Technology Overview

In addition to the fundamental research the ICCUB performs in the fields of cosmology, astrophysics and particle physics in various international collaborations, the Institute also contributes to challenging technological developments. During the last few years, the institute has increased its collaboration in these technological developments, to build up its technology department into a strong program within the institute’s main lines.

The areas in which ICCUB is contributing with technological developments:

• Experimental Particle Physics: ICCUB’s experimental particle physicists specialize in flavor physics and contributed to the Hera-B experiment at the DESY lab. Currently the group is fully involved in LHCb experiment upgrades.
• Galaxy Structure and Evolution: ICCUB researchers have been participating since 1998 in the simulations and data processing systems for ESA’s Gaia mission. It includes designing, implementing, managing and running the whole data reduction of the Gaia mission, from the raw telemetry to the production of the final catalogue.
• High Energy Astrophysics: ICCUB high energy astrophysicists became members of the MAGIC Collaboration in February 2006, and are now participating, together with experimental physicists and engineers from the ICCUB, in the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) project, an initiative to build the next generation ground-based gamma-ray instrument. 
• Quantum Technology: This area of the ICCUB is composed of researchers with backgrounds in nuclear and atomic physics, many-body theory, and theoretical physics.  They are currently working on developing and testing quantum algorithms, studying the production of relevant atomtronic quantum devices, and understanding quantum correlations arising in systems of few atoms, as well as condensed matter and high energy physics systems.
• Astronomical Image Processing and High Resolution Techniques: The ICCUB researchers in the field of image reconstruction are focused on improving the ability of image sensors to detect faint stars and moving objects using wavelet transform.
• Heliospheric Physics and Space Weather: The ICCUB researchers in this field are giving scientific support to the participation of technological groups of the UB in ESA’s Solar Orbiter project: Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) and LET-EPD (Energetic Particle Detector) instruments.

The above areas of research are complemented with the following transversal technological lines:

• Electronic and Instrumentation Development:Instrumentation plays a key role in the success of a research project.  The aim of instrumentation science is to create a careful design specifically tailored to the needs of a project, and to construct different components of telescopes, cameras, and similar tools.

• Very Large Data Processing and Analysis: The production of huge amounts of data and how to treat that data before extracting any possible results are usual tasks the scientific community faces when working in sophisticated experiments. Data processing and analysis deals with the performance of the necessary manipulations on a given set of data, in order to extract the required information in an appropriate form such as diagrams, graphics, reports, or tables.