Today the ICCUB is hosting a new edition of the Masterclass in Particle Physics, held at the ICCUB under the name of Taller de Física de Partícules. A second edition of this activity will be held on 16 March. Altogether, 160 bachelor students from 149 different Catalan high schools will take a day off from school to come to the ICCUB and dive into the actual data. ICCUB researchers will introduce them to the tiniest building blocks of the universe and to the accelerators and detectors which probe these mysterious particles. By analyzing real data from experiments at CERN´s Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, students will get a taste of how modern physics research works.

Particle physics is one of the most important emerging fields in science. The discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC in summer 2012 led to a large public interest in understanding particle physics. In a daylong Masterclass, high school students can explore this field of cutting-edge physics by working with authentic data from experiments at the LHC under the supervision of physicists.

The basic idea of the program is to let students work as much as possible like real scientists. Four experiments - ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHCb - have made data for educational use within the program. The data used at the ICCUB will correspond to the LHCb experiment, to which researchers of the Experimental Particle Physics group have made important technical and scientific contributions. Similarly to what occurs in real scientific collaborative environments, the activity will include a connection in a videoconference with physicists at CERN and other student groups from around the world to discuss their results. At the end of the session, The students visit the laboratories of the Physics Faculty of the University of Barcelona, headquarters of the ICCUB.

The Masterclass at ICCUB is part of an annual program called International Masterclasses. Scientists at about 210 universities and laboratories host Masterclasses at their home institutions. The Masterclasses this year are organized for February 15 through March 28 in more than 50 countries worldwide. The worldwide participation reflects the international collaboration in particle physics.

International Masterclasses are organized by the International Particle Physics Outreach Group (IPPOG). IPPOG is an independent group of outreach representatives from countries involved in the research at CERN and other leading research laboratories. The group’s goal is to make particle physics more accessible to the public.

The International Day of Women and Girls in Science will be celebrated on 11th February.

On the occasion of this event a lot of activities are organized to vindicate the role of women in scientific research. The Institute of Cosmos Sciences and the Department of Quantum Physics and Astrophysics join this celebration participating in different activities, some of them addressed to general public and others to educative centers:

• Photograph of the Gaia researcher women attending the Florence CU5 meeting
  
• Chatting with an astronomer woman
  
• Board of astronomer women
  
• Talk "Investigadores en física nuclear" by A. Ramos, INS Arnau Cadell, 14/02/2018
  
• Opening talk and guided visit to the exhibition "Telescopi A. Català", by F. Figueras, exhibition room"Agrupa", Molins de Rey, 13/02/02018
  

• Exhibition "Investigadores en Física nuclear", INS Arnau Cadell, 04-20/02/2018
• Exhibition "Amb A d'AstrònomA", INS secretari Coloma, 25/01/2018-15/02/2018)
• Exhibition "Telescopi A. Català", exhibition room"Agrupa", Molins de Rey, 13-23/02/02018 (openned to general public)

You can find further information about other activities organized on the website.

Related news

(El Periódico)

[El Nacional.cat]

The SPRG award is granted yearly at the traditional Black Holes Workshop to a young researcher who is a member of the Society. Miguel Zilhão is a young physicist from Porto, Portugal, working in numerical relativity and computational physics. He completed his PhD degree in 2012, under the supervision of Profs. Carlos Herdeiro and Vitor Cardoso. He moved on to a postdoctoral position at CCRG-RIT, Rochester, with Prof. Manuela Campanelli, and then to Universitat de Barcelona (Department of Quantum Physics and Astrophysics & ICCUB), under the supervision of Prof. David Mateos. Since September 2017 he has been an FCT researcher at CENTRA-IST, Lisbon.

Published articles

https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.93.124072
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FJHEP10%282016%29155
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FJHEP01%282017%29026
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FJHEP06%282017%29129

• Complete Astrometry (positions, proper motions and parallax angles) for 1,300 million stars (up to a magnitude of G= 21).
  
• Radial velocity for more than 5 million stars (G betwen 3 and 12).
  
• Magnitude G for 1,500 million stars.
  
• Magnitude G_BP & G_Rp for 1,100 million stars.
  
