaining profession in the world: investigating the most fundamental questions of humanity while questioning everything rather than blindly believing in what has been told to you is priceless.
Join APPEC today and throughout the month of March on here and Twitter and meet more of the inspiring women doing incredible work in our field.
Gravitational waves, neutrino, dark matter and gamma ray research are high on the list of research priorities being recommended today with the launch of the latest European astroparticle physics strategy.
Astroparticle physics is a relatively new and rapidly growing field that is already achieving important results: the most recent and well-known being the discovery of gravitational waves that has opened a new era of multi-messenger astronomy and earned the field the 2017 Nobel Prize for physics.
Astroparticle physicists from across Europe have gathered today in Brussels, alongside their international colleagues and important guests from the European Commission, to celebrate the official announcement of the new strategy by the Astroparticle Physics European Consortium (APPEC) which will guide the community’s recommended research priorities over the next ten years. By acting coherently on these recommendations, Europe will be able to exploit fully the tantalising potential for new discoveries that is highlighted within the strategy document.
The new APPEC roadmap includes three relevant astroparticle research areas:
the simultaneous study of cosmic messengers (charged cosmic rays, electromagnetic radiation, neutrinos and gravitational waves) emitted from the highest energy cosmic sources in the Universe (multi-messenger approach);
a detailed study of the most mysterious and elusive elementary particle, the neutrino;
the exploration of the dark side of the Universe (dark matter and dark energy) together with a study of all its evolution from the Big Bang (cosmology, study of the CMB- cosmic microwave background radiation).
APPEC is calling for continued experimental efforts and funding support in these areas in particular through big projects endorsed by the consortium and community such as the Cubic Kilometre Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT), the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), future gravitational interferometers (the Einstein Telescope) and a substantial upgrade of our underground research infrastructures (the Gran Sasso laboratory, in particular). The report also includes recommendations addressing, in addition to the scientific issues, crucial organisational aspects as well as important societal issues such as gender balance, education, public outreach and relations with industry.
“This is such an exciting time for astroparticle physics!” said Antonio Masiero, chair of APPEC and a physicist at the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) and the University of Padua, Italy.
“Never before has our understanding of the fundamentals of our Universe been so great and yet, at the same time, never before have we faced so many un-answered questions to solve, such as what is dark matter that together with dark energy makes up a huge 95% of our Universe, or what is the mechanism that gives neutrinos mass, or even simply why matter (and therefore ourselves) even exists at all! Revealing the answers to these questions will tell us a lot about the origins, evolution and overall structure of the Universe, and will reshape our understanding of physics.
“This work needs a collaborative effort and APPEC is at the centre of making sure that the European research community and experiments are at the global forefront of these discoveries. Building on the successful work of the previous APPEC roadmap in 2011, and based on recommendations from across the full breadth of the astroparticle physics research and funding communities, APPEC will collaborate with our colleagues to implement the strategy recommendations concerning the cosmic messengers, neutrino physics, the dark side (dark matter and energy) and the origin of the Universe (through the study of the cosmic background radiation).
“Such a task represents an enormously fascinating adventure into uncharted scientific territory.”
APPEC is a consortium of 18 funding agencies, national government institutions, and institutes from 16 European countries, responsible for coordinating and funding national research efforts in astroparticle physics.
The APPEC General Assembly gathers heads of agencies around Europe and observers from international organizations such as CERN, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and the European Committee for Future Accelerators (ECFA), to coordinate a collective European strategy for astroparticle physics, execute the recommendations of the roadmap and to create a forum where future actions are discussed and common endeavours emerge.
The Astroparticle Physics European Consortium (APPEC) will proudly present the new European Astroparticle Physics Strategy 2017-2026.
The event will take place on 9 January 2018 10:00 – 18:00 in Residence Palace, Brussels.
The new APPEC strategy will be presented, addressing scientific issues and an update of the long term scientific strategies. Crucial organisational aspects and societal issues like global collaboration, community building, gender balance, education, public outreach and relations with industry will be discussed. By acting coherently upon these recommendations, Europe will be able to fully exploit the tantalizing discovery potential in Astroparticle Physics.
The ceremony will start with the new strategy, followed by a contribution of Robert Jan Smits, the EC Director General of DG RTD, a keynote talk about the exciting prospects of Gravitational Waves science and more.
The one-day event will include an interactive and lively afternoon programme for scientists, policy makers and representatives of funding agencies discussing the recommendations and how to implement them between all participants. Participants are kindly invited for active contributions and bringing up ideas.
Participation in the APPEC Roadmap event is free of charge.
On Tuesday 31 October thousands of people from all over the world joined in a global celebration of dark matter, one of the biggest mysteries of our Universe.
