The AugerPrime symposium held on 15-16 November 2015 saw the signing of a new international agreement for the operation of the Pierre Auger Observatory for the exploration of cosmic rays until 2025. Collaborators and science funding agency representatives gathered in Argentina to sign the agreement, which will allow for new scintillation detectors to be added to the 1660 existing detectors, as well as faster and more powerful electronics.
Astrid Chantelauze, science outreach manager of the Helmholtz Alliance for Astroparticle Physics and Marie-Noëlle Rolland, freelance graphic designer, created a blog for their attendance at AugerPrime.
There is five times more dark matter in the Universe than “normal” matter, the atoms and molecules that make up all we know. Yet, it is still unknown what this dominant dark component actually is. Today, an international collaboration of scientists inaugurated the new XENON1T instrument designed to search for dark matter with unprecedented sensitivity, at the Gran Sasso Underground Laboratory of INFN in Italy.
Dark matter is one of the basic ingredients of the Universe, and efforts to detect it with laboratory-based experiments have been ongoing for decades. However, until today dark matter has been observed only indirectly via its gravitational interactions – the interactions that govern the dynamics of the Cosmos at all length-scales. It is expected that dark matter is made of a new, stable elementary particle which has so far escaped detection. About 100,000 dark matter particles are expected to pass through an area of 1 cm² per second. The fact that these particles have not yet been directly detected puts stringent constraints on their tiny interaction probability with the atoms of ordinary matter. It also implies that more sensitive instruments are required to find the rare signature of the dark matter particle. The international XENON Collaboration, consisting of 21 research groups from the United States, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Israel, Sweden and United Arab Emirates, celebrated the inauguration of their new XENON1T instrument today, which will search for dark matter with unprecedented sensitivity.
The event took place at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN-LNGS), the largest underground laboratory in the world for astroparticle physics. The inauguration was attended by the XENON scientists along with guests from funding agencies as well as journalists and colleagues. About 80 visitors were able to join the ceremony directly at the experimental site in the 100m long, 20m wide and 18m high hall B of LNGS, which is itself below 1400m of rock. Here, the new XENON1T instrument is installed inside a 10m-diameter water tank to shield it from radiation which originates from the environment. Even more guests followed the introductory presentations in the LNGS auditorium, where Elena Aprile, Professor at Columbia University (New York) and founder of the XENON project, illustrated the evolution of the XENON program from the early beginnings with a 3kg detector 15 years ago to the present-day instrument XENON1T with a total mass of 3500kg.
Fighting against radioactivity
XENON1T employs the noble gas xenon as the dark matter detection material, which must be made ultra-pure and cooled down to –95°C to make it liquid. The large-mass instrument features an extremely low radioactive background in order to be able to identify the rare events from dark matter interactions. For this reason, the XENON scientists have carefully selected all materials used in the construction of the detector, ensuring that their intrinsic contamination with radioactive isotopes meets the experiment’s low-background strict requirements.
The XENON1T detector measures the tiny flashes of light and charge which are generated when a particle interacts with the xenon. The scientists use this information to reconstruct the position of the particle interaction within the detector, as well as the deposited energy and whether the interaction may have been induced by dark matter. The light is observed by 248 sensitive photosensors, which are each capable of detecting even single photons. A vacuum-insulated double-wall cryostat, essentially a gigantic version of a thermos flask, contains the cryogenic xenon and the dark matter detector. The xenon gas is cooled down and purified in the three-story tall XENON building, a fancy installation with a transparent glass facade right next to the water tank, allowing visitors to actually see what the scientists are doing inside. A gigantic stainless-steel sphere equipped with pipes and valves is installed on the ground floor. It can accommodate 7.6 tons of xenon in liquid and gaseous form, more than two times the capacity needed for XENON1T. This will allow the collaboration to swiftly increase the sensitivity of the experiment by using a larger mass detector in the near future.
