The Laboratory

The gamma astronomy looks at the sky through photons of energy around the TeV, thousand billions times more energetic than those from the visible light.

The quest is twofold: which mechanisms generate such photons, what are their sources.
We contributed in building and now use an observatory, HESS, located in Namibia which detects these photons through their interaction in the atmosphere.

The laboratory also participates in the observation programme performed by the Fermi Space Telescope for which we designed and built the mechanical structure of the calorimeter.

Regarding particle physics, we played an important role in the discovery of a new boson which could be the «Higgs boson», the missing piece in understanding the subatomic world, in proton-proton collisions at the record energy of 8 TeV.
This research takes place at the CERN LHC (Large Hadron Collider) in the CMS experiment.
Using this same experiment, we also study the formation of a quark-gluon plasma in collisions of lead nuclei at the energy of 2.76 TeV per nucleon.

In the future, the detailed study of the Higgs boson will require the study of high energy electron-positron interaction, for which we develop innovative techniques for ultra-granular calorimetry.

Another important research in particle physics deals with the oscillations between the three neutrino flavors that have been observed for several years and are currently being studied in the T2K experiment (Japan).
Our physics has a world-wide development and experimental installations are scattered all around the world. Always at the limit of the existing technologies, our field develops its own technologies which can be applied to many other domains.

We develop codes for simulating the interactions of particle with matter, or realize beam profilers for the ions accelerators used in cancer therapy. We also prepare the future by looking at new acceleration techniques by laser-plasma interactions.

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