The Accelerators, Cryogeny and Magnetism Division

“The research teams are really enthusiastic about what they do and it was fantastic listening to them. The event provided an excellent opportunity to meet them”

  said one participant at the Master's Day held at the end of January.

The scientific community had to wait 18 months for the data collected by Planck, the European Space Agency satellite. Now, the first scientific results are in. The first edition of the compact sources catalog (ERCSC, Early Release Compact Sources Catalogue), with several thousand sources detected by Planck, has been published and presented in the context of an international colloquium, held from 11th to 14th January 2011 at the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie in La Villette (Paris).

Read the joint press release from CNES, CNRS, CEA, and ESA

Also refer to the program of the colloquium

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III, a collaboration with contributions from researchers at the CNRS and CEA, has just released the widest sky survey ever carried out to the international scientific community at the annual meeting of the American Astronomy Society held in Seattle between January 10 and 13, 2011. This survey provides an image and a catalog of sources covering almost all of the sky in five colors and with a quality never before achieved in terms of the sky coverage and the accuracy of the luminosity measurements. The catalog, containing around 470 million objects (galaxies, stars, quasars, etc.), will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Supplements.

Thierry LASSERRE

Christian VEYSSIERE 

After almost a year collecting data from proton-proton collisions, the LHC at CERN began the injection of lead ions at the beginning of November, with the first collisions obtained on November 8. The energy in the nucleon-nucleon center of mass is 2.76 TeV, around ten times greater than that achieved previously by the RHIC in Brookhaven USA. The first results from ALICE have been made available without delay.

In August 2010 at CERN in Geneva, a team of physicists from SEDI and SPP working in collaboration with a group from ETH-Zurich obtained the first successful results from a MicroMegas detector operating in a time projection chamber filled with pure cryogenic argon at a temperature of 87.2 kelvin. 

 The Planck satellite has just discovered a supercluster of galaxies thanks to its imprint on fossil radiation—witness to the first moments in the life of the Universe. This is a first for the satellite, which also revealed new clusters of galaxies with great precision. 

These objects, which contain hundreds or thousands of galaxies, are the largest known structures in the Universe. Thanks to these data, scientists hope to gain a better understanding of how dark matter and visible matter come together in the form of these structures.

Physicist working on the CDF and D0 experiments using Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator in Chicago, including scientists from IN2P3/CNRS and IRFU/CEA, announced their latest results on 26 July at the International Conference on High-Energy Physics (ICHEP 2010) in Paris. Their measurement further constrain the Higgs boson mass domain still open within the standard model of particle physics. This means that CDF and D0 have ruled out a Higgs Boson with a mass between 158 and 175 GeV/c².

An increasing amount of experimental results points to a low mass for this famous boson; will a solution to this puzzle be found sometime in the next two years strong?

The 35^th International Conference on High-Energy Physics was held at the Palais des Congrès in Paris from 22 to 28 July—an opportunity for the LHC teams to present their first results. IRFU is involved in three of the four major collaborative projects that have set up their detectors at the collision points in the ring: Alice, Atlas, and CMS. Our teams have contributed in particular to some fundamental analyses for the control of the detectors, whose performance has exceeded expectations.

The ESS (European Spallation Source) will be the most powerful neutron source in the world. The increased intensity of neutron beams obtained by the spallation method and through the development of new observation methods will allow scientists to analyse and understand phenomena occurring on an atomic and molecular level. Construction of the ESS in Lund should begin soon, with a view to its being commissioned at the end of the decade.

Numerical simulations peformed by a group of astrophysicists of the  AIM-CEA Saclay Laboratory  (University Paris Diderot, CEA, CNRS) and the Nice observatory, based on images collected by the Cassini mission, show that some tiny moons of Saturn are still forming now from material of the Saturn's rings, some billion years after the  end of the formation of planets and satellites inside the Solar system. The simulations can also give some clues about the formation of the Earth's moon. These results are published in the June 10th issue of the Nature magazine. 

