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.
Antonio Masiero, deputy head of INFN in Italy and professor of theoretical physics at the University of Padua has been appointed by the APPEC General Assembly as the new Chair of the APPEC organisation commencing in January 2017.
Professor Masiero was elected Chair of APPEC (Astroparticle Physics European Consortium) by representatives of the 13 member countries of the group which coordinates research in Astroparticle Physics in Europe.
At the same General Assembly Job de Kleuver, from the Dutch FOM Institute for International Affairs and Large Scale Facilities, was elected Secretary General. Both will take office on 1 January 2017, respectively succeeding Professor Frank Linde (Nikhef, Netherlands) and Thomas Berghöfer (DESY, Germany), at the end of their mandates.
Speaking of his appointment Professor Masiero said “”It is really an honour and a responsibility to be asked to lead APPEC through the next few years when we will be putting in place the key recommendations made by the forthcoming APPEC road map due to be published early in 2017. Astroparticle physics now represents an extraordinarily exciting opportunity for science to explore the uncharted land beyond the Standard Models of particle physics and cosmology”.
Current APPEC Chair Professor Linde welcomed the appointments and said “Congratulations to Antonio on being appointed APPEC Chair. You will have a busy time ahead of you with the roadmap soon to be published. I am sure you will do an excellent job as our new APPEC Chair.”
Job de Kleuver said “Astro particle physics is an exciting field of science and in recent months we have seen research breakthroughs with hopefully more on their way. The implementation of the new APPEC roadmap is an ambitious effort and I am fully motivated to take on responsibility for those plans, together with Antonio, and to strengthen the ties between the APPEC partners, leading to both the realisation of new research infrastructures and enabling European Astroparticle Physics to continue to flourish.”
Appec is the consortium that brings together European agencies that support research in Astroparticle Physics at the national level, with the primary objective to promote and facilitate cooperation within the growing community of astroparticle physicists in Europe. Astroparticle physics, that the encounter between particle physics, cosmology and Astrophysics, is a relatively recent and rapidly growing field of research. With physics experiments in the underground Labs and submarines, extensive networks of ground-based telescopes to detectors in space, Europe is gathering more and more fascinating challenges, aiming to study the elusive particles and uncover the darkest mysteries about the structure of the universe.
Biographies
Antonio Masiero was born in Vicenza in 1955 and since 2001 he has been Professor of physics at the University of Padua and was Director of the local chapter of INFN. A graduate of the University of Padua in 1978 (with a thesis on the unification of the fundamental interactions), he spent eight years of research abroad (postdoc at the University of Geneva, CERN and at the Max Planck Institut Munich, assistant professor at New York University) in the period 1979-1987. His research career began at INFN in 1982 at the INFN Padova and later a senior researcher in the same section in 1987. He has been a college professor since 1994, first as extraordinary Professor at the University of Perugia, then to SISSA (international school for advanced studies) in Trieste and then at the University of Padua. His research has shown particular attention to signs of new physics beyond the Standard model. Antonio is author of about 200 scientific publications and he has been an invited speaker at more than 100 conferences and international schools.
Job de Kleuver graduated in experimental physics in 1989. After two years of research in physics, in 1991 he moved to Research Policy Department of FOM, the Research Council in the Netherlands. He is currently responsible in charge of International Affairs and large infrastructures. For 25 years, he has been involved in scientific policy in various fields of physics, with a specific focus on large research infrastructures, such as the Dutch laboratory experiments at LHC HFML and since 2000 astroparticle physics. He is Secretary of the board of the collaboration Nikhef and a member of various committees including HFML domestic, international and European projects.
In the lovely surroundings of the Carl-Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung at Schloss Nymphenburg in Munich the SENSE Kick-off workshop took place on 27 September.
Scientists, international experts and company representatives gathered to signal the start to the SENSE project, which is funded as FET-Open in Horizon 2020.