Aiming for a dark matter detection
Once fully operational, XENON1T will be the most sensitive dark matter experiment in the world. The detector installation has been completed just a few days ago and the first tests of its performance have already been started. The first science results are expected early 2016, as only one week of good data is sufficient to yet again take the lead in the field. The design goal of the experiment will be reached after two years of data taking, as the collaboration explains in a detailed sensitivity study published at the same time as the inauguration. The ultimate goal is the detection of the dark matter particle. Still, even if there are only some hints found after two years of operation, the XENON collaboration will be in an excellent position to move forward, as the next phase of the project, XENONnT, is already being prepared. It will largely use already existing infrastructure, and will increase the sensitivity to dark matter by another order of magnitude.
The International Cosmic Day enables students to get in contact with astroparticle physicists to get a first insight into their research, experimental methods and everyday work. Some basic questions which will be adressed are:
What are cosmic particles?
Where do they come from?
How can they be measured?
The 4th International Cosmic Day on November 5, 2015 is organized by DESY, together with Netzwerk Teilchenwelt, IPPOG, QuarkNet and Fermilab and will enable students in many different countries around the world to get to do their own experiments at nearby universities, research institutions or even in their classrooms. We invite students to:
Perform their own cosmic particle experiment
Analyze and present their data on a common website
Compare their own results with the results of others
Work like in an international research collaboration
Get in contact with scientists and physics
In September 2015 the Horizon 2020 work programs for the period 2017-2018 will be released by the European Commission. APPEC invites all interested astroparticle physicists, colleagues from neighboring scientific fields and companies interested in F&E cooperations to a community workshop.
After the APPEC Horizon 2020 workshops in November 2013 (Zeuthen) and February 2014 (Paris) with this third workshop APPEC wants to achieve the following:
1. Analyse and discuss the experience of the first two years of Horizon 2020 and give advice on how to prepare successful proposals in future calls.
2. Inform about the upcoming funding opportunities and support the community in preparing their proposals for the calls.
3. Prepare with the community astroparticle infrastructure related activities and collaborative actions to be discussed with the European Commission as topics of future work programs (2019 and beyond).
The program of the workshop will be composed by experts’ presentations on the various funding instruments – including individual grants – and open discussions. Furthermore, astroparticle groups can ask for dedicated sessions to setup and plan their strategy for collaborative projects.
Special emphasis shall be put on proposals for calls in the Future Emerging Technology (FET) and the Leadership in Enabling and Industrial Technologies programs of Horizon 2020; representatives of companies interested in common R&D projects are welcome to participate in the workshop. The Spreading Excellence and Widening Participation program (“Teaming and Twinning”) as well as the Research Infrastructures program with focus on e-infrastructures and big data shall be covered.
The first annual meeting of the programme “Matter and Universe” of the project oriented funding (PoF) research field Matter will take place at the research center Jülich.
The meeting at the Research Center Jülich brings together the different programme communities with activities in elementary particle physics, hadron physics, nuclear physics and astroparticle physics in order to strengthen the co-operation across the different programme topics.
This meeting follows the HAP DM 2013 meeting, addressing recent results and developments in Dark Matter search. The workshop will be organised along plenary overview talks by senior scientists, with the additional possibility for young researchers to present their work in short presentations.
HAP DM 2015 will have overview talks on the following topics:
1) CMB and its impact on DM: Planck results focussing on consequences for WIMP DM
2) CDM vs. WDM scenarios: N-body simulations with LCDM parameters: general overview and special results on dwarf galaxies; Simulations of galactic structures with warm DM; Astrophysical observations of dwarf galaxies/ dwarf galaxy surveys; Searches for DM annihilation in dwarf galaxies; Production of Sterile Neutrino dark matter; Observation of a 3.5keV line from X-ray observations of galaxy clusters – evidence for sterile neutrinos?
