Seismic Sensors group activity

The seismic sensors group (led by Prof. Tomasz Bulik) activities revolve mainly around the gravitational waves theme of the Astrocent project. A detection of gravitational waves in 2015 was a great achievement and led to the opening of gravitational wave astronomy. The advancement of this new branch of particle astrophysics hinges on development and improvement of detectors. The quality of the data is related to monitoring and compensating for a variety of sources of noise. The seismic noise, apart from shaking the test masses in the interferometers, is also a source of the Newtonian – or gravity gradient – noise. This type of noise is due to fluctuations of the local gravity by seismic or sound waves in the medium surrounding the detector.

Ultrapure SiPMs and Associated Readout Electronics group activity

One key physics goal is to use dedicated systems of SiPMs to look for the elusive dark matter in the Universe. In order to achieve extreme sensitivity of detectors, its components themselves must not generate any background that could potentially obscure the signal from dark matter. Another important physics goal is the search for so-called Majorana neutrinos. A similar detection technology enables us to look for this potential feature of neutrinos, which could shed lights on the reasons for why our Universe is mostly made up of matter and not antimatter.