CHIPP: Swiss Institute of Particle Physics
The main highlight of 2021 was the Annual CHIPP Plenary meeting. This year it was held in the beginning of June in Spiez, a village on the lake Thun, in the welcoming Hotel Seaside. For two days we scheduled presentations from the various experts in CHIPP to cover the three physics pillars: particle physics at the high-energy and intensity frontiers, astroparticle physics, and neutrino physics. The main goal was to cover the actual state of the field highlighting the sectors where hints of discover are found. The many talks presented were shared between senior and young researchers. Both the CHIPP board meeting and the CHIPP formal Plenary meeting were held during the two days; in parallel with the Board meeting the CHIPP Young scientists organised talks and a poster session. The plenary formal part of the meeting hosted a session with reports of the activities of the various committees such as the European Committee for Future Accelerators, the International Particle Physics Outreach Group, the Astroparticle Physics European Consortium (APPEC) and the Nuclear Physics European Collaboration Committee (NuPECC). During this meeting CHIPP held the elections to cover the different roles in the association and to select the Swiss representatives in the international organizations. During this meeting CHIPP held the elections to cover the different roles in the association and to select the Swiss representatives in the international organizations. A special session was dedicated to Searches for new physics: Flavour physics at the LHC, the field where many measured anomalies point to New Physics.
In the end of August, CHIPP participated to the annual meeting of the Swiss Physical Society at the Innsbruck University in Austria, helping with the organization of parallel sessions for particle and astroparticle physics where many Particle Physics students presented their work. As part of the SPS award ceremony where all winners of the various SPS prizes were honoured and the CHIPP prize for the best 2021 PhD thesis work in particle physics was awarded to Gabriel Cuomo, scientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Gabriel receives the award for his doctoral thesis, with the laudation "The CHIPP Prize jury honours Gabriel Cuomo for his outstanding theoretical studies of quantum field theories in the strongly coupled regime, which elucidated new properties relevant to a variety physical system: from condensed matter to cosmology".
Marco Valente from the UniGe (supervised by A. Sfyrla) received in 2021 the 2020 ATLAS thesis award.
During 2021, the CHIPP Executive Board and the CHIPP Board were very active in the editing of the Swiss CHIPP Roadmap as the document to illustrate to politicians and to the public the priorities of the Particle Physics community in Switzerland. The CHIPP EB kept the FLARE Tables updated with the funding of experiments of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), the Board continued to exchange information and feedback with the funding agencies.
To get flexibility for more actions towards young physicists, possibly to organise a student award the CHIPP EB proposes to increase both the personal membership fees and the institution fees, the decision has been accepted by the CHIPP Board.
The CHIPP outreach activities continued supporting the thematic portal hosted on the SCNAT website, the multi-lingual “particlephysics.ch”. Thanks to the SCNAT support, we could continue to keep this a lively page with 10 interviews and a video given by B. Vogel, a professional journalist, and several other news articles and press releases in 2021.
In 2021 CHIPP continued to work on its networking and educational goals and organized directly or through its members several meetings, schools and workshops.
Prof. Mike Seidel (EPFL) and Dr Tatiana Pieloni (EPFL) contributed to a MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) on accelerators, as part of the European programme ARIES.
On a dedicated webpage in the CHIPP website are some online presentations that took place online during the 2021 from young researchers.
Scientific cooperation
Research in particle and astroparticle physics usually involves large infrastructures, which are the result of regional, national and worldwide collaborations. To cover the important intellectual and technological challenges, the amounts of human and financial resources required can no longer provided by a single country. The table below shows a snapshot of the current international experimental collaborations involving CHIPP Board members.
Furthermore, smaller cooperation projects exist; many of them occur spontaneously – between groups working in the same field or requiring the same type of infrastructure – or in a coordinated way by CHIPP. Here below some of the activities coordinated by CHIPP members:
During 2021 two PSI community papers were published:
«Science Case for the new High-Intensity Muon Beams HIMB at PSI» Editors: Andreas Knecht, Frank Meier, Thomas Prokscha, Stefan Ritt, Adrian Signer
«Review of Particle Physics at PSI» Editors: Adrian Signer, Klaus Kirch, Cyrus Hoffman.
S. Schramm (University of Geneva) created an ATLAS open dataset for outreach and teaching purposes that was made public in June2021. An illustration of the project is in Fig. XX and more details can be found at the CERN opendata webpage.
