The Particle Physics Workshop participates at the 1st Biennal Ciutat i Ciència to be held in Barcelona from February 7 to 11. The Biennial organises during five days 70 free dissemination activities distributed in the 10 districts of the city and aims to facilitate the dissemination of scientific knowledge made in Barcelona and strengthen its link with the citizens.

The Particle Physics Workshop aims to bring high school students with special interest in physics closer to one of the most important emerging fields: particle physics. During a day, the students will be able to explore this area with master classes, which the general public can follow through streaming, will make some practical work under the supervision of physicists and will subsequently discuss the results obtained with other participants from around the world.

The Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB), in collaboration with the Societat Catalana de Física, has organised this workshop since 2005. The attendees of the workshop work with real data obtained with the " LHCb Experiment" at CERN, in which researchers from the ICCUB Experimental Particle Physics group have made important scientific contributions. The activity includes a videoconferencing connection with CERN physicists and other groups of students around the world to discuss their results, coordinated by the International Particle Physics Participation Group (IPPOG).

At the end of the day, students will be able to visit the laboratories of the Faculty of Physics of the University of Barcelona.

https://www.biennalciutaticiencia.barcelona/ca/taller-de-fisica-de-particules

"Cosmos. Una inmersión rápida" is a review on what we know of astronomy and the Universe in order to catch up without previous knowledge. The book is part of the collection "Una inmersión rápida", which combining rigour and dissemination,introduces and looks into current issues.

Can you imagine being able to immerse yourself in the immensity of the Cosmos and understand how planets, stars and galaxies are?

The Cosmos has been there much longer than any being that has ever lived on our little planet. Despite this, humans have managed to do something unprecedented: to know our place in it, discover aspects about its origin and revealing the farthest places in the Universe without having travelled there.

However, we live in an era in which all this knowledge advances by leaps and bounds with each new space mission and with each telescope that we inaugurate, being difficult to be up to date without a minimum knowledge base. From the comets to black holes, through planets orbiting other suns, the journey you are about to start summarise what we currently know about the Universe and it will leave you wanting to know more.

José Manuel Carrasco

José Manuel Carrasco is a Physics doctor of the University of Barcelona. He works in the development of the Gaia Mission. Gaia is an ambitious mission which aims to chart a three-dimensional map of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. In the process, it will reveal the composition, formation and evolution of the Galaxy. Gaia will provide unprecedented positional and radial velocity measurements with the accuracies needed to produce a stereoscopic and kinematic census of about one billion stars in our Galaxy and throughout the Local Group. This amounts to about 1 per cent of the Galactic stellar population.

He simultaneously carry on his research, teaching at the University of Barcelona and a lot of activities of science dissemination. He also has the astronomical popularisation project 'Miralcel'.

During the Setmana de la Ciència there are a lot of scientific dissemination activities throughout the Catalan territory: exhibitions, talks, games, scientific workshops ...

The Institute of Cosmos Sciences participates in this celebration with talks given by its members, and also with exhibitions.

'La Setmana de la Ciència' is an initiative coordinated by the Fundació Catalana per a la Recerca i la Innovació.

Check the activities

The awarded researchers work in several different fields such as: High Energy Astrophysics, Galaxy Evolution or Cosmology and Large Scale Structure.

Only 22 international postdoctoral researchers have been chosen to benefit from this excellence grant. The primary condition to receive it is to perform their research in a Severo Ochoa or María the Maeztu accredited centre, as the Institute of Cosmos Sciences. It is a recognition the Spanish government give to certain centres to reward its outstanding research.

The Spanish academic and research network that provides advanced communications services to the national scientific and university community, RedIRIS, collaborates with Gaia space mission with a network infrastructure based on Optical fiber, interconnected to the pan-European academic network GEANT, that allows the global transmission of all the information generated by the project.

Currently Gaia's biggest challenge is the compilation and processing of the huge amount of information produced. Every day the satellite generates and sends to the Earth 50 gigabytes data, received by 3 antennas, one of them located in Cebreros, Ávila, that must be processed.

RedIRIS highlights, for this final phase, the role of the researchers of the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona, ICCUB, that deal with the simulations and the construction of the data archive collaborating with the University Services of Catalonia (CSUC) and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). The ICCUB has worked in the mission since its beginning, contributing to define some elements of the satellite and of the software for data processing.

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