NEWSLETTER 48
Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare
JUNE 2018
The Laboratory for the Environment and Cultural Heritage (LABEC) of the INFN, based in the Scientific Hub of the University of Florence, in Sesto Fiorentino, is the laboratory for nuclear techniques applied to the study of cultural heritage and environment, which has succeeded in acquiring a world leadership role in this sector over the years, by working in contact with prestigious national and international institutions. Besides being at the heart of the INFN network for cultural heritage, CHNet (Cultural Heritage Network), with the INFN sections in Genoa and Florence, the LABEC becomes part of a Joint Research Unit (JRU) known as Actris-Italia (Aerosols, Clouds and Trace gases Research Infrastructure), which aims to create an Italian network of national and international importance devoted to observing and studying the atmosphere, pollution and climate change. Besides that, it has been the landmark laboratory for years in training young researchers originating from developing nations in the use of nuclear analysis techniques with accelerators, through programmes backed by IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency. We asked its director, Massimo Chiari, about the main research dealt with so far and how the LABEC activities have evolved over the years.
What are the main lines of activity of the LABEC?
The LABEC laboratory was set up in 2003, in close cooperation between the INFN section in Florence and the University, mainly for applications of nuclear analysis techniques with accelerators in the area of cultural heritage and the environment, as its name suggests. The laboratory’s interest, though, is also focused on applications of these techniques in other sectors, especially on testing detectors, study of geology, the sciences of materials, forensic science and on damage from radiation.
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It is a priority of the European strategy in particle physics and it’s going to be the biggest physics project of the next 10 years. It’s High Luminosity LHC, also known as HiLumi LHC, which on the 15 June, at CERN, celebrated the laying of its first stone, with the start of the civil engineering ...
The leader of the most sensitive dark-matter experiment conducted to date will receive the 2019 Lancelot M. Berkeley – New York Community Trust Prize for Meritorious Work in Astronomy. The Berkeley prize is bestowed annually since 2011 by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and supported by a grant from ...
The 10th birthday for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the NASA satellite operating in the field of high energy astrophysics, dedicated to detecting gamma-rays. Fermi is a NASA mission which counts on a fundamental Italian involvement, with the contributions of the INFN, the Italian Space Agency (ASI), and the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF)....
Something that was hidden in a painting for almost four centuries has now become visible for the first time and this is partly thanks to a special X-ray scanner called LANDIS-X, built by researchers from the INFN and the National Research Council (CNR). What was hidden was a female figure, painted then ...
The CUPID-0 (CUORE Upgrade with Particle IDentification), installed in the INFN National Laboratories of the Gran Sasso (LNGS), has published its first results in Physical Review Letters. CUPID-0 studies neutrinoless double beta decay, an extremely rare phenomenon which, if detected, ...
FULL SPEED AHEAD EUCLID: TOWARDS THE STUDY OF THE DARK UNIVERSE
On 14 June in the ThalesAlenia Space facility in Turin, the avionic model (AVM) of the Near Infrared Spectro Photometer (NISP) was delivered, the “eye” in the infrared, which will join the one in the visible (VIS) in helping the EUCLID space mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) to study the Dark Universe with levels of precision never reached before. The aim of EUCLID is to create a super-detailed map of the distribution and the evolution of dark matter and dark energy in the Universe. AVM is the first fully functioning system of the electronic part of the NISP and it makes it possible to check that the instrument is working properly, starting from commands sent from Earth, down to receiving scientific data, after processing by the on-board computer and by the two software systems. The AVM is completely “made in Italy” and Italy is involved in the EUCLID mission under numerous aspects: both with making the subsystems of the on-board instruments and with responsibility for management of the Earth Segment and the survey, but also with important roles in managing technical and scientific aspects of the mission. Whit the support of the Italian Space Agency (ASI), more than two hundred Italian scientists are involved in EUCLID, coming from the INAF (National Institute of Astrophysics), INFN and several Universities. ...
cover image:
Analysis at LABEC on Painting “Trivulzio Portrait” by Antonello da Messina © INFN
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