The D0 experiment at the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab (Chicago), in which physicists from CEA/IRFU and CNRS/IN2P3 are involved, has measured a significant matter-antimatter _asymmetry_ in the behaviour of particles containing b quarks, known as B mesons (or beauty mesons) beyond the predictions of the standard model (the current theory of particle physics). This result has been submitted for publication in the Journal Physical Review D.

On April 14, Thierry Lasserre received the CNRS bronze medal from the new director of the In2p3, Jacques Martino. Since 1954, CNRS has awarded three medals each year to renowned researchers or promising young scientists. This Bronze Medal rewards a researcher's first work, which marks that person as a promising specialist in his or her field. The work of Thierry Lasserre concerned the most abundant massive particle in the universe: the neutrino.

The LHC is about to start up for an initial two-year period of data acquisition which will produce a flow rate and volume of data among the largest that the man has ever needed to process. During recent tests under real conditions, the Paris region research grid (GRIF) was able to provide the required performance, allowing physicists to access reconstructed data only four hours after it had been recorded at CERN. In 2010, the volume of data to process will be 100 times larger. The teams from IRFU have shown, by this first success, that they will be ready to meet this challenge.

The space mission KEPLER, launched in March 2009 to investigate exoplanets, has just delivered its first results on the vibrations of stars. Several international teams of scientists, including members of the Astrophysics Division (CEA-Irfu) have shown, using this first data, that starquakes not only make it possible to probe the interior of stars but they also allow determination of their age and tell us whether or not the stars belong to a cluster. The results are the subject of four articles published in a special edition of Astrophysical Journal Letters dedicated to the Kepler Mission

The Phenix and Star collaborations, which include physicists from CEA-IRFU and CNRS-IN2P3, have announced major discoveries on the nature of the quark-gluon plasma. These conclusive results, which advance our understanding of nuclear material subjected to extreme conditions, shed new light on the birth of the universe. They have been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Forest fires are a constant danger, particularly for arid countries. They act as a brake on economic development and are a threat to environment, by the large scale release of greenhouse gases as well as by the destruction of ecosystems.

The FORFIRE project, which includes the use of Micromegas¹ detectors, has been supported by the European Union (FP7 program) in order to develop a network of sensors sensitive to the light emitted during a forest fire, allowing its almost instantaneous detection (opposed to the several minutes required by current methods).

A company from the Vosges Department in France, NEOTEC, received the 2009 "Outstanding Implementations" award, at the International MIDEST Exhibition attended by the Industry Minister, Christian Estrosi, for their production of very special chambers. This equipment forms part of an important component of the Double-Chooz experiment which, before the end of the year, will measure neutrinos emitted by the reactor at the Chooz nuclear power station in the Ardennes.

Since 1995, the Accelerators, Cryogenics and Magnetism Division (SACM) has initiated a software development  for designing structures and simulating beam transport in accelerators. Since 2000, these codes have been distributed to many laboratories and companies around the world. This professional software suite is now distributed under license from the CEA. 

Since the restart of the LHC on 20 November, CMS has taken advantage of the excellent operating performance of the collider to record a large amount of useful data. This is now being used to check its correct operation and calibration. During this period, CMS has demonstrated the stability of the detectors' working conditions as well as the efficiency of the data analysis system, which sends data from the detector to analysis teams around the world, and this in spite of very rapidly changing beam conditions.

For the first time, the high-energy gamma rays emitted by a microquasar have been spotted with certainty, thanks to NASA's Fermi telescope. The observation of the microquasar Cygnus X-3 by a French team (CEA-IRFU, CNRS-INSU and IN2P3, University of Paris Diderot, Joseph Fourier University) teaches us more about how these particular sources function and how a compact object orbiting a star can hurl a mass equivalent to the Moon's through the interstellar medium at almost the speed of light. The study is published in Science Express on 26 November 2009.

- for more information : see the French version

For more than 20 years, solid niobium has had the monopoly on high-gradient applications of superconducting radio frequency (SRF) cavities for particle accelerators. But it will soon have reached its limits. It was only recently that A. Gurevich, a theoretician from Florida State University, put forward a theory explaining the reasons behind niobium's success and a way of breaking its monopoly. Until now, this theoretical model had never been experimentally demonstrated. This has now changed for a collaborative project between IRFU (Saclay) and INAC (Grenoble) has just made this vital step towards new acceleration technology.