• Astrometric Data of 1,300 already-known asteroids.
  
• Effective temperatures for 150 million stars (G<17).
  
• More than 500,000 light curves of variable stars.
  

Last Sunday December 3rd, at a ceremony in California, the Breakthrough Prize in fundamental physics was awarded to the WMAP "For detailed maps of the early universe that greatly improved our knowledge of the evolution of the cosmos and the fluctuations that seeded the formation of galaxies". Funded by private sponsors, the Breakthrough Prizes recognize the achievements of scientists in the fields of Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics and Mathematics with awards of $3 million prizes, the largest individual monetary awards in science.

Launched in 2001, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) mapped the cosmic microwave background (CMB) with unprecedented precision during 9 years, opening a new era of quantitative cosmology that lead to the establishment of the Standard Model of Cosmology. Among other discoveries, the interpretation of WMPA data allowed scientists to determine age of the universe (about 13.8 billion years), its rate of accelerating expansion (about 70 kilometers per second per megaparsec) and its basic composition (about 5% "normal” matter, 24 % dark matter and 71 % dark energy).

Licia Verde, ICREA researcher at ICCUB (IEEC-UB), joined the WMAP team in 2001, when she was a Chandra Fellow in Princeton University. Among other contributions, she contributed to the cosmological analysis and lead the methodology paper in the 2003 release, the sixth most cited paper in the field of Astronomy and Astrophysics according to Web of Science.
This is not the first time WMAP team has been awarded such an important prize. The team also holds the prestigious Shaw Prize for Astronomy (2010) and the Gruber Prize in Cosmology (2012).

Links:

Breakthrough Prize 2018 Ceremony:

• Ceremony: https://breakthroughprize.org/News/41
• Laureates of the WMAP Science Team: https://breakthroughprize.org/Laureates/1/L3809
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKqzBGE5w-0 (Time 6:13)

WMAP

• Overview: https://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/

An international team led by ICCUB researcher H. Witek has been awarded a prestigious 15 million CPU hour high-performance computing time grant by PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe. The project “ProbPhysGrav – Probing fundamental physics with gravity”, running from 2 October 2017 to 30 September 2018, will shed new light on some of the most intriguing mysteries in gravity and cosmology using gravitational waves.

The ground-breaking observations of gravitational waves by advLIGO/VIRGO have opened a new observational window to answer open questions in physics. For example, the constituents and properties of dark matter are still an open puzzle, and there are numerous open issues concerning the inflationary phase of our universe. In both cases we expect to observe characteristic gravitational wave signatures with current or future detectors. How they would look like exactly, however, is yet unknown. Moreover, having theoretical predictions of the expected signals is essential to identify them in the data and to understand their meaning. This is precisely the goal of the project: simulate the early stages of our universe and the collision of black holes in dark matter environments in the most violent, highly dynamical regime of gravity and predict their gravitational wave signatures to confront theory with observations.

The computations required to obtain these predictions from the equations of General Relativity are so complex that they can only be performed by very powerful supercomputers. PRACE is a pan-European Research Infrastructure for High Performance Computing consisting of several Tier-0 supercomputers distributed across the continent, including MareNostrum at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), where the project “ProbPhysGrav” is running.

Helvi Witek is a Marie Curie research fellow in the Gravitation and Cosmology group of ICCUB. Her main research interests are numerical relativity, black hole and gravitational wave physics, and their applications in high-energy physics and cosmology. She carried out her PhD studies on black hole collisions in higher dimensional spacetimes at the Centro Multidisciplinar de Astrofisica (CENTRA)/ Universidade de Lisboa. After graduating in 2012, she joined the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) / University of Cambridge (2012-2015) and the School of Mathematical Sciences / University of Nottingham (2016), where she developed new techniques to investigate the interplay between black holes and fundamental fields, and to study the formation of black holes in extensions of GR. She became an ICCUB member in September 2016.

Apart from H. Witek, her team consists of researchers from 7 institutions all over Europe including CENTRA / IST (M. Zilhão), King's College London (E. Lim, J. Cook, T. Helfer), CERN (D. Blas), University of Goettingen (K. Clough), Queen Mary University London (H. Bantilan, P. Figueras) and the University of Cambridge (W. Cook, M. Kunesch, R. Rosca, U. Sperhake).

