NEWS promotes the collaboration between EU, US and JP research institutions in key areas of fundamental physics than can open new windows on the universe. These include gravitational wave astronomy, astrophysics and particle physics. NEWS researchers have given leading contributions to develop cutting-edge physics experiments to explore the universe and study particle physics. They are involved in the data analysis of these experiments and in new experimental challenges that require substantial technological advancements.
The LIGO and Virgo collaborations have built the largest gravitational wave observatories in the world in US and Italy. Based on km-long laser interferometers located thousands of kilometres apart, they detect gravitational waves and probe their astrophysical sources. The observation of gravitational waves has inaugurated the era of gravitational wave astronomy pursued in an international collaborative effort which includes also the Japanese observatory KAGRA.
The Large Area Telescope (LAT) collaboration built and operates the principal scientific instrument on the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope spacecraft launched by NASA in the year 2008. The LAT is a high-energy gamma-ray telescope covering the entire sky in few hours. It has recorded more than one billion gamma-rays over the whole sky and released the catalogue of thousands of sources in condition of strong gravity and magnetic fields. These detectors allow to study the most violent phenomena in the Universe in a new multi-messenger way, by taking advantage of the simultaneous observations of different cosmic messengers, gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation.
This is complemented by the study of phenomena produced in the laboratory by employing high-intensity and high-energy particle beams. The Muon Campus at the Fermilab is hosting two world class experiments dedicated to the search for signals of new physics in the interactions of high-energy particles. Muon (g-2) will determine with a ten-fold improvement the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon while Mu2e will improve by four orders of magnitude the sensitivity on the search for the as-yet unobserved Charged Lepton Flavour Violating (CLFV) process of a neutrino-less conversion of a muon to an electron. EU research institutions have a leading role in these experiments. The results will complement those from similar CLFV searches carried out in Europe and produce fruitful collaborations in this field. These researches require the development of new cutting-edge technologies in several areas, including superconducting materials, used to develop particle accelerators and detectors, cryogenics, radiation detectors, particle detectors, analog and digital electronics for hostile environments and for space, computing infrastructures.
NEWS coordinates the research activity of about 100 researchers from 13 EU research institutions, 3 small/medium size enterprises and 15 partners from US, JP, RF and HK and promotes these international and inter-sectoral collaborations by means of secondments of personnel.
