Service d'astrophysique
Laboratoire AIM

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) Council at its meeting at ESO's Headquarters in Garching, Germany on 4 December 2012 has given full approval for the start of the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) programme. With its 39,3 m ... More »

Thanks to the data of the NASA  Kepler satellite, an international team including Rafael Garcia of the Astrophysical Department at CEA-Irfu [1], succesfully probe the heart of hundreds of giant stars for the first time. The researchers ... More »

Waves traveling inside the core of a giant star have been discovered by a international team of researchers including Rafael A. Garcia, member of the Service d'Astrophysique of CEA-Irfu [1]. The results were obtained using 320-day observations  ... More »

    “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 ... More »

IRFU's Double Chooz group has just published some surprising results regarding the flux of antineutrinos generated by uranium and plutonium fission products in nuclear power reactors. A more precise estimate of this flux has revealed a +3% shift ... More »

An international team, including scientists from the Astrophysics Department-AIM and the Particle Physics Department of CEA-Irfu, has just used the Planck satellite to discover galaxy clusters with characteristics that were previously unknown. These ... More »

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 ... More »

  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 ... More »

The Double Chooz collaboration recently completed its neutrino detector which will see anti-neutrinos coming from the Chooz nuclear power plant in the French Ardennes. The experiment is now ready to take data in order to measure fundamental ... More »

A major international collaboration [1], involving researchers from the CEA-IRFU Astrophysics Department, CEA-IRAMIS and CEA-DAM, has succeeded in measuring for the first time the effects of light absorption by nickel in high temperature plasmas ... More »

At a meeting in Brussels of the NUPECC Committee(1) on December 9, the researchers presented their long term plan for maintaining the leading position currently enjoyed by European institutions in the field of nuclear physics. The Spiral2 project in ... More »

High field magnetic resonance imaging at field strengths at or above 7 tesla appears to be one of the most promising techniques for the early detection of neurological pathologies. Currently beyond the reach of most MRI system manufacturers, this ... More »

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 ... More »

A team of physicists, engineers and technicians from IRFU are developing a new generation of MicroMegas trackers. The planned Compass II experiment at CERN, together with the Clas12 experiment at the Jefferson Lab, will impose new operational ... More »

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 ... More »

An international team of astronomers, including several French researchers, has just completed a precise measurement of the distance to five distant galaxies using the ESA Herschel Space Observatory together with ground-based data from the ... More »

    The instrument known as MUSETT1 detected its first heavy nuclei during a commissioning experiment that took place in early April 2010 at the GANIL2 accelerator in Caen. MUSETT was built for identifying very heavy elements: ... More »

‘High-resolution’ numerical simulations carried out by scientists at the Astrophysics Department of the CEA-Irfu/AIM  have just revealed that the most famous galactic collision ever, the Antennae collision, produces far more stars ... More »

   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 ... More »

An international team[1] led by a CEA astrophysicist of the AIM Laboratory- Astrophysics Department of the CEA-Irfu has observed, for the first time, the cycle of magnetic activity in a star using stellar seismology - the study of ... More »

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 ... More »

The 35th 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 ... More »

An international team led by astrophysicists from the Lyon Observatory (CRAL, CNRS/INSU, Université Lyon 1) and the AIM laboratory (CEA-Irfu, CNRS, Université Paris 7) has just shed some light on the origins of the giant gas ring in ... More »

   The pion, predicted by Yukawa in 1935 and discovered in 1947, was the first of a family of particles called mesons: a family that has continued to grow ever since. Ordinary mesons consist of a quark and an antiquark. The theory of ... More »

  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 ... More »

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 ... More »

The central black hole of the Galaxy, today surprisingly quiet, has undergone, several hundred years ago, a violent phase of activity. This is the conclusion reached by an international team led by astrophysicists of the APC laboratory and ... More »

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 ... More »

An international team of astronomers led by Dr. Masato Onodera at the Astrophysical Department of the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique in France [1] has used the Subaru Telescope [2] to take an infrared spectra of a very distant, extremely bright, ... More »

One year on from the launch of the Herschel European satellite, the European Space Agency (ESA) is carrying out an initial scientific assessment of the mission, starting with the first symposium of Herschel scientific results, held from 4th to ... More »

IRFU (the Institute for Research on the Fundamental Laws of the Universe) has created the first prototype of the Alexia system, an automatic solution preparation system containing the radioactive tracers required for medical imaging using the ... More »

The Astrophysics Department of CEA-Irfu, which has scientific and technical responsibility for the MIRIM imager (Mid Infrared Imager) on the MIRI spectro-imager, one of the major instruments of the forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope ... More »

The SNLS collaboration (Supernova Legacy Survey, at the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope) has just published a new method which allows the determination of the recession velocity of supernovae, those "standard candles" which have appeared in the ... More »

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 ... More »

Following its launch on 14 May 2009, the Planck satellite [1] has been continually observing the celestial vault and has mapped the entire sky since 13 August to obtain the first very high resolution image of the dawn of the universe. The Planck ... More »

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 ... More »

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 ... More »

For the first time, the events following the explosion of a star have now been simulated in three dimensions by a team from the Astrophysics Division of CEA-IRFU. The simulation includes the significant contribution of particles ... More »

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 ... More »

Increasing the available laser power results in an high intense production of secondary particles (photons, neutrons). These constitute a radiological risk which needs to be assessed and controlled. Hence, fifty years after the production of the ... More »

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. ... More »