Interview

Interview by Mujeres con Ciencia

Presentation

Domènec Espriu, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Barcelona and researcher of the ICCUB, has been vice-rector of research of the University of Barcelona since December 2016, when he took office as a member of the new governing team lead by Joan Elias. During his term of office, D. Espriu will be responsible for the UB research institutes, the UB research support office as well as the institutional relations in the field of science policy and the research staff policy.

D. Espriu obtained his PhD at the University of Barcelona in 1982 and became professor of this university in 1988, after holding postdoc positions at the Universities of Oxford and Harvard and a professor position at the University of Valencia. In the year 2000 he was awarded the Research Distinction by the Generalitat de Catalunya, and in 2014 he was elected professor honoris causa by the State University of Saint Petersburg.

Throughout his career, D. Espriu has combined his research with science management activities. He has held relevant positions such as head of department (2000-2003), coordinator of the Spanish Funding Agency for Particle Physics (2004-2007), vice-chairman of the Astroparticle Physics European Coordination Committee (2004-2007) and chairman of CERN's Computing Resources Scrutiny Group. He was one of the main promoters of the Institute of Cosmos Sciences, becoming its first director in 2007 (2007-2009).

His scientific interests cover a wide spectrum of topics within the field of theoretical physics, from phenomenology aspects of particle physics and astrophysics to more theoretical issues concerning gravitation and quantum field theory. Up to now he has supervised 10 doctoral theses and has published 94 articles in peer-reviewed journals.

Interview

By ICCUB Scientific Office

The new governing team has insisted that one of its main goals is to boost research at the University of Barcelona. What actions are you willing to undertake to materialize this boost?

For us, the key element of research is the human capital. Over the last ten years faculty staff at the UB has, on average, grown older. Furthermore, many vacant positions resulting from retirement have been filled with temporary staff contracted as associate professors. This has considerably devalued the research capacity of our university.

We want to fill the vacant positions with people who have demonstrated high scientific quality, who have research merits. For faculties of science this means the incorporation of Ramon y Cajal researchers. If economic conditions permit, we will encourage them with a welcome pack.

We would also like to give an impulse to joint appointments, maybe by offering part-time professorships to researchers such as ICREAs. The University of Barcelona is a center of prestige and we believe that this can attract good researchers.

What is the UB-100 strategy about?

We want the University of Barcelona to be positioned within the first 100 research institutions in the main quality rankings. However, this is a long-term goal, it will take ten or fifteen years at least... It is very hard to ascend in this kind of rankings because to get in you have to displace a very good university.

What does it mean, for the UB, to be part of the League of European Research Universities (LERU)?

To begin with, it is an honor. The LERU gathers the most prestigious universities in Europe. Also, being part of the LERU represents a great opportunity for the UB to debate issues concerning human resources, governance and research at universities. But above all, the LERU is a lobby with presence in Brussels: in all the meetings of the commission that have something to do with research, there is a representative of the LERU. Apart from this, the UB intends to adopt little by little LERU proposals and good practices.

What is the role of research institutes at the UB?

With our research institutes we want to increase the visibility of research and promote synergies among different disciplines. This does not mean, though, that research is only done in institutes. There are researchers at the UB that are not members of any institute, and they are doing excellent research.

Is the current governing team planning to undertake any new action in relation to institutes?

We are planning to create new structural positions for technologists and project managers that will be linked to institutes and research groups. We also want to promote the participation of institutes in the María de Maeztu program. There are already two institutes of the UB that have this distinction and, in the last call, the IN2UB was very close to get it. We are ambitious and we would like to have more institutes with this accreditation of excellence. Shortly, a systematic evaluation of institutes will be established. This evaluation will result in a classification and a set of recommendations which should have consequences for the research program contract and in some cases could lead to a redirection of institutes.

What would you highlight about your contribution to the ICCUB?

The satisfaction of having created it, with the aid of many other people. I am very glad it has become a Unit of Excellence María de Maeztu.

And about your six first months in office as vice-rector of research?

The chance to meet marvelous people at the university, as well as excellent research groups and professionals.