3) WIMP models and (laboratory) searches: WIMP interactions in EFT and simplified models; LHC DM search: results and perspectives; Asymmetric Dark Matter; Two-Component Dark Matter; SUSY NMSSM WIMPs; Direct searches for WIMPs, challenges & perspectives with liquid noble gas detectors; Direct searches for WIMPs, challenges & perspectives with cryogenic bolometers
4) Axions, ALPs and dark photons: Phenomenology of dark photons and ALPs; The experimental search for axions and ALPs
5) Indirect DM searches: Modelling of astrophysical foreground; Update on Fermi-LAT & the case for a 1-3 GeV excess in GC data; Positron excess, the search for nuclei and prospects with AMS-02; Searching for a neutrino signal from DM annihilation in IceCube and SuperK
Program Committee:
Gisela Anton (ECAP Erlangen), Klaus Eitel (KIT), Iris Gebauer (KIT), Josef Jochum (Kepler Center Tübingen), Michael Klasen (WWU Münster), Lutz Köpke (JGU Mainz), Marek Kowalski (HU Berlin, DESY Zeuthen), Gernot Maier (DESY Zeuthen), Uwe Oberlack (JGU Mainz), Martin Pohl (U Potsdam, DESY Zeuthen), Thomas Schwetz-Mangold (KIT), Günter Sigl (U Hamburg), Christopher Wiebusch (RWTH Aachen)
Local Organisation:
Klaus Eitel, Marie-Christine Kauffmann, Thomas Schwetz-Mangold
The International GridKa School “Big Data, Cloud Computing and Modern Programming” is one of the leading summer schools for advanced computing techniques in Europe. The school provides a forum for scientists and technology leaders, experts and novices to facilitate knowledge sharing and information exchange.The target audience are different groups like graduate and PhD students, advanced users as well as IT administrators. GridKa School is hosted by Steinbuch Centre for Computing (SCC) of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). It is organized by KIT and the HGF Alliance “Physics at the Terascale”.
The biennial TAUP series covers recent experimental and theoretical developments in astroparticle physics by invited plenary review talks and parallel workshop sessions of invited and contributed presentations. Topics covered by the conference are:
Cosmology and particle physics
Dark matter and its detection
Neutrino physics and astrophysics
Gravitational waves
High-energy astrophysics and cosmic rays
Starting as a workshop in Ambleside in 1997, annual COSMO meetings rapidly became a major venue of interaction of theorists working at an interface of particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology. Topics to be discussed include:
Dark Matter
Dark Energy
Inflation and primordial cosmology
CMB and the large-scale structure of the Universe
Primordial gravitational waves
Particle astrophysics
The ESA mission Planck has set a very high standard in European research on the cosmological microwave background delivering the definitive map of temperature fluctuations. These measurements together with other measurements, e.g. the discovery of Higgs at LHC nurture the hope of a fundamental theory addressing the formation of the Universe at all scales from the smallest to the largest.
Furthermore, Planck together with other CMB measurements on ground and large surveys using telescopes opened the possibility of new breakthroughs in the CMB domain, including the mapping of the B-polarisation. This will give access to the parameters of inflation and the neutrino mass, the correlation of CMB with large scale structures as well as the distortions of the blackbody spectrum, opening access to phase transitions and other events before recombination.
It is currently believed that the next space mission will happen at the earliest in the late twenties-early thirties and it should be planned with the same ambition that determined the design of Planck, that is: give definitive measurements. Till then the European CMB community needs to develop both intermediate measurements on ground or using balloons and the technology that would permit ultimate sensitivities.
APPEC and ASTRONET organize the meeting “Towards the European Coordination of the CMB programme” in August 31-1 September 2015 in Florence. The meeting will gather both principal investigators and agency representatives attempting to set the conditions and chart the first steps towards European coordination on the ground and sub-orbital missions, review and prepare future collaboration in the detector side, discuss similar efforts in other parts of the world, prepare the proposals to future mission calls of ESA.
