DIGITAL ARCHAEOLOGY: EUROPEAN ARIADNEPLUS PROJECT LAUNCHED
Monuments, sites and archaeological finds, in Europe and other countries, can be reached just with a click. This is the ambitious goal of the ARIADNEPLUS project, which aims to build a platform to integrate data from archaeological investigations, and which sees among its new partners also INFN, with its CHNet network dedicated to the cultural heritage. The project, whose launch event took place in February, is the geographic and thematic extension of the previous ARIADNE project: Israel, Argentina, Japan and the United States joined it and scientific investigations were integrated. And to implement scientific investigations the INFN-CHNet network joined the project, since it is active in the field of archaeological heritage analysis with a great variety of techniques. The INFN-CHNet network is already working on the creation of digilabs, digital archives that will initially allow researchers, followed by the entire community and subsequently the public, to share data coming from all the nodes of the network. This will open enormous possibilities for researchers, including the reuse of data: indeed, the data acquired by one group can be used by other researchers to respond to new queries and guide any subsequent experimental campaigns.
The European Physical Society (EPS) Emmy Noether Distinction for Women in Physics 2018 (winter) has been attributed to Chiara Mariotti, INFN Turin Division’s reasearcher. Mariotti has been awarded for her outstanding contributions to the discovery and characterisation of the Higgs boson, for her leading role as founder and coordinator of the LHC-wide Higgs Cross Section Working Group, and for her impressive capacities and achievements in outreach, in particular towards the young generation of physicists. The EPS has established the Emmy Noether Distinction for Women in Physics to bring noteworthy women physicists to the wider attention of the scientific community, policy makers and the general public, to identify role models that will help to attract women to a career in physics. The scope includes personal achievements in areas such as research, education, outreach and industry. Chiara Mariotti graduated in physics in Turin, with a thesis on experimental research at the Fermilab in Chicago. After getting her Ph.D., she began working on CERN's DELPHI experiment. In 1999 she reached the position of research coordinator of this experiment, which engaged 550 physicists from 17 different nations. While keeping her role at DELPHI, in 2002 she joined LHC's big adventure by getting involved in the CMS experiment and becoming one of the people in charge of the Turin group. Since 2008 she has been the main coordinator of CMS analysis for the search of the Higgs boson.
On 18 January, at the Whipple Observatory in Amado, Arizona, pSCT (prototype of the Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope), a prototype telescope for gamma-ray astronomy, which will begin to take data in the coming months, was inaugurated. The aim of pSCT is to provide indications for the construction of the medium-sized telescopes that will be part of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), the next-generation distributed observatory for gamma photons, in which Italy is participating with INFN and INAF, National Institute of Astrophysics, dedicated to the study of the universe at high energies.Unlike classic gamma ray telescopes traditionally consisting of a single surface of mirrors, SCT telescopes are medium-sized telescopes consisting of two mirror surfaces: the first consisting of 48 and the second of 24 aspherical mirrors. The innovative features of these telescopes will allow CTA to drastically improve the image quality of large regions of the sky and to improve the detection of weak astronomical sources. The CTA involves more than 1,400 scientists and engineers from 31 countries in the scientific and technical development of the highest energy and most sensitive high-range gamma-ray observatory in the world, with approximately 120 telescopes of three different sizes, divided between two sites: one in the northern hemisphere at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in the Canary Islands, and the other in the southern hemisphere near the existing site of the Southern Observatory of Paranal, in Chile. Once completed, CTA will allow investigation of the most violent astrophysical phenomena that take place in our universe, but it could also acquire valuable information on aspects that are still little known or even unknown, such as the nature of dark matter, which constitutes most of the existing matter in the cosmos.
The Advanced Virgo gravitational wave detector and the Advanced LIGO twin experiments will start taking data again this spring, if everything goes as planned in April, when the third observation campaign, in jargon O3, will begin. In particular, for Advanced Virgo, the challenge is to improve further in terms of both observation time and sensitivity.Before the start of the new observation campaign, Advanced Virgo and Advanced LIGO have planned a series of test data acquisition periods. The last one in 2018, called ER13 (Engineering Run 13th), included a complete test of the warning system that will alert the community of physicists and astronomers whenever a potential gravitational wave candidate is observed. The last test data acquisition period, ER14, is scheduled for March 2019. ER14 will last for approximately four weeks and the plan foresees that, on its conclusion, the start of the new observation campaign will follow. The expectation of the researchers of the LIGO-VIRGO international collaboration is for a greater number of events in O3, thanks to the progress in the sensitivity of the three interferometers. Also the pointing capability will be better than in the past and will allow astronomers to detect any other cosmic messengers emitted from gravitational wave sources more quickly.
On 19 December, the European Research Council (ERC) appointed new members of its Scientific Council. The Nobel laureate for Chemistry Ben L. Feringa, from the University of Groningen, Lene Vestergaard Hau, physicist, Professor at Harvard University, and Manuel Arellano, economist, Professor at the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies in Madrid were appointed. In addition, Fabio Zwirner, already a member of the ERC Scientific Council since 2015, a theoretical physicist, INFN researcher and Professor at the University of Padua, was reconfirmed for a second two-year term and appointed Vice-President of ERC, together with Dame Janet Thornton, biologist, Director emeritus of the European Bioinformatics Institute and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. Zwirner took on the role of Vice-President in January 2019 with particular responsibility for the physical sciences and engineering sector. In his career, Zwirner has worked at the University of California Berkeley, INFN, CERN and at Sapienza University of Rome, and has dealt with various aspects of unified theories of fundamental interactions, supersymmetry and supergravity.