Credit:STFC
On Dark Matter Day 24 countries marked the day with events.
Dark matter is a huge part of the Universe that scientists’ calculations tell us exists, but that has never been observed. Yet, together with dark energy, scientists believe it makes up 95 percent of the total universe. What we can see, and the matter that scientists can account for is just five percent of the Universe, the rest is a mystery.
To highlight the international effort to find dark matter, Dark Matter Day was created by the Interactions collaboration, a global network of particle physics communicators.
Events were held all over the world, in the US, Canada, France, Brazil and Norway to name a few.
All in all, Dark Matter Day was a huge success, leaving behind a legacy of greater understanding of and appreciation for dark matter research and with many on the hashtag #darkmatterday on Twitter calling it the new Halloween!
Will we do it all again next year? Watch this space.
More than 100 years since they were first theorised by Albert Einstein – and two years since they were first detected here on Earth – the study of gravitational waves has been awarded a Nobel Prize.
The 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics has gone to Professors Kip Thorne, Barry Barish and Rainer Weiss of the Ligo-Virgo collaboration, key figures in detecting the long-theorised ripples in space-time ‘for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves’.
The detection was a truly international effort and has captured headlines across the world ushering in an entirely new era of astronomy research.
“I am delighted that this year’s Nobel Prize has gone to our gravitational wave research”, said Jo van den Brand, spokesperson for the Virgo Collaboration.
“The detection of these minute wrinkles in spacetime constitutes an extraordinary achievement. It is the start of a new chapter in our study of the Universe”
Since the first discovery in 2016, three more gravitational waves generated by two colliding black holes have been detected. The most recent of these detections, on August 14, 2017, was the first one with three detectors at the same time, namely the two Advanced LIGO detectors and the upgraded Advanced Virgo instrument, which jointly operated for 4 weeks starting August 1, 2017.
LIGO Executive Director, David Reitze, said: “I’m positively delighted that the Nobel Committee has recognized the LIGO discovery and its profound impact on the way we view the cosmos. This prize rewards not just Kip, Rai, and Barry but also the large number of very smart and dedicated scientists and engineers who worked tirelessly over the past decades to make LIGO a reality.
Notes to editors
Credit: Nobel Prize
Gravitational waves are ripples in space caused by massive cosmic events such as the collision of black holes or the explosion of supernovae. They are not electromagnetic radiation, and as a result have been undetectable until the technological breakthroughs at LIGO enabled by UK technology. The waves carry unique information about the origins of our Universe and studying them is expected to provide important insights into the evolution of stars, supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, neutron stars and black holes. However, they interact very weakly with particles and require incredibly sensitive equipment to detect.
LIGO is operated by Caltech and MIT with funding from the USA’s National Science Foundation (NSF), and supported by vital input from more than 1,000 researchers around the world.
The Virgo collaboration consists of more than 280 physicists and engineers belonging to 20 different European research groups: six from Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France; eight from the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy; two in The Netherlands with Nikhef; the MTA Wigner RCP in Hungary; the POLGRAW group in Poland; Spain with the University of Valencia; and EGO, the laboratory hosting the Virgo detector near Pisa in Italy.
They are studying new phenomena in our Universe for the very first time, whilst honing novel technology to allow gravitational wave detectors to probe even further out into our cosmos.
Preparatory activities have been ongoing for a few years now, however, the International Axion Observatory (IAXO) has recently reached an important milestone with the formal constitution of the collaboration in a meeting that took place on 3-4 July 2017 at DESY, Hamburg. An initial set of 17 institutions from around the world have approved a collaboration agreement, setting the rules and basic management bodies of the collaboration.
IAXO is a next generation axion helioscope whose baseline goal is to search for axions from the Sun, with sensitivity largely beyond current limits on this elusive particle. In particular, IAXO will enjoy signal-to-noise ratio 10000 times larger than its predecessor the CERN Axion Solar Telescope (CAST). IAXO will uniquely probe a region of the axion parameter space that is strongly motivated by theory, astrophysics and cosmology.
The near-term goal of the collaboration is to build a scaled-down prototype version of the experiment, called babyIAXO, to probably be located at DESY. It will pave the way to the full experiment and will deliver intermediate relevant physics outcomes.
The Astrophysical Multimessenger Observatory Network (AMON) is a program currently under development at The Pennsylvania State University, in collaboration with a growing list of U.S. and international observatories. AMON seeks to perform a real-time correlation analysis of the high-energy signals across all known astronomical messengers – photons, neutrinos, cosmic rays, and gravitational waves – in an effort to:
Enhance the combined sensitivity of collaborating observatories to astrophysical transients by searching for coincidences in their sub-threshold data;
Enable rapid follow-up imaging or archival analysis of the putative astrophysical sources.
