The Euclid Satellite from the European Space Agency (ESA) was successfully launched on Saturday, July 1st, with an SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Station in Florida, USA. It is now in its final position at the second Lagrange point (L2) of the Sun-Earth system, 1.5 million km from Earth in the opposite direction to the Sun. The commissioning has been completed and observations and survey has started. The satellite contained the Filter Wheel Assembly (FWA) for the Near Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP), whose construction was led by IFAE. During the following six years, Euclid will map one third of the sky and will help to understand the nature of dark matter and energy, which constitutes 95% of the total matter and energy in the universe. The IFAE team is preparing the scientific exploitation of the mission.

In June 2023, the first batch of data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument was made publicly available. Taken during the experiment’s “survey validation” phase, the data include the spectra of nearly 2 million distant galaxies and quasars as well as stars in our own Milky Way. DESI is in the midst of a five-year campaign to measure accurate redshifts of 40 million galaxies and quasars over a third of the sky, and provide the most accurate measurements of the expansion rate of the Universe across the cosmic history.

On March 2023, the ATLAS Collaboration reported the results of the most exhaustive set of measurements of the production of top-quark pairs alongside a W± boson (ttW) to date. This process accounts for just 1 in every 1000 top-quark pairs events. The measurement is based on the full Run 2 dataset corresponding to 140 fb-1 of proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, and is focused on events with two leptons of the same charge or three leptons. Among the results obtained are the first differential cross-section measurements of ttW across nine different kinematic observables, a precise measurement of the total ttW cross section, and the ratio of the ttW+/ttW– cross sections. The inclusive cross section was measured to be 890 ± 85 fb, in agreement with predictions within 2 standard deviations. This confirms the pattern of previous excesses in total ttW± production. On the other hand, the measured kinematic observables and their relative ttW+ and ttW– contributions could be well-modelled by various simulations within uncertainties, limiting the possibility that the ttW excess may be localised in a particular region of phase space. This result is critical input for the analyses in which ttW is a dominant background process, and will likely spur a new wave of interest in the theoretical modelling of ttW production. While these measurements present a major step forward in the understanding of the ttW process, they are limited by statistical uncertainties. New data from LHC Run 3 (2022-2026) will go a long way to improve this precision, strengthening ATLAS’ robust top-physics program and potentially revealing new physics beyond the Standard Model.

IFAE researcher Gerard Ariño awarded the VERSATILE project under the ATRAE call, focusing on advancing nuclear medicine capabilities. VERSATILE aims to develop a gamma detector with innovative technology for Targeted Alpha Therapy dosimetry, Boron Neutron Capture Therapy, and high-performance Time-of-Flight Positron Emission Tomography.

The LST collaboration reached an important milestone with the publication in The Astrophysical Journal of a paper reporting on the observations of the Crab Nebula and pulsar with LST-1, the first operational telescope of the future CTA Observatory. The Crab Nebula is the standard candle of gamma-ray astronomy, and hence the target on which the performance of new instruments is validated. The paper, led by the IFAE team, confirms the prior expectations, based on Monte Carlo simulations, about the potential of the LST telescopes, and paves the way for the scientific exploitation of LST-1 and the future CTA-North array.

IFAE is working on the ATLAS upgrades for the coming High Luminosity LHC era. The ATLAS-Pixels group is building modules for the innermost pixel layer of the new tracking detector called ITk. After considerable delays in the ATLAS schedule (a two year delay, since 2020), the first pre-production triplet module has been assembled at IFAE. Eleven other modules will be fabricated during the pre-production early in 2024. The assembly work is being carried out by P. Fernandez, J. Carlotto, N. Kakoty and E. Peregrina.

Within the AVaQus FET-Open project led by IFAE, the first coherent dynamics have been observed in a superconducting flux qubit device by the IFAE team. The sample was fabricated by the Royal Holloway University London fabrication team. This result is an important milestone in the goal of the IFAE QCT group of performing analog quantum computation with superconducting flux qubits.

The group performed a combined study of the two hadronic decays D+ → K−π+π+ and D+s → K+K+π− using a detailed analysis of the semileptonic decays D+ → K−π+l+νl (l=e, μ) thanks to the high-statistics dataset provided by the BESIII Collaboration. The stduy proposes simple and suitable amplitude parametrizations of the studied reactions that shall be of interest to experimentalists for upcoming analyses. These new parametrizations are based on the naïve-factorization hypothesis and the description of the resulting matrix elements in terms of well-known hadronic form factors, with special emphasis on the Kπ scalar and vector cases. Such form factors account for two-body final-state interactions which fulfill analyticity, unitarity, and chiral symmetry constraints. As a result of our study, we find that the P-wave contribution fits nicely within the naïve-factorization approach, whereas the S-wave contribution requires complex Wilson coefficients that hint for possibly genuine three-body nonfactorizable effects. Our hypothesis is further supported by the examination of D+s → K+K+π− decays, where we achieve a description in overall good agreement with data.