Dr Thomas Berghöfer, the general secretary of APPEC, explained to the audience the long way to SENSE, which was developed after the experience of two APPEC/ ASPERA Technology Fora on photosensors, and discussions on the LIGHT and other conferences to coordinate and support R&D activities towards the ideal low light-level photosensor.
The project consortium – which consists of the partners DESY, University of Geneva, Max-Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology – and the work packages were introduced in the following talks. Further talks gave an introduction to current status and challenges in in the area of low light level sensors. Lively discussions after the talks and in the breaks showed strong interest on the project from the audience.
Dr Razmik Mirzoyan, leader of work package “Roadmapping & Monitoring” mentioned in his talk that he is “dreaming of a sensor with a photon detection efficiency of 70%” – so let´s start working together on sowing the seeds for substantial sensor developments!
All the presentations from the conference can be found on the kick-off website.
From 29 August – 3 September, 60 scientists from across the world gathered in the village of Listvyanka at the shore of Lake Baikal during The Three Messenger Conference writes Dr Vladimir Bozhilov
Somewhat contrary to your first expectations, Siberia – a tremendously vast region that accounts for 77% of the land of the Russian Federation – can be a magnificent and sunny place. At least at the shores of Lake Baikal at the end of August or in the early days of September. The 60 scientists who just a few weeks ago took part in the Three Messenger Conference at the village of Listvyanka at Lake Baikal enjoyed nice weather, and an intense amount of lectures and networking, focused on the three astroparticle messengers.
The conference from 29 August – 3 September was organized by APPEC (Astroparticle Physics European Consortium), its transnational partner JINR (Joint Institute for Nuclear Research) in Dubna, the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, together with the Lomonosov State University in Moscow, and the Irkutsk State University. The meeting provided a unique opportunity for exchanging cutting-edge science ideas and for fostering collaborations between scientists from all over Europe, America, and Russia.
The name “Three Messenger” is inspired by the three basic cosmic messengers that scientists use to study the high energy Universe. Remember the discovery of gravitational waves announced in February 2016? Combined with ultra-high energy neutrinos and cosmic and gamma rays, these are the tools astroparticle physics uses to study some of the most exciting phenomena in nature. The merging of two black holes, the active hearts of distant galaxies, and the mysterious events that produce gamma ray bursts are just a few examples.
During the conference, colleagues from around the world also learned more about the history of astroparticle physics in the Baikal region. It dates back to the 1960s, as explained by Prof. Nikolay Budnev, director of the Applied Physics Institute at the Irkutsk State University. Prof. Budnev was also head of the Local Organizing Committee, which did a great job. In between all the lectures and proceedings, the participants could still have a boat ride on Lake Baikal and follow the Great Baikal Trail. After the conference, participants had the chance to make an excursion to the TAIGA experiment, a combined cosmic and gamma ray experiment currently built in the Tunka Valley. In one of the upcoming newsletters, we will describe the TAIGA experiment in greater detail. The TAIGA site visit was accompanied by a film team from Russian television.
So next time you hear Siberia, think science, think adventure, think astroparticle physics. And astroparticle physics is always hot and always rocks!
Dr. Vladimir Bozhilov is a Chief Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Astronomy at the Faculty of Physics, University of Sofia, Bulgaria. He is also the editor-in-chief for BBC knowledge Bulgaria magazine.
The SENSE project will be funded by the European Commission as a Coordination and Support Action in the domain of Future Emerging Technologies (FET-Open) with the aim of coordinating the research and development efforts in academia and industry in low light level sensoring.
This initiative has emerged from the series of Technology Forums organized within the frame of ASPERA and APPEC. SENSE is a three-year project. Starting in September 2016, R&D experts will be invited to prepare an R&D roadmap towards the ultimate low light level sensors. SENSE will then coordinate, monitor, and evaluate the R&D efforts of research groups and industry in advancing low light level sensors and liaise with strategically important European initiatives and research groups and companies worldwide.
