PRESS RELEASE 2024

Getting involved, experimenting firsthand, learning while having fun and starting with questions and not answers are the key ingredients of HOP Hands-On Physics (www.hopscuola.it), a project for middle schools that offers an educational kit and training course for mathematics, science and technology teachers. The project is designed, implemented and promoted by CERN, the Agnelli Foundation, and INFN National Institute for Nuclear Physics, with the support of Intesa Sanpaolo and Stellantis, and it is completely free for teachers and schools.

Following a pilot phase in spring 2023, HOP was launched last autumn to offer Italian middle school teachers an innovative and engaging educational approach to teaching STEM disciplines and returns this year with the second edition that will welcome 650 teachers from all over Italy.

Teachers participating in the project will receive the teaching kit and attend the training day to learn how to use it in the classroom and find out more about the teaching method on which it is based, Inquiry-Based Learning. The kit contains the materials needed to carry out approximately 20 laboratory exercises, described in a teaching guide that also suggests to the teacher a number of ways of conducting the activities in the classroom. The topics of the activities, chosen according to the envisaged middle school curriculum, are the scientific method, pressure, light and electricity. The training day, conducted by INFN researchers and experts in communication and education, is thus an opportunity for teachers to approach the CERN and INFN research world and to experience firsthand the activities and method they will be able to bring into the classroom thanks to the kit.

Information on how to take part in the HOP project free of charge and register for the 2024-25 school year training days, which begin in mid-October can be found at this link: www.hopscuola.it.

The European Euclid space telescope enriches our 'album' of the universe with five breathtaking new portraits. The European Space Agency (ESA) mission, in which NASA is also involved, thus continues to send amazing images to Earth that contain unprecedented detail of information. There is also great satisfaction for the Italian researchers from ASI, INAF and INFN who are participating in the mission's international consortium of more than 2,000 scientists from 300 institutes in 13 European countries, in addition to the United States, Canada and Japan.

The entire series of first observations made by Euclid, which pointed its telescope at 17 astronomical objects, from nearby clouds of gas and dust to distant galaxy clusters, was made in anticipation of the main programme of observations that Euclid will conduct to unlock the secrets of the dark cosmos and reveal how and why the universe appears as it does today. The new images, which took just 24 hours of observations, less than 0.1% of the total time spent on the mission's main objective, are accompanied by the publication of ten articles on the first scientific data produced by the mission and five articles describing the mission, instruments, and performance based on the first in-flight data.

The images obtained by Euclid cover vast portions of the sky and allow us to observe the distant universe with much better resolution than terrestrial telescopes, using both visible and infrared light. And although they are extraordinary even only visually, these images are more than just beautiful 'snapshots': thanks to Euclid's new and unique observational capabilities, they also reveal a great deal of information about the cosmos. For example, it has been possible to study the mechanisms of star and galaxy formation and evolution, as well as to identify objects hitherto never seen, such as wandering newborn planets in our galaxy and dwarf galaxies on the periphery of a galaxy cluster. Two INAF-led studies have revealed previously unknown details of a star cluster in the Milky Way and a number of galaxies close to our own. In addition, the infrared light-sensitive NISP instrument aboard Euclid has made it possible to reveal new galaxies that formed in the primordial stages of the universe some 13 billion years ago, proving that it is possible to observe and study this category of astrophysical objects, discovered only a few decades ago and still so mysterious.  

Euclid is one of the most ambitious programmes at the international level in which Italy, through the Italian Space Agency /ASI), the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) and the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), plays a leading role, involving more than two hundred Italian scientists, also belonging to numerous universities: University of Bologna, University of Ferrara, University of Genoa, State University of Milan, Sapienza University of Rome, University of Trieste, SISSA, University of Ferrara, and CISAS of the University of Padua.

Thanks to this fundamental Italian role, the Euclid satellite houses a 1.2-metre-diameter mirror telescope and two scientific instruments, the VIS (VISible Instrument) and the NISP (Near Infrared Spectrometer Photometer), which have the main objective of observing the extragalactic sky with the aim of obtaining images with very high resolution and measuring the spectra of millions of galaxies. Italy had the key role of designing the mission's observational strategy and now has the role of coordinating all ground data reduction activities.

