The Electronics, Detectors and Computing Division

ATLAS

Atlas is one of the general purpose detectors which started operation in 2008 at the the CERN proton collider, to study the Higgs boson. Goals: Unifying the elementary constituants of matter and their interactions. Atlas is one of the two general purpose detectors installed at the LHC which started operation in 2008. Atlas brings experimental physics into new territory. Discovering new processes and particles that change our understanding of energy and matter would be most exciting.

ATLAS-Muon Spectrometer

ATLAS-Toroid

CLAS12

Deeply Virtual Compton Scattering experiment at Jefferson Lab Hall B , with CLAS12, large acceptance spectrometer. Goals: Theoretical concepts as Generalized Parton Distributions (GPD), enable to probe with a dramatic accuracy the nucleon structure, and access the quark confinement in hadrons.

CLAS12-Tracker

CMS

CMS is the detector of one of the 2 multi-purpose experiments out of the 4 experiments located at the LHC at CERN near Geneva. CMS is installed at point 5 in Cessy. Main goals : During the last decades, research in particle physics has made tremendous progress and succeeded in validating the theoretical framework called “Standard Model”.

CMS-solenoid

R3B

Reaction studies with Relativistic Radioactive Beams

Goals of the experiment The R3B experiment is part of the FAIR project (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research, http://www.gsi.de/fair) to be built at GSI (Darmstadt, Germany). The FAIR project gathers different physics around a common facility: exotic nuclei at low and high energy, hadronic physics with proton – antiproton collisions, relativistic heavy-ion collisions (a few 10 GeV per nucleon), plasma physics and atomic physics.

R3B-TPC (English)

AGATA

AGATA (Advanced Gamma-ray Tracking Array) is a new generation high-resolution γ-ray spectrometer providing unprecedented Doppler-correction capabilities thanks to a combination of fine detector segmentation, efficient pulse-shape analysis algorithms, and implementation of an innovative γ-ray tracking concept.

ALICE

The ALICE experiment is devoted to the study of nuclear matter under extreme conditions of temperature and density. It is specially designed to test the fundamental theory of the strong interaction, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), which predicts the existence of this new state of matter, the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Objectives There are still some open question concerning the formation of our Universe.

Antares, a high energy neutrino telescope

The sky observed from the sea deeps

Overview Most of our current knowledge of the Universe comes from the observation of photons. Photons have many advantages as cosmic information carriers: they are copiously produced, they are stable and electrically neutral, they are easy to detect over a wide energy range, and their spectrum carries detailed information about the chemical and physical properties of the source.

Antares, a high energy neutrino telescope

BABAR

Goal The main goal of the experiment was to perform a complete study of CP violation (CP is the symmetry linking particules and antiparticules) in the system of B mesons. More generally the experiment studied the physics of heavy flavors: mesons and baryons with a b or a c quark and tau leptons.

BAO

BOSS, eBOSS, DESI

Most of the content of the Universe, about 70%, is dominated by an energetic component that is neither matter nor radiation: dark energy. This mysterious component, first observed in 1998 with supernovae, revolutionized our vision of the evolution of the Universe and is one of the major discoveries of the end of the 20th century. A characteristic scale of about 500 million light-years, acting as a "standard meter", is present in the distribution of matter on a cosmic scale.

BTD (Beam Tracking Detector)

Project context The BTD project was developed in the framework of experiments aiming at the spectroscopy studies of radioactive nuclei using gamma-radiation and light particles in GANIL, mainly with SPIRAL and then SPIRAL2 beams. The purpose of these experiments is to study the structure of exotic nuclei in order to better understand the interactions that bind protons and neutrons and their reactions to different excitation modes (temperature, spin...).

CLIC: CTF3-CALIFES

Probe beam linac

Objectives The scientific exploitation of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), planned to start operation in 2008 will be the higher priority in high energy physics for the next coming years. In the following step new large instruments will be required to reach a fine characterization of LHC discoveries, and analyse new phenomena around the TeV scale. The energy required (probably a few TeV), will be precised by the first results of the LHC, i.e. about 2010.

COAST COmputational ASTrophysics

Numerical Simulations in Astrophysics

Web site of the COAST project Presentation The COAST project is a DAPNIA program of high performances computing in astrophysics. It includes developments of codes, numerical methods, visualization tools, distributed databases, optimization and parallelization methods.

D0

Presentation The D0 experiment was located at the proton-antiproton Tevatron collider at the Fermilab laboratory (Chicago, USA). There was two data taking periods: Run I from 1992 to 1996 with a center of mass energy of 1.8 TeV, and Run II from 2001 to 2011 with a center of mass energy of 1.96 TeV. Before the advent of the LHC, the Tevatron was the most energetic collider in the world and the only collider where the top quark as well as possibly a Higgs boson could be produced.