Project Swiss institutes CHIPP Board Members Institutesworldwide
High-Energy particle physics
ATLAS Bern, Geneva Beck, Ereditato, Golling, Iacobucci, Nessi, Schramm, Sfyrla, Weber, Wu 218
CMS ETHZ, PSI, Zurich Botta, Caminada, Canelli, DeCosa, Dissertori, Grab, Kotlinski, Kilminster, Wallny 198
LHCb EPFL, Zurich Bay, Nakada, Schneider, Serra, Shchutska 81
LHC Tier-2 ETHZ, CSCS Donega > 200
HL-LHC EPFL, PSI Seidel 55
CLIC ETHZ, PSI Seidel 70
FCC Bern, EPFL, ETHZ, Geneva, PSI Blondel, Rivkin, Dissertori, Laine, Seidel 134
NA64 ETHZ Rubbia, Crivelli 8
FASER Bern, Geneva Iacobucci, Sfyrla, Scampoli 18
Astroparticle physics
AMS Geneva Wu 63
ArDM ETHZ Rubbia 7
CTA ETHZ, Geneva. Biland, Montaruli 210
DAMIC Zurich Kilminster 10
DAMPE Geneva Tykhonov
DARWIN Bern, Zurich Baudis 24
IceCube Geneva Montaruli 50
MAGIC+FACT ETHZ Biland 24-4
XENON Bern, Zurich Baudis 27
Neutrino physics
GERDA Zurich Baudis 18
T2K / HyperK Bern, ETHZ, Geneva Blondel, Ereditato, Sanchez, Rubbia 33-63-75
SBN (MicroBooNE) Bern Ereditato, Weber 34
SHiP EPFL, Geneva, Zurich Bay, Blondel, Kilminster, Serra, Shaposhnikov 53
WA105/DUNE Bern, ETHZ, Geneva Blondel, Rubbia, Weber 21-175
High-precision and muon physics
CREMA ETHZ, PSI Hildebrandt, Kirch, Soter 9
GBAR ETHZ Rubbia, Crivelli 18
MEG II PSI Hildebrandt, Ritt 15
Mu3e ETHZ, Geneva, PSI, Zurich Blondel, Caminada, Dissertori, Grab, Hildebrandt, Ritt, Wallny, Serra 8
MuMass ETH, PSI Crivelli, Kirch, Soter 3
n2EDM ETHZ, PSI, Bern Kirch, Lauss, Piegsa 15
PANDA Basel Krusche 64
BASE ETHZ Soter 11
LEMING ETHZ, PSI Soter, Kirch, Crivelli 3
PIONEER ETHZ, PSI Soter, Caminada 13
Other
Medical Bern Braccini, Scampoli
Novel Detectors Bern Kreslo
Ion-Beam Physics ETHZ Synal
In parallel to these experimental collaborations and projects, Swiss theorists are involved in numerous international collaborations. The prominent ones, in which Swiss theory institutes are key players is
- The LHC Higgs cross-section working group (LHCHXSWG) created in 2010 to produce agreements on cross sections, branching ratios and pseudo-observables relevant to the Higgs boson: M. Spira (PSI) was involved in the LHC Higgs cross-section working group responsible for the HDecay Manual.
At the University of Bern the work on the review of lattice results continues. It is related to pion, kaon, D- and B-meson physics with the aim of making them easily accessible to the particle physics community.
Prof. O. Schneider (EPFL) is convener of a sub-group of the Heavy Flavour Averaging Group (HFLAV). HFLAV is responsible for calculating world averages of measurements of beauty-hadron, charm-hadron and tau-lepton properties from current and past experiments and provides a comprehensive resource for the field in terms of web pages and full documentation of results.
Institutional collaboration (in alphabetical order):
Several CHIPP Board members are acting as official delegates to international organizations in 2019:
Several CHIPP members were committed to international responsibilities:
One of the main objectives for CHIPP is to attract the young public to Physics and Astroparticle Physics. To achieve this goal more than 50 educational events like information days for BSc and MSc students, for pupils finishing high school and for high-school classes were organized, throughout Switzerland, involving more than 4000 young students.
Several information days for future students were organised, in Zurich at the University three sessions in March and September with approximately 130 pupils participated; ETH organised two “unterwegs” at two high schools (Baldegg LU, and Bern). Elena Graverini (EPFL) organized 4 sessions at the Liceo Galilei, Siena (IT) with 80 participants.
Information days for pupils in the last year before their Matura/baccalaureate were organised, at UZH 6 evets with more than 120 pupils; at the EPFL 20 participants visited the particle physics lab of Prof. Schneider and Prof. Shchutska. Events were organised also for smaller students, at the UZH one event hosted 24 participants while at the EPFL Maria Vieites Diaz visited a class of 15 students of the Galician primary school. Frederic Blanc (EPFL) intervened for a special event “Journée des métiers” organised for school children in Lausanne; Dr Ana Barbara Rodrigues Cavalcante (EPFL) organised an online event “Kid Game Jam”. At the University of Zurich an open day for children was organised, it hosted 50 children. Christop Grab (ETHZ) and Adrian Glauser (ETHZ) organised two special events under the umbrella of the "ETH-unterwegs" visiting Gymnasia. Günther Dissertori (ETHZ) gave a talk for children at the University of Winterthur.