In Japan at the end of January 2010, the detectors of the Tokai to Superkamiokande (T2K, [ti:tu:kei]), developed at Saclay, observed their first neutrinos. These detectors consist of two large chambers where the tracks of charged particles are ... More »

The CHyMENE project (Cible d'Hydrogène Mince pour l'Etude des Noyaux Exotiques -Thin hydrogen target for the study of exotic nuclei) has the ambitious goal of producing a thin target of pure hydrogen, without using a container, suitable for ... More »

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 ... More »

  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 ... More »

The Space Electronics Laboratory (LEDES) of the (CEA-IRFU) Astrophysics Division has recently signed a partnership agreement with the industrial company Skylab Industries to manufacture and distribute space equipment including the computer ... More »

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 ... More »

Since the accident which occurred on the LHC accelerator several days after its commissioning in 2008, the ATLAS collaboration has been impatient to observe "true" events produced at the centre of the detector, and to make the equipment function ... More »

Monday, 23 November 2009, marked the first particle beam collision inside the large detectors of the LHC. ALICE saw its first collisions at an energy of 900 GeV, enabling it to check for correct operation of the 18 large detectors which comprise ... More »

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, ... More »

  The new generation of detectors from the Edelweiss experiment, which is searching for dark matter, have just delivered their first results.  Remarkably reliable and robust, they have proved excellent at removing interference signals. ... More »

Which came first - the black hole or the galaxy? Many large galaxies in the Universe have a supermassive black hole at their centre. But which came first? The black hole that is frantically consuming the matter around it or the vast galaxy that is ... More »

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 ... More »

  Work on a new clean room, begun in July 2007 at the Saclay accelerator platform, has just been completed. The new clean room will be officially opened on 24 November 2009 and will replace the chemical facilities and clean room of ... More »

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 ... More »

The last coil of the Wendelstein W7X stellarator left CEA-Saclay last week, on Wednesday 9 September 2009 to be precise. The event marks the end of trials on the 70 coils of this fusion reactor and seals the success of a major project that began in ... More »

    Engineers and physicists from IRFU have successfully assembled and commissioned three large chambers designed to reconstruct charged particle tracks. The chambers will characterize the neutrino beam used in the T2K (Tokai to ... More »

A spectacular document relating to the history of astronomy is brought back to light by a recent study from a group of scholars led by Jean-Marc Bonnet-Bidaud from the CEA Astrophysical Department [1]. The document, called the Dunhuang chart, now ... More »

An IRAMIS team is fitting out a basement area for the purposes of a scientific programme to study laser electron acceleration. Electrons will be generated by the interaction of a laser beam with a helium gas jet. The team called on SENAC, an IRFU ... More »

  The Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS) team at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope facility has just obtained the world's best measurement of the explosion rate of massive stars when the Universe was only 10 billion years old. A research team ... More »

The second phase of the Double Chooz international experiment officially began on Wednesday 20 May. The Declaration of Intent signed by the four partners (CEA, CNRS, EDF, Champagne-Ardenne Region) is the first step in the plan to build a ... More »

At the end of March 2009, the ALICE Muon Spectrometer took cosmic rays over a period of two weeks. The ALICE group at Saclay2 was closely involved in the design, development, construction and installation of a part of the chambers of this ... More »

Since researchers have been confronting the standard model of particle physics with experimentation, nothing has been able to shake it. Of all particles it describes, only the Higgs Boson has not yet been discovered. But the standard model is ... More »

It has now been more than two years that Antares1, the underwater telescope installed in the depths of the abyssal plains 2500 m under the Mediterranean, is scanning the skies through the Earth in search of neutrinos. Over a thousand of ... More »

    Until the advent of the LHC, the Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Fermilab (close to Chicago, USA), will remain the world's most powerful collider and the only location where the top1 quark can be ... More »

The Nobel Prize for Physics 2008 rewarded Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa for having realised that the weak interaction does not affect particles and antiparticles in the same way1. In this theory, it was expected that the strong interaction ... More »

The Fermi gamma-ray space telescope  [1] has detected the most violent gamma-ray burst ever recorded; a gigantic explosion marking the death of a massive star. Light from this explosion, captured by the Fermi observatory on September 16th 2008, ... More »

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 ... More »

        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 ... More »

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 ... More »

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 ... More »

  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 ... More »

Shortly after the LHC started up on the 10th 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 ... More »

    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 ... More »

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 ... More »

Part of the IFMIF-EVEDA1) project consists of the construction of a prototype deuton2) accelerator at Rokkasho-Mura in Japan. The accelerator is due to enter service in 2013. The purpose of the EVEDA phase is to validate the IFMIF project which aims ... More »

  η b is the name of the particle recently discovered by the physicists working on the BaBar experiment.This ground state of ‘bottomonium’, a collection of particles formed from a bottom quark and an anti-bottom quark, has ... More »

Scientists from the CDF and DZero collaborations at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermilab have combined Tevatron data from the two experiments to advance the quest for the long-sought Higgs boson. They have presented their results on August 3rd ... More »

 The shape of an atomic nucleus reflects the shell structure of the protons and neutrons of which it is formed. If the shells are completely filled, we speak of a "magic" nucleus, which is spherical in shape. Most nuclei, however, ... More »

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 ... More »

The BaBar experiment running on the PEP-II accelerator at SLAC (California) has been collecting data for ten years and has recorded sufficient events to probe the most subtle aspects of the Standard Model of particle physics and quantum field ... More »

An international team of astronomers lead by scientists of the Astrophysics Division of CEA-IRFU has discovered large molecular gas reservoirs - the combustible for forming new stars - hosted in ordinary massive galaxies in the young, distant ... More »