In addition, ASI, again in collaboration with INAF and INFN, led the industrial team that designed and built the instrument contributions, which consisted of a Temporary Association of Enterprises with OHB Italia as lead company and SAB Aerospace and Temis as member companies, while the leadership for the platform implementation was entrusted by ESA to Thales Alenia Space Italia belonging to the Leonardo Group. ASI also funded the industrial activities for the design and implementation of the mission's Italian Science Data Centre, which were entrusted to ALTEC of Turin.

“Euclid is currently the most complex mission in ESA's Science Programme in terms of scientific objectives and is destined to open an important chapter in the knowledge of our Universe” says Barbara Negri, Head of Human Flight and Scientific Experimentation at ASI. “These new images obtained by Euclid confirm the excellent performance of the scientific instruments on board, to which ASI contributed with the implementation of important parts, and the great work of the Science Ground Segment, under Italian responsibility, in processing the scientific data.”

“These new images, along with those released last November, provide insight into the enormous potential of the mission, in terms of both the number of objects Euclid will be able to observe and the quality of the measurements themselves,” says Anna Di Giorgio of INAF, who coordinates Italian activities for the ASI-funded Euclid mission. “The first scientific results published today, which see a significant contribution from INAF researchers, also provide an idea of which and how much ‘legacy science’ it will be possible to do using Euclid data: for example, the study of extragalactic star clusters, the discovery of new small-mass dwarf galaxies or of very distant bright galaxies, or the exploration of objects whose light was emitted more than 10 billion years ago, at the very beginning of the Universe.”

“The goal of the Euclid mission is to study how dark energy and dark matter governed the evolution of the universe,” explains Stefano Dusini, who coordinates INFN's participation in Euclid. “95% of the universe seems to consist of these two mysterious forms of energy and matter about which we still know little or nothing. The excellent quality of these first images makes us confident that Euclid will achieve its scientific goal. The excellent performance of the NISP instrument, to which INFN contributed with responsibility for integrating the hot electronics and, together with INAF, monitoring and in-flight management of the instrument and of the performance and good quality of the data, make us proud of the work done by INFN scientists and researchers,” concludes Dusini.  

The Euclid satellite was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida on 1 July 2023 aboard a Falcon 9 launch vehicle of the private U.S. company SpaceX.

It is the most precise measurement ever obtained at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerator of the mass of the W boson, and determines its value to be 80360.2 MeV with an uncertainty of 9.9 MeV. The measurement was made by the CMS experiment by analysing data produced in proton-proton collisions of the second LHC data-acquisition period (run2). The result, much awaited by the international particle physics scientific community, was presented by the CMS Scientific Collaboration at a seminar held today, 17 September, at CERN.
“The measurement of the mass of the W boson was obtained by CMS through a state-of-the-art analysis of the data produced at the LHC”, underlines Giacomo Sguazzoni, INFN researcher and national manager of CMS. “The precision achieved was unimaginable when the LHC and CMS were conceived, and is the result of the dogged and passionate work of many colleagues engaged in research activities that, over the years, have enabled CMS, a very complex and sophisticated detector, to achieve performance far beyond that originally envisioned by the project”, concludes Sguazzoni.
“This measurement is the result of many years of capillary work during which we faced and solved numerous experimental problems”, explains Lorenzo Bianchini, Professor of physics at the University of Pisa, INFN associate, and coordinator of the ERC ASYMOW project dedicated to this very measurement. “We built on the experience acquired from similar measurements at the LHC and the Tevatron, addressing critical issues with recent advances in theoretical precision calculations and new data analysis paradigms. What emerged was a modern and innovative measurement in many respects, the result of international collaborative effort in which the Italian contribution was extremely important, also thanks to the opportunities offered by European research funding. All this using only a tenth of the run2 data, thus leaving ample room for improvement of the measurement in the coming years”, concludes Bianchini.
Since its discovery, the W boson has been measured with increasing precision by various experiments, at CERN and other laboratories. The result now presented by CMS agrees with theoretical predictions and with all previous measurements, except that obtained by the CDF experiment at Fermilab’s Tevatron accelerator in the United States.
In 2022, the CDF Scientific Collaboration had, in fact, measured a surprisingly high value of the W boson mass of 80434.0 MeV with an uncertainty of 9.4 MeV: a value that differs significantly from the theoretical prediction of the Standard Model and other experimental results, requiring further study. In 2023, the ATLAS collaboration, which had provided its first measurement of the mass of the W boson in 2017, published a new improved measurement based on a reanalysis of proton-proton collision data from the first LHC data-acquisition period (run1). The new value of the W mass determined by ATLAS - 80366.5 MeV with an uncertainty of 15.9 MeV - was in line with all previous measurements except that of CDF, which still remains the most precise measurement obtained to date. Now, the CMS experiment, with its first measurement of the mass of the W boson, also brings its contribution to these studies, and its result is confirmed to be in line with all previous measurements except, as already mentioned, that of CDF.
Together with the Z boson, the W boson is the elementary particle mediating the weak force and was first observed in 1983, by the UA1 and UA2 experiments at CERN’s Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) accelerator. For this discovery, Carlo Rubbia, who led the UA1 experiment, and Simon van deer Meer, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics the following year. The Standard Model puts the mass of the W boson in close relation to the force of the interaction unifying the electromagnetic and weak forces, and to the masses of the Higgs boson and the top quark, constraining its value to 80353 million electron volts (MeV) with an uncertainty of 6 MeV. Determining the value of the mass of the W boson with high precision is therefore very important because it allows us to verify whether these properties are all consistent with the Standard Model. If they are not, the cause would lie in new physical phenomena, such as new particles or interactions.
“The value of the mass of the W boson derives, in the Standard Model, from two fundamental ingredients: the strength of the weak interaction – of which it is a mediator – and the value of the Higgs field, which is responsible for generating the mass of all elementary particles observed to date”, explains Stefania De Curtis, director of INFN’s Galileo Galilei Institute. “Thus, this new measurement represents a further success of our theory because, given its precision, which exceeds all expectations, it confirms the prediction at the level of the quantum corrections that contribute to its value. The alignment at the quantum level with theoretical predictions indicates that, at least for the W mass, no new phenomena or particles are needed to explain its nature. This does not rule out that they are not lurking around the corner and that LHC experiments may ‘discover’ them in the near future in order to shed light on the still open problems of the Standard Model”, concludes De Curtis.

