Événements
Everything, everywhere, all at once in particle physics
It’s always exciting to find a new use for an existing tool. Researchers from Geneva University, Andrii Tykhonov and Paul Coppin, discovered that DAMPE – a detector built to analyze cosmic rays and search for dark matter – can also measure how cosmic protons interact with heavy nuclei inside the detector. Why does this matter? Because this result is key to so many things from studying distant cosmic events to unlocking the secrets of the strong force.
Image : Video still, Chinese Academy of Science
Dark sirens singing about dark energy
Meet Professor Marcelle Soares-Santos, a dark energy expert who joined the University of Zurich in January last year. In our conversation, she shared her excitement about how gravitational waves can teach us about the history of our universe. Read on to discover what led her to this field and what she’s working on next.
Image : CHIPP
Scientists discover extremely rare particle decay
You may or may not remember that the Swiss particle physics expertise portfolio gained a new entry last year: research with kaons. EPFL assistant professor Radoslav Marchevski had imported his research specialty to the country, trying to look for extremely rare and hard-to-spot kaon decays. Well, we’ve got some news: there has been a discovery!
Image : CERN
CERN and Switzerland: Seven decades of close collaboration and some lesser-known facts
2024 is the year that CERN turns 70. Its close connection to Switzerland is no secret, after all the confederation is one of the lab’s host countries and heavily involved in its physics programme by way of many universities and research institutes in the country. But what role does Winston Churchill play in this collaboration? And did you know that the canton of Geneva almost didn’t become host to the world’s largest particle accelerator (to date)? That there was a lot of improvisation in the early days and that the CERN-Swiss ties even extend up into space? Read on to find out more…
Image : CERN
Piles of pile-up data turned to good use
Researcher Steven Schramm and his team from the University of Geneva have found a way to make use of the unloved and unwanted extra-stuff from the collisions of the ATLAS experiment: they turn it into a new dataset with the potential to perform precision tests for the Standard Model of particle physics and probes for potential future collider collisions. A study described in a reference paper shows that it is possible to extract the jet energy resolution from this extra data.
Image : denisismagilov, stock.adobe.com
CHIPP prize 2024: When physics comes to life
Congratulations to Gabriela Rodrigues Araujo, this year’s winner of the CHIPP prize for the best thesis in particle physics! Gabriela is a neutrino explorer – exploring those events whose particular feature is a lack of neutrinos. She knows almost everything there is to know about the shy little beasts that cross our paths in abundance without us noticing and she’s set to find out even more. Currently a postdoc at the University of Zurich, she leads the R&D efforts in imaging techniques for PALEOCCENE, a collaboration she helped initiate and advance.
Image : Gabriela Araujo