Particle Physics Division

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.

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.

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 at the International Conference on High Energy  Physics in Philadelphia indicating that they have for the first time excluded, with 95 percent probability, a mass for the Higgs  of 170 GeV (about 170 proton masses). This value lies near the middle of the possible mass range for the particle established by earlier experiments. This result not only restricts the possible masses where the Higgs might lie, but it also demonstrates that the Tevatron experiments are sensitive to potential Higgs signals.