Related papers: From Accelerators To Asteroids
In many applications of the probabilistic method, one looks to study phenomena that occur ``with high probability''. More recently however, in an attempt to understand some of the most fundamental problems in combinatorics, researchers have…
The reader surely knows what particles physics is about: finding building blocks of nature that appear elementary at a given time and study their interactions - so why in the world this essay? The problem is how to arrive at a fundamental…
Cosmology is intrinsically intertwined with questions in fundamental physics. The existence of non-baryonic dark matter requires new physics beyond the Standard Model of elemenatary-particle interactions and Einstein's general relativity,…
The likelihood of detecting individual discrete sources of cosmic rays depends on the mean separation between sources. The analysis here derives the minimum separation that makes it likely that the closest source is detectable. For…
We try to understand how particles acquire mass in general, and in particular, how they acquire mass in the standard model and beyond.
Asteroseismology provides us with a unique opportunity to improve our understanding of stellar structure and evolution. Recent developments, including the first systematic studies of solar-like pulsators, have boosted the impact of this…
Asteroids and meteorites provide key evidence on the formation of planetesimals in the Solar System. Asteroids are traditionally thought to form in a bottom-up process by coagulation within a population of initially km-scale planetesimals.…
The number of small satellites has grown dramatically in the past decade from tens of satellites per year in the mid-2010s to a projection of tens of thousands in orbit by the mid-2020s. This presents both problems and opportunities for…
High energy astrophysics is one of the most active branches in contemporary astrophysics. It studies astrophysical objects that emit X-ray and gamma-ray photons, such as accreting super-massive and stellar-size black holes, and various…
In the first section, I will try to convey a sense of the variety of observational inputs that tell us about the existence and the spatial distribution of dark matter in the universe. In the second section, I will briefly review the four…
The scientific achievements of the Pierre Auger Collaboration cover diverse and complementary fields of research. The search for the origin of ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) is based on the measurement of the energy spectrum and…
Indirect detection is the search for the particle nature of dark matter with astrophysical probes. Manifestly, it exists right at the intersection of particle physics and astrophysics, and the discovery potential for dark matter can be…
Searching for extrasolar planets by direct detection is extremely challenging for current instrumentation. Indirect methods, that measure the effect of a planet on its host star, are much more promising and have indeed led to the discovery…
Astrophysical sources are extremely efficient accelerators. Some sources emit photons up to multi-TeV energies, a signature of the presence, within them, of particles with energies much higher than those achievable with the largest…
The field of exoplanets is quickly expanding from just the detection of new planets and the measurement of their most basic parameters, such as mass, radius and orbital configuration, to the first measurements of their atmospheric…
Many extensions to the Standard Model of particle physics hypothesize the existence of new low-mass particles. Typically there are few theoretical constraints on the mass or lifetime of such particles. This requires the experimentalist to…
The exoplanet detection is the most exciting and challenging field of astronomy. The discovery of many exoplanets has revolutionized our understanding of the formation and evolution of planetary systems and has showed new ways to search for…
This course reviews the rotational properties of non-degenerate stars as observed from the protostellar stage to the end of the main sequence. It includes an introduction to the various observational techniques used to measure stellar…
While almost all potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) with a size larger than one kilometre have been discovered, it is well-known that the vast majority of the smaller ones are in fact yet to be found. There is therefore an excellent…
Quantum vacuum experiments are becoming a flexible tool for investigating fundamental physics. They are particularly powerful for searching for new light but weakly interacting degrees of freedom and are thus complementary to…