July 2024
Carlos Peña Garay, director of the LSC, has been elected new Chair of the APPEC General Assembly
Carlos Peña Garay, director of the Canfranc Underground Laboratory, has been elected new Chair of the APPEC General Assembly. His presidency will begin on 1 January 2025 and he will succeed Andreas Haungs. The Astroparticle Physics European Consortium (APPEC) represents the astroparticle physics community views in Europe’s decision-making process for the long-term future of the field. The General Assembly, formed by directors of major astroparticle physics...
June 2024
LSC Seminars: “Coating based radon barriers for future rare event searches”
Florian Jörg, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg and part of the XENON collaboration, has presented a novel technique to reduce radon emanation in materials used in rare event experiments. By using copper electrodeposition, they managed to reduce emanation rates in steel by over 1000 times with just a few microns of coating. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apradiso.2023.110666
New setup of DAMIC-M collaboration at LSC
Since last week, the LSC has a new cutting edge setup for reading scientific charge-coupled devices (CCDs) with an extraordinary capability: they can count electrons! This breakthrough brings us closer to the ambitious and fascinating goal of building a radio-purity service capable of detecting very low-energy radiation and the weakest signals. It is currently in the commissioning phase, where the equipment is being tested, but environmental background measurements are expected soon.
May 2024
34th meeting of the LSC Scientific Advisory Committee
The 34th meeting of the LSC Scientific Advisory Committee took place on 21-22 May. The Committee heard presentations from the experiments: ANAIS, CROSS, NEXT and DAMIC and assessed the written reports of the rest of the experiments.
LSC Seminars: “Quantification and control of the cosmogenic activation of materials”
At the LSC we organise monthly seminars related to the different scientific and technical areas in which we work. Susana Cebrián, researcher of the CAPA group at the University of Zaragoza and expert in cosmogenic activation of materials, presented the results of her latest research. In this talk, she explained the importance of quantifying and controlling the radioactivity induced in materials by cosmic radiation, fundamental aspect for reducing the radioactive background in rare event experiments, such as those we host at the LSC .
Meeting of the Evaluating Committee of the LSC’s Biology Platform
A group of experts in biochemistry, microbiology and virology, in charge of evaluating the progress of the experiments and analysing new proposals in biology, met on Monday 29 April at the LSC. This evaluation committee will prepare the necessary evaluation report for the scientific committee to be held on 21 and 22 May in Canfranc.