Scientific Highlights

New understanding on the relationship between galaxies and dark matter solves mysterious problem in cosmology

March 10, 2023

Recent studies have revealed that the bending of light around massive galaxies is significantly smaller than what our theories predict. Now, a team of scientists from Spanish institutions has found that the mismatch between theory and observations is actually caused by imprecise modeling of astrophysical processes.

The MAGIC Telescopes scrutinize the center of the Milky Way for fingerprints of dark matter

February 10, 2023

233 hours of observations of the galactic center with the MAGIC Telescope has helped constrain possible properties of dark matter particle candidates. The results are published in Physical Review Letters. Daniel Kerszberg, Ramon y Cajal fellow at IFAE, Barcelona, Spain, is one of the leading authors of this research.

IFAE leads the Plan Complementario for Astrophysics and High Energy Physics

February 10, 2023

The Plan Complementario for Astrophysics and High Energy Physics was presented in Barcelona with the presence of the Minister of Science and Innovation and the Minister of Research and Universities of the Generalitat de Catalunya. The IFAE leads the project which has a budget of more than 39 million euros and seven autonomous communities involved.

Prof. Eugenio Coccia named new Director of IFAE

October 7, 2022

Prof. Coccia was the director of the INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory and founding director of the school for advanced studies Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI), of which he was the rector until now. He will succeed Prof. Ramon Miquel as IFAE Director on November 15, 2022.

New ERC Starting Grant to improve the diagnostic capabilities of Time-of-Flight Positron Emission Tomographies with innovative detector technologies

September 20, 2022

Gerard Ariño-Estrada and his team plan to build a gamma detector for time-of-flight positron emission tomography with improved time and spatial detection features by exploiting a novel gamma detector design.

IFAE leads an international project to pave the way for the Einstein Telescope: a European Third-Generation Gravitational Wave Observatory

September 7, 2022

ET-PP is an Horizon Europe INFRA-DEV project that started on September 1st 2022 to address the fundamental prerequisites for the approval, construction and operation of the Einstein Telescope. The Institut de Física d’Altes Energies (IFAE) is the coordinator institution of this project that comprises leading research centers from 11 countries.

The Higgs boson, ten years after its discovery

July 4, 2022

The landmark discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC exactly ten years ago, and the progress made since then to determine its properties, have allowed physicists to make tremendous steps forward in our understanding of the universe. The Collider Physics Group at IFAE joined the ATLAS collaboration since its inception. For 30 years it has contributed to the design and construction of the experiment and the physics analysis program.

The MAGIC telescopes detect vampire star nuclear explosion

April 14, 2022

Researchers from the MAGIC collaboration, have detected very high-energy gamma rays from a recurrent nova in the Milky Way. The results of these observations and the new discoveries about these stellar explosions have been published on April 14 in an article in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Moon’s orbit proposed as a gravitational wave detector

March 17, 2022

IFAE Theory Group member Diego Blas, in collaboration with Alexander Jenkins from UCL, propose using the variations in distance between the Earth and the Moon, which can be measured with a precision of less than a centimeter, as a new gravitational wave detector within a frequency range that current devices cannot detect. The research, which could pave the way for the detection of signals from the early universe, was published recently in Physical Review Letters.