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey - known as Boss - delivered its first data during the night of 14-15 September. This experiment, devoted to the search for baryon oscillations, heralds the start of a new era of research into dark energy and the evolution of the Universe. Several teams are involved in BOSS, in particular from IN2P3⁽¹⁾/CNRS, INSU⁽²⁾/CNRS and CEA.

On November 14, 2008, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) successfully generated a nominal magnetic field of 4 tesla. This success rewards IRFU efforts for the design and construction of what constitutes the largest superconducting solenoid magnet in the world. Over a period of approximately one month, CMS teams conducted a continuous data acquisition campaign with the detector operating under nominal conditions. Approximately 300 million cosmic events were recorded. This also provided an excellent opportunity to showcase the specific expertise of IRFU teams, particularly in areas such as detection systems, electronics, trace data reconstruction techniques and laser control systems.

The high energy part of the SPIRAL2 linear accelerator (new GANIL¹ accelerator scheduled for implementation in 2012) uses two types of superconducting cavities. IRFU's Accelerator, Cryogenics and Magnetism Department is responsible for the design and development of 12 cryomodules² of the first type, to be installed at the injector output. 

On December 8, 2008, the qualification prototype cryomodule was successfully tested at full power. The superconducting cavity attained an accelerating gradient of 10.3 MV/m (million volts per meter), far greater than the specified value of 6.5 MV/m.

Jean-Luc Starck, an experienced research scientist at IRFU (the CEA Institute for Research on the Fundamental Laws of the Universe) was awarded a 2.2 million euro grant spread over five years under the 7th European research and development framework programme (FP7). The grant comes in recognition of Mr Starck's research project in statistics, signal and image processing and its applications to astrophysics.

The Micromesh Gaseous Structure (Micromegas) detectors designed and developed by IRFU researchers have been used increasingly over the past few years in the field of particle and radiation detection for physics research, and show strong potential for nuclear, biomedical and industrial instrumentation applications. Recent R&D efforts have led to the development of new manufacturing processes that improve the performance and scope of application of these detectors. The second generation of Micromegas detectors is already being used in several international physics experiments that have yielded excellent results since the fall of 2008.

A prototype of a novel charged particle detector has just been put to successful use by an IRFU-CERN-NIKHEF team working as part of the European EUDET project.

3D digital images of charged particle tracks have been obtained using the TimePix chip in conjunction with a Micromegas detector. This clears the way for building digital time projection chambers (TPCs) which could be used, for example, in building detectors for the future international linear collider (ILC). The novelty consisted in adding "clocks" to a more conventional chip to enable the arrival time of detection signals to be measured.

Shortly after the LHC started up on the 10^th September 2008 at 9:30 am, the detectors recorded the first events resulting from proton collisions in the beam detectors. The data processing scheme that had been planned for such a long time immediately came into action with the distribution of data to the Tier0 data centre, then the eleven Tier1 data centres, and finally the Tier2 data centres.

This large gas detector is based on a simple, strong and low-cost spherical geometry. The detector combines a large drift volume and proportional amplification in order to detect ionising particles. A metal ball at the centre of the sphere is held at a high voltage causing an avalanche effect in the gas surrounding it.

Target applications:
- Low energy neutrino physics
- industrial applications involving the detection of neutrons

The 11.75 tonne whole body Iseult magnet to be installed in the Neurospin centre in 2012 will push back the boundaries of cerebral imaging. A key step in the success of this Franco-German project is the development of the SEHT test station in which a nominal field strength of 8 teslas was successfully achieved in early October 2008

The last two lines of the ANTARES detector were connected and powered at a depth of 2500 m on the Mediterranean seabed during the night of May 30, 2008. This brings the number of lines to twelve and completes the construction phase of the largest underwater neutrino telescope ever built.
The lines were immersed a few weeks earlier, close to the other lines that have been tracking cosmic neutrinos since 2006. These particles may be able to tell us more about the most violent phenomena in the Universe.
The event rewards the efforts of the European ANTARES collaboration1 and, more especially, of CEA-IRFU, which has been a major contributor to the project.