Particle physics at INFN Padova
L’obiettivo delle ricerche coordinate dalla Commissione Scientifica Nazionale 1 è lo studio delle interazioni dei costituenti fondamentali della materia attraverso esperimenti con gli acceleratori di particelle. Lo scopo delle attuali ricerche è di ottenere un’approfondita conoscenza di alcuni aspetti, come il meccanismo di generazione della massa delle particelle, o quello responsabile dell’asimmetria tra materia e antimateria, e in generale l’individuazione di possibili scenari di Nuova Fisica che spieghino i problemi irrisolti del Modello Standard.
In generale la fisica subnucleare richiede apparati di grande dimensione ed estrema complessità dove trovano applicazione le tecnologie più moderne nel campo dei rivelatori, dell’elettronica, dei sistemi di acquisizione dati, calcolo e analisi. Le collaborazioni sono composte da centinaia (o migliaia) di fisici provenienti da istituti e laboratori di tutto il mondo, un esempio molto importante di cooperazione internazionale. I gruppi INFN partecipano con contributi di eccellenza e con incarichi di responsabilità nei più elevati livelli decisionali degli esperimenti.
Belle II
In the big bang, matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts. But wherever we look today in the Universe we see only matter while antimatter seems to have disappeared. It also seems that most of the matter present in the Universe is actually invisible, known also as dark matter. What is the nature of the invisible mass? Is our knowledge of the microscopic world complete?
The Belle II experiment at the SuperKEKB accelerator in Japan aims to answer these and similar questions by colliding electrons and their antiparticles, the positrons, to make extremely precise measurements of the particles resulting from the reaction.
CMS Compact Muon Solenoid
The CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment is one of the four large particle detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the highest energy particle collider in the world, located at CERN. The CMS experiment records the signals of the particles produced during these collisions, allowing to explore many aspects of particle physics: the properties of the Higgs boson, the famous particle discovered in 2012 at CMS and Atlas, and other particles, and also the search for signs of so far unknown physics phenomena. The Padova group played a leading role in the design and construction of parts of the experiment and is heavily involved in the data analyses and maintaining and operating the detector.
LHCb
LHCb is one of the four big experiments at the LHC, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. The collaboration working on the detector consists of more than a thousand physicists from all over the world. The main purpose of the LHCb experiment is to explore what happened after the Big Bang when antimatter disappeared and only matter survived to build the universe we inhabit today. LHCb records, like a very expensive camera, the LHC collisions in a complementary way with respect to CMS and ATLAS. LHCb has already observed many processes that prefer matter over anti-matter, has discovered exotic particles composed of four and five quarks bound together, has performed precision measurements hinting at deviations from the established theories and many more results.
MUonE
Very high precision measurements are a severe test of the theories of the particle world. Nowadays hints show that the muon, an unstable elementary particle, is not completely described by the framework of confirmed theories, the Standard Model, which in case has to be modified to include “new physics”. MUONE is a difficult and ambitious experiment which aims to measure, with high precision, a basic parameter of the muon, which characterizes its interaction with an electron. The experiment will take place at the SPS accelerator at CERN in Geneve. In Padova we are developing the apparatus dedicated to the measurement of the electron, the electromagnetic calorimeter, exploiting the light emitted by crystals containing lead and tungsten.
RD FCC ???
The RD_FCC research group of the INFN studies the options for detectors and physics of future electron-positron circular colliders, FCC-ee at CERN or CEPC in China. FCC-ee will be able to produce directly the heavies particles of the Standard Model and measure with unprecedented precision the properties of the Higgs boson and other important parameters of the Standard Model. It will also have a unique access to the discovery of dark matter particles. Our studies are focused around an original proposal for a detector concept, called IDEA, optimised to realise the physics measurements with the needed precision. We develop computer simulations to study the most interesting physics processes, and we explore new technologies to be used in our detector design.