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“Art and science are not separate universes”: this is how Fernando Ferroni, INFN president, describes “The mistery of the origin. Myths, transfigurations and science”, a virtual and immersive installation produced by Foundation Carla Fendi in collaboration with INFN and CERN for Spoleto 61 Festival of 2Worlds. The installation offered, from July 1 to 15, a trip throughout the history of our universe: from the Big Bang to the formation of galaxies, black holes, stars, planets, all the way down to our solar system. It gave the visitors a chance to discover some of the instruments employed today to explore the universe, from space telescopes, to neutrino and dark matter detectors of INFN Gran Sasso National Laboratories and to the major experiments at CERN Large Hadron Collider. Foundation Carla Fendi, which for the first time this year has hightlighted science in Spoleto Festival of 2Worlds, awarded the “2018 Carla Fendi Prize” to Peter Higgs and François Englert, 2013 Nobel Prize in physics winners for the prediction of the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles, and to Fabiola Gianotti, CERN Director General, for her important role and her contributions in the field of experimental particle physics. The Prize has to be devolved to activities that encourage and support science dissemination. During the Prize Award Ceremony, that took place on July 15 in Spoleto, we met Peter Higgs and Fabiola Gianotti.
Fabiola Gianotti, you are leading the largest particle physics laboratory in the world, CERN, what does it mean to lead such an important laboratory, which is trying to push beyond the frontiers of our knowledge every day?
It is a great privilege, a wonderful and extremely enriching experience. The scientific programme is exciting; from the LHC, which allows us to explore the so-called “energy frontier”, to the injection
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An international research group, including scientists from INFN, the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) and the University of Bologna, has succeeded in locating one of the densest cosmic clumps in the known universe. It is the cosmic environment around the galaxy ...
Making use of technology developed by INFN and CERN is now a concrete opportunity for many hi-tech Italian companies, spin-offs and small businesses, that are willing to back and invest on innovation. Agreements have now actually been signed between INFN and the first Business Innovation Centres (BIC), ...
On July 9th the launching event of CHNet (Cultural Heritage Network)the INFN special network focused on cultural heritage, took place in Rome. The event, organised in collaboration with the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities (MiBAC), provided an opportunity to take stock of the experiences, ....
On 17 July, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Italian Republic in the Russian Federation Pasquale Terracciano paid his first official visit to the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. The Ambassador was accompanied by the First Counselor of the Department of the promotion of Italian culture, science and language and coordination of the consular network ...
Giuseppe Battistoni is to become the new director of the TIFPA (the Trento Institute for Fundamental Physics and Applications), the INFN’s National Centre dedicated to particle physics research and the development of cutting-edge technologies in sensoristics, space research, supercomputing and ...
FIRST OBSERVATION OF NEUTRINOS AND PHOTONS EMITTED BY THE SAME COSMIC SOURCE
For the first time, we have been able to identify the possible source of a cosmic neutrino, thanks to its association with a gamma ray source. We are talking about a blazar, that is an active galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its centre, at a distance of 4.5 billion light-years, in the direction of the constellation of Orion. Researchers achieved this extraordinary result, published in Science, by combining the data from the IceCube neutrino detector, which operates among the glaciers of the South Pole, with 15 other experiments for detecting photons from Earth and in space. The INFN, the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and various Italian Universities made decisive contributions by participating with their researchers in many of the experiments and observatories involved in the discovery. On 22 September 2017 the IceCube neutrino detector observed an interesting neutrino, then named IC-170922A. This was of interest, because its extremely high energy, equal to 290 TeV (teraelectronvolts, one thousand billion electronvolts), showed that, in all probability, it originated from a very “active” remote celestial object. Since, in theory, production of cosmic neutrinos is always accompanied by gamma rays, when IceCube observed IC-170922A, it immediately sent a “neutrino alert” to all telescopes, spread around in space and on earth, in the hope that their observations might help identifying the source accurately. And that’s what happened: the Fermi satellite, designed by NASA with an important contribution from ASI, INAF ...
cover image:
A distant astrophysical source emits neutrinos, later detected by DOM, IceCube detectors placed under ice, illustration © IceCube / Nsf
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