Detectors for linear collider

FELICE

FELICE (acronym for "Future Electron LInear Collider Experiment") is a group of physicists and engineers working for the physics and detectors at the ILC (International Linear Collider). An electron-positron linear collider, with a centre-of-mass energy up to 1 TeV, has been chosen by a majority of physicists worldwide as the big project in High Energy Physics, after the commissioning of the LHC at CERN.

Double-Chooz

Contact: Thierry Lasserre (thierry.lasserre@cea.fr)

Scientific goals : Neutrinos are elementary particles produced abundantly in stars, in the Earth's atmosphere and in the cores of nuclear power plants. In 2006 CEA/IRFU and CNRS/IN2P3 have decided to officially launch the construction of the Double Chooz experiment. Two identical detectors are to be installed near the Chooz nuclear power plant, in the French Ardennes, at different distances from the reactors.

Edelweiss

Objectives The goal of Edelweiss is to detect the dark matter of our Galaxy through its interactions in detectors operated in underground laboratory. The EROS experiment, searching for massive compact objects in our galaxy, showed that at most 7 % of our local missing mass could be accounted for by such objects, that is by ordinary matter.

Fulis rotating Target

Objectives While the heaviest element on earth is 238-uranium (with traces of Pu and Np in natural nuclear reactors) whose lifetime is 5 billion years, the last 60 years have seen the synthesis of dozens of new elements in laboratory, with shorter lifetimes. In 2007, The heaviest elements which has been named is the Darmstadtium, with 111 protons. Z=112 has also been claimed, as well as Z=113 from a japanese team.

HERSCHEL

Herschel An Infrared and Sub-millimetre Observatory The Herschel telescope is a scientific space mission developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) dedicated to observing the Universe in the infrared and sub-millimetre ranges (wavelengths between 60 et 670 µm), a window of the electromagnetic spectrum that is still largely unexplored. It measures 9 m in length, 4 m in diameter and will weigh over 3 metric tons upon launch.

HESS

Exploring the High Energy gamma ray sky

H.E.S.S. Exploring the High Energy gamma ray sky H.E.S.S stands for "High Energy Stereoscopic System". This telescope system been designed and built by a large international collaboration which includes the DAPNIA as a member. This instrument is dedicated to the observation of high energy gamma ray sources with energies above a few tens of GeV.

MEGACAM

Megacam MegaCam A major instrument at the CFHT observatory (Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope) The MegaCam camera was developed for the prime focus of the 3.6m diameter Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), on the summit of the Mauna Kea volcano, at an altitude of 4200m on the Big Island of Hawaii (USA).

MINOS

Scientific Issues and Project Framework The MINOS project aims at performing the spectroscopy of very exotic nuclei produced by fragmentation at the radioactive ion beam facilities such as RIKEN or GSI / FAIR. The structure of the targeted atomic nuclei should allow us to bring strong constraints on the nuclear interaction acting between nucleons in the nucleus.

MUSETT

MUSETT: A segmented Si array for Recoil-Decay-Tagging studies at VAMOS

A new segmented silicon-array called MUSETT has been built for the study of heavy elements using the Recoil-Decay-Tagging technique. MUSETT is located at the focal plane of the VAMOS spectrometer at GANIL and is used in conjunction with a gamma-ray array at the target position. This device consists of four 10x10 cm2 Si detectors each, to obtain a total detection area of 40 x 10 cm2.

nTOF

Goal This activity is focused on the study of neutron-induced reactions for nuclear astrophysics (stellar and big bang nucleosynthesis), for nuclear structure (levels density) and for nuclear technologies (current and innovative nuclear reactors, transmutation of nuclear wastes). This program contributes to national and international efforts aiming at nuclear data improvement.

SNLS : SuperNova Legacy Survey

SNLS aimed at detecting type Ia supernovae at high redshift for cosmological studies. It belongs to the second generation of experiments in that field, launched after the unexpected discovery of the late acceleration of the Universe expansion rate by the first programs of type Ia supernovae at the end of the1990s. SNLS used the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope (CFHT) of 3.6 m located on the Mauna Kea mountain in Hawaii. It was equipped with MegaCam, the large field CCD camera designed and built at Irfu.

T2K

T2K (Tokai to Kamioka) is the world leading experiment dedicated to the study of neutrino oscillations over a long distance using µ-neutrino and µ-anti-neutrino beams. Neutrinos exist in three different types (called 'flavours'): νe, νμ and ντ. In the last fifteen to twenty years, several experiments have proven that neutrinos undergo a quantum mechanical phenomenon called 'oscillation', where neutrinos oscillate from one type to another.

Division of Electronics, Detectors and Computing for Physics (DEDIP)

Institute of Research into the Fundamental Laws of the Universe