APC – AstroCeNT annual meeting 2022

In early December 2022, an AstroCeNT delegation (group leaders, postdocs, PhD students and administration) traveled to Paris to attend the annual meeting with the Laboratoire Astroparticule & Cosmologie, a scientific partner of the AstroCeNT.

For the past two years, meetings of the two institutions have been held remotely due to Сovid-19 restrictions. This year we managed to get together in large numbers and meet in person.

During the meeting, 15 reports on the progress of the working groups and ongoing projects were presented.

Travel of our scientists to Paris was supported by DarkWave and COPIN grants.

Minister Rzymkowski visits AstroCeNT

On the 1st of June 2022 AstroCeNT was visited by Dr Tomasz Rzymkowski, Vice Minister of Education and Science. The purpose of the visit of our distinguished guests was twofold: to learn more about the field of particle astrophysics, including the research done at AstroCeNT, and to meet with an initiative group to build in Poland an underground laboratory.

The Vice Minister showed much interest in the initiative and encouraged the group to produce a report with more information about possible sites and about the role that the Polish underground laboratory could play in Polish science and economy, both locally and an international level.

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.

“Rewolucja Stanu” — comics about Quantum Informatics co-authored by Prof. Piotr Gawron
The book consists of two parts: the first is comic and the second is scientific. The storyline of the comic part takes place in some undefined future, ruled by an organisation that guards access to knowledge. In this world quantum informatics has developed, but at the same time it is treated as a forbidden art. In the story, a certain organisation is trying to gain access to all the knowledge accumulated by Humanity. But to do so, they have to steal quantum cryptographic keys…

Scientific Awards of “Polityka”
Dr Sebastian Trojanowski from the Particle Astrophysics group has been placed among the 15 finalists of the 21. edition of the scientific award “Nagroda Naukowa Polityki” organised by the major Polish weekly “Polityka”. Scientific Awards of “Polityka” are scholarships for young Polish scientists to encourage their work in different scientific disciplines. Dr Trojanowski is this year’s finalists in physics.

Unique infrasound sensor has been developed at AstroCeNT
Group 2 led by Prof. Bulik and group 3 led by Dr. Suchenk have developed  a unique infrasound sensor. It will find its application both in cutting-edge scientific research and commercial projects.
“While most commercial solutions are very expensive, we have managed to significantly reduce the cost of such a solution, which is crucial in applications where tens or even hundreds of precise sensors are needed.”

Events

PhD Defense of Sarthak Choudhary

26/06/2025

New Scientific Article Published...

12/06/2025

Astrocent at the DarkSide-20k...

6/06/2025

Calendar

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