IFAE scientists and engineers have designed, produced, and tested the electrical and functional models (EFMs) of the trigger and acquisition electronic systems for the HERD’s fiber tracker and plastic scintillator detector. Both systems were successfully operated in the beam test campaigns performed at the CERN between August and October 2023. The EFMs have served as demonstrators of the feasibility of the HERD’s advanced trigger system for gamma rays proposed by IFAE and have facilitated the accumulation of invaluable expertise in view of the forthcoming engineering models, and for the integration of IFAE hardware contributions to HERD.

The IFAE GW grop performed a search for the coalescence of compact binary mergers with very asymmetric mass configurations using convolutional neural networks and the LIGO/Virgo data for the O3 observation period. Two-dimensional images in time and frequency were used as input. A scan over the O3 data set using the convolutional neural networks for detection results into no significant excess from an only-noise hypothesis. The results are translated into 90% confidence level upper limits on the merger rate as a function of the mass parameters of the binary system. Results are published in M. Andrès-Carcasona et al., Phys. Rev. D 107 (2023) 8, 082003.

The theory group at IFAE has revived the old idea of using a superconducting cavity as a Weber bar to search for Gravitational Waves. The group performed updated calculations of the sensitivity of both the mechanical and electromagnetic signals in the cavity, accounting for various noise sources that had previously been neglected. They also computed the sensitivity of a tunable experiment across a wide range of frequencies from kHz to GHz. The group quantified the advantages of using a superconducting cavity as a Weber bar over traditional approaches, demonstrating that the cavity can have a better broadband sensitivity across a wide range of frequencies. The efforts have led to a revival of the MAGO program by experimental groups at FNAL and DESY

IFAE plays a central role in the preparation of the third-generation Einstein Telescope (ET). Mario Martínez is the European coordinator of the Horizon-CSA INFRA-DEV ET-PP four-years project (2022-2026), corresponding to the preparatory phase of the ET experiment, and one of the three ET Directors. Eugenio Coccia is the Chair of the ET Collaboration Board.

Researchers from the MAGIC collaboration constrained the properties of candidate dark matter particles. A total of 223 hours of observation with the MAGIC Telescopes, pointed to the center of the Milky Way, were dedicated to searching for gamma-ray “lines” - light emitted within a narrow and specific range of energies. The detection of TeV lines would have indicated particles much heavier than those known within the Standard Model, serving as a compelling signature for dark matter.

Engineering muon collisions for the first time entails new and yet unexplored physics opportunities, and novel strategies for measurements that will first become available at a future muon collider. Specifically, the study by the Theory group exploits the highly-penetrating nature of the muons, which can travel through the components of the collider and hence be detected even if emitted very close to the beam line, unlike other particles. This entails novel opportunities for the study of Z-boson fusion processes, depicted on the left panel of the figure. If the ``X’’ particle produced in Z fusion is the Higgs boson, this gives new opportunities to study its properties. The right panel of the figure shows that this strategy would allow to measure with high precision the Higgs boson branching ratio to invisible (like neutrinos) particles. Small new physics (BSM) corrections to the branching ratio predicted by the Standard Model could be observed, provided the forward muon detection is possible up to angles as small as 1/100 of a radiant (i.e., half a degree).

Access to existing compute resources beyond those pledged by the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid sites has been explored as a way to increase the available capacity for LHC computing. The PIC team led the negotiations with the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) for the recognition of LHC computing as a strategic project. As a result of the agreement, preferential access to a fraction of the CPU resources at the BSC has been granted since 2020. Since then, the research team at PIC has invested significant effort to integrate and exploit these resources. The lack of outbound network connectivity from the BSC compute nodes, necessary to interface them to the workload management systems of the LHC experiments, required R&D work to circumvent the limitations. New services were developed and deployed at PIC to interface the BSC with WLCG and handle the job submission and the data flow. Monte Carlo simulation workflows from ATLAS, CMS and LHCb experiments are now routinely executed at BSC. Since 2020, a total of 125M hours have been allocated and consumed in BSC. In 2023, a total of 38.5M hours were consumed at BSC for LHC activities through gateway services at PIC.