The TeRABIT project enters the execution phase for the network component with the exclusive acquisition of a portion of Sparkle’s BlueMed submarine cable. This will allow to extend GARR-T, the new generation of GARR network, to Sardinia, thus connecting it to the rest of the research network on the national territory.

The TeRABIT project, funded by the NRRP with INFN and OGS as proposers and CINECA and GARR as partners, is creating a digital research infrastructure that integrates a high-performance network with HPC resources and distributed computing to make it available to the entire scientific community.

Thanks to the current acquisition and the use of cutting-edge technologies, it will be possible to exploit the optical spectrum of the BlueMed submarine cable system. This means that there will be more lanes in the fiber, managed by GARR, exclusively for research data traffic. This innovation represents the first step towards achieving dual high-speed fiber optic connectivity in Sardinia, ensuring not only rapid data transmission to the research and university world but also greater redundancy and reliability extending globally.

From a technological point of view, this is a unique result so far in the national panorama, as explained by Massimo Carboni, Chief Technical Officer of GARR: “Thanks to the open cable technology, which offers the possibility to freely manage a wide range of spectrum rather than individual optical signals, this new digital fiber optic bridge will eliminate the distance of the island creating a seamless integration between the GARR-T infrastructure in the peninsula and that of Sardinia, effectively opening a unified optical network throughout the national territory. Today’s is the first stone of the expansion of GARR-T, which will be completed by 2025 and will provide connectivity up to 400 Gbps”.

“We are proud to present this first concrete result today,” commented Mauro Campanella, scientific coordinator of the TeRABIT project. “We are creating a broad-spectrum infrastructure, perfectly harmonized with other ongoing interventions financed by the NRRP. Once operational, the new connection will bring Sardinia’s infrastructure and researchers closer to TeRABIT’s HPC computing systems and to the resources of ICSC, the National Research Center in HPC, Big Data, and Quantum Computing being installed throughout the national territory.”

The new network connection will support the needs of several research infrastructures and laboratories in Sardinia and will strengthen the candidacy of the Sos Enattos area to host the Einstein Telescope, the future infrastructure to be built in Europe dedicated to gravitational waves, a third-generation detector 10 times more sensitive than those currently existing.

Once the expansion is completed, the GARR-T network will guarantee an increase of 5,000 km of fiber optic, reaching a total capacity of approximately 40 Tbps throughout Italy.