More than 200 Swiss high-school pupils (at the Universities of Bern, Geneva, Zurich and the ETHZ) were invited to participate in the International Masterclasses ‘Hands on Particle Physics’, where over 13’000 Gymnasium level students in about 215 institutes over 52 countries can actually work with real data from the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Since 2017 CERN invites high-school students to come to CERN for two weeks, to gain practical experience in science, technology, and innovation (High-School Students Internship Programme, HSSIP). Each student gets a supervisor and works on a project, eg. working on vacuum techniques, accelerators or in experimental areas, or working on an analysis or a simulation project. Switzerland takes part for the first time; HSSIP was scheduled for Autumn 2020 and then re-scheduled to Spring '21. It was finally decided to move it to Autumn '21, 24 students were very happy to participate.
At PSI 5 high-school students had an internship of 3 weeks in particle physics, while a high school student was hosted for a two-week internship at the group of Anna Sfyrla, within the program "extra-muros".
Dr Valérie Domcke (EPFL) gave outreach talk at Jashore University of Science and Technology, Bangladesch (18/10/2021, online) while Prof. Joao Penedoens (EPFL) gave an outreach talk "What is Quantum Field Theory?" at PLANCKS 2021 on 08/05/2021, targeting undergraduate physics students from several schools.
Bernd Krusche (University of Basel) gave a talk ('Bausteine der Materie') to a class from the Muensterplatzgymnasium in Basel (was in presence).
In the following we outline a few of the key activities for the general public and high-school students of the past year:
Visits to CERN: CERN as the centre of high energy research is extremely attractive for visits which are organised regularly by CHIPP members. In recent years about 50 visits a year were organised for university students in physics and other disciplines, high-school students, alumni, politicians, members of societies, media, and the general public at large.
Specialised school labs as well as lectures and workshops for school classes play a key role in attracting young students to study STEM related subjects. There are several dedicated laboratories at our institutes that offer special courses in cosmology as well as particle, astroparticle and neutrino physics for school classes targeting different ages of young students. With hands-on experiments, visits to the labs and by meeting bachelor and master students they get in contact with state-of-the-art research and passionate researchers (iLab at PSI, Science Lab at the University of Zurich, Physiscope at University of Geneva).
Several events were organised during the year; researchers helped and participated giving presentations and supporting young kids to get closer to scientific topics:
CHIPP’s website contains news, documents, minutes of all meetings, as well as the link to the complete membership database. The continuous dialogue between the institutes, which is enshrined in the CHIPP Statutes and By-Laws, aims at having at hand in a timely and transparent manner the information about current and planned research activities. As in previous years, CHIPP took an active role in the biannual meetings of SCNAT’s Round Table International Organisations and Research Infrastructures. The scope of this information forum is the exchange between the research fields involving with large international infrastructures. It accounts for the participation of Swiss groups in international research facilities and also comprises representatives of the SERI, SNSF, and “Swiss universities”.
On the 14 April 2021, Lea Caminada gave a motivational talk at the CMS job matching event.
The SCNAT offered a firm place with increased visibility among the other fields of science for both the CHIPP website and the more general Physics outreach website (‘particlephysics.ch’). The site was kept lively throughout 2020 with the addition of 10 interviews, a video and other news articles. As approved by the CHIPP Board, the articles are authored by B. Vogel, a science journalist collaborating with CHIPP since many years. Dr. H. P. Beck (the University of Bern) was responsible for their scientific content and Angela Benelli inserted them on the SCNAT portal in Italian, in German and in English. CHIPP is grateful to SCNAT for supporting this activity as an important dialogue with the society.
During 2020 the CHIPP Twitter account @CHIPP_news has continuously spread physics news to increase the public awareness about science and publicized available jobs in academia and outside for physicists.
At the EPFL, G. Pietrzyk is in charge of the LHCb Experiment Twitter account: @lhcbexperiment and the LHCbExperiment Instagram account with around 26.3K and 13000 followers respectively. Anna Sfyrla set up and manages the Particle Physics Unige Twitter account @DPNC_Unige. The Facebook site Verflixtes Higgs continued to be fed by H. P. Beck.
With A. Benelli as the Swiss member in the European Particle Physics Communication Network (EPPCN), CHIPP continues its link between the CERN press office and the Swiss media, as well as with the communication offices of the institutes related to CHIPP. The contact has been established and a measure of the media coverage of particle physics in Switzerland is provided on-line.
Several articles have been published on magazines, here are some of them:
Video:
Gender issue & society
Several events were organized:
Exhibitions
Science Exploratorium UZH with three exhibits on CMS, Dark Matter and Superconductivity.
4 November 2021, Focus Terra ETHZ Gravitational waves in the context of the AGORA-Project "The irresistible attraction of gravity"
22-30 Mai 2021, UZH, Science and nature festival; Booth on XENON, CMS and Superconductivity.
4 September, UZH at the Zürcher Museen, Lange Nacht der Museen. Booth on XENON, CMS and SUperconductivity.
4-5 September 2021, Scientifica, Synthetic naturally, ETHZ & UZH. Booth on particle physics at CERN and dark matter Labtour to XENOSCOPE.