NEWSLETTER 44
Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare
FEBRUARY 2018
Promoting and strengthening technology transfer activities is one of the areas on which INFN has been strategically investing for some years. Since 2012, it has set up the National Committee for Technology Transfer (CNTT), with a dedicated Office, and it has launched several projects, the most recent being R4I (Research for Innovation). We spoke about this with Ezio Previtali, coordinator of the CNTT.
What is meant by technology transfer?
'Research turns into innovation when it exceeds the social threshold', this is how one of my professors described technology transfer. It's a process through which knowledge, technologies and prototypes, which are developed by research institutions for scientific purposes, are made available to the market and society. It's an important mechanism, and sometimes we do not realise how intrinsic it is in what we do. Technology transfer has by its very nature an interdisciplinary aspect: we develop a product that is used for high energy physics and we apply it to medicine, for example. It's a very satisfying activity because, in order to achieve our scientific objectives, technologies are pushed to the limit, to then be transferred to other areas, which can benefit from them but where it would have been difficult to develop them.
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The DarkSide-50 experiment in operation at the INFN Gran Sasso National Laboratories reported two new results on dark matter studies. DarkSide-50 was designed to detect a specific type of large mass weakly interacting massive particles, WIMPs larger than 50 GeV/c2. The main difficulty ...
The Autonomous Region of Sardinia applied to host the Einstein Telescope (ET), the future third-generation infermometre to study gravitational waves. The application filed by the Sos Enattos mine site is supported by the Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR), INFN and the University of Sassari. The site, located close to Lula (Nuoro province), ...
CSES, China Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite to observe the Earth, was successfully launched on 2 February from the China-based Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre, in the Gobi desert (inner Mongolia). The satellite was built by the China Space Agency (CNSA) to develop on a global scale new methods to study geophysical phenomena, ...
The Italian Roberto Carlin, INFN researcher and professor at the University of Padua, was appointed as the new international spokesperson of the CMS scientific collaboration and will lead the experiment from September 2018, taking over from the American Joel Butler, to August 2020. Roberto Carlin’s appointment brings to three out of four the number of Italian researchers heading CERN’s LHC ...
On 14 February, the Abruzzo region and INFN signed an agreement governing the participation in the master plan of the DarkSide-20k project. The aim is to achieve synergy between the scientific world and companies, exploiting the Nuova Officina Assergi (NOA) infrastructure (the Gran Sasso laboratories’ new technological hub supported by the Abruzzo region). ...
The two projects financed by the European Commission as part of the Horizon 2020 program were launched with a joint kick-off meeting. These projects, which see INFN’s participation, focus on distributed computing and big data, eXtreme Data Cloud and DEEP-Hybrid DataCloud. Together with the EOSC-hub ...
THE GGI BECOMES NATIONAL CENTRE OF ADVANCED STUDIES FOR THEORETICAL PHYSICS
The Galileo Galilei Institute (GGI), a centre of excellence for high education in theoretical physics, has become the National Centre of Advanced Studies of INFN, in partnership with the University of Florence. A ceremony in Florence celebrated the event with the participation of the scientific community and the institutions. The ceremony was held on 15 February, the date which marks the anniversary of Galileo Galilei’s birth, to whom the centre which, every year, houses hundreds of the world’s best scientists, is dedicated. The GGI is now INFN’s third national centre, joining CNAF, the National Centre for the Research and Development in Information and Communication Technologies based in Bologna, and TIFPA, Trento’s Institute for Fundamental Physics and Applications. In addition to the GGI’s transformation into a National Centre, the Galileo Galilei Medal was introduced. This award will be assigned for the first time in 2019 to the researchers who contributed significantly to the progress on theoretical physics research. ...
cover image:
Silicon sensor © SLab
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