The 2009 Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics

The CERN Axion Solar Telescope (CAST) is searching for solar axions, which could be produced in the core of the Sun via the so-called Primakoff effect. For this purpose, CAST uses a decommissioned LHC prototype magnet. In its magnetic field of 9 Tesla axions could be reconverted into X-ray photons. The magnet is mounted on a structure built to follow the Sun during sunrise and sunset for a...

The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment (CDMS-II), operated at Soudan Underground Laboratory, employs an array of germanium and silicon low-temperature particle detectors to identify nuclear recoils from elastic scattering of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). These detectors record the phonon and ionization depositions of each particle impact, data which are used to...

The existence of dark matter (DM) has strong support today while its nature remains one of the big science quests. EDELWEISS-2 is a direct DM search experiment using cryogenic Germanium bolometers. The most promising DM candidate, a so-called weakly interacting massive particle, WIMP, is expected to scatter off the target nuclei thus depositing a tiny energy in the detectors. A powerful event...

An energy threshold of (220+-10) eV was achieved at an efficiency of 50% with a four-channel ultra-low-energy germanium detector [1] with a total active mass of 20 g. This provides a unique probe to WIMP dark matter with mass below 10 GeV. With low background data taken at the Kuo-Sheng Laboratory, limits on WIMPs in the galactic halo were derived for both spin-independent and spin-independent...

The XENON100 experiment aims to directly detect cold dark matter particles via their elastic collisions with Xenon nuclei. On this purpose a ultra-low background double phase (liquid-gas) xenon filled time projection chamber with a total mass of 170 kg (70 in the target region and 100 kg in the active shield) has been installed at the Gran Sasso Underground Laboratory and is currently taking...

The PAMELA apparatus has been launched in space on June 15, 2006 on the Russian Resurs DK1 satellite, and is continuously taking data since July 2006. The experiment is devoted to the precise and extensive measurements of cosmic ray in space, with main focus on the antiprotons and positrons in the 100 MeV/200 GeV energy range. Primary protons, electrons and light nuclei spectra are also...

Recently the Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter (ATIC) balloon experiment reported observations of high energy cosmic ray electrons over the energy range 300 to 800 GeV, indicating a feature in the otherwise smoothly decreasing energy spectrum. ATIC has had three successful high altitude flights over the continent of Antarctica 2000-2001, 2002-2003 and 2007-2008. During this talk we will...

For almost one year the Large Area Telescope on board the Fermi observatory has been surveying high-energy phenomena in our Universe. We will present an overview of the status of the mission and of some results from the first year of observations: detection of high-energy gamma-ray bursts, the discovery of new populations of gamma-ray sources, measurement of the cosmic-ray electron spectrum up...

The measurement of very-high-energy cosmic-ray electrons is intrinsically difficult due to their very steep spectrum with low fluxes and an enormous background of hadronic cosmic rays. The large collection areas needed for such a measurement can be provided by ground-based imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes. The High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) has performed the first...

If R-Parity is broken, a Gravitino LSP can still act as Dark Matter due to the Planck scale suppression of the decay width. Within this framework, we study cosmic ray signatures of models with trilinear R- Parity Violating couplings. The signals are compared with cosmic ray measurements from PAMELA and Fermi/LAT. It is shown that leptonic operators (LLE) can successfully reproduce the...

The recent data from PAMELA and Fermi-LAT can be interpreted as evidence of new astrophysical sources of high energy positrons. In that case, such astrophysical positrons constitute an additional background against the positrons from dark matter annihilation. In this paper, we study the effect of that background on the prospects for the detection of a positron dark matter signal in future...

The present status of the ANTARES detector is given. The experience of building and running a deep sea neutrino detector in the Mediterranean sea is reviewed. The first neutrino flux limits from astrophysical sources determined by ANTARES are presented. These limits are the most stringent limits to date for the sources in the southern sky, despite being determined in less than half a year...

The cubic kilometer neutrino telescope IceCube at South Pole has begun the 3rd season of data-taking with meanwhile almost 0.75 cubic kilometers of instrumented ice volume. The cubic kilometer neutrino telescope IceCube at South Pole has begun the 3rd season of data-taking with meanwhile almost 0.75 cubic kilometers of instrumented ice volume. The talk sketches the project status and gives...

In recent decades we have gained a tremendous amount of knowledge on our Universe. However, up to now astronomical observations have been restricted to the electromagnetic spectrum. The detection of cosmic high-energy neutrinos (>~ 1 TeV) will complement the information from these observations and at the same time provide completely new insights. The low interaction probability, which renders...

We discuss the reconstruction of neutrino flavor ratios at astrophysical sources from future neutrino-telescope measurements, given the knowledge of neutrino mixing angles obtained from terrestrial experiments. With a statistical analysis, we demonstrate that the pion source and the muon-damped source can be distinguished at the $3\, \sigma$ level provided the accuracies on measuring...

The detection of vertical High Energy Cosmic Rays is blurred in ground arrays by Coulomb spread of air-shower secondaries. These showers grows in a well knon conic random tree. High Altitude horizontal airshowers are totally different: the low air density allows the spread of the shower in a thin fan-like shape of huge lenghts. Their arrival angle at horizons select, in a fine- tuning, ...

The origins of the ultra-high energy cosmic rays remain a fundamental and unsolved problem in astroparticle physics. Promising clues could be provided by the associated high energy neutrinos since they would neither interact with intergalactic or interstellar media nor be deflected by the magnetic fields. Various detectors have been proposed for detecting high energy neutrinos. Some of them...

The hybrid Pierre Auger Observatory, consisting of fluorescence detector with 24 telescopes and of surface detector with more than 1600 water Cherenkov stations, has been collecting quality data since January 2004. In this contribution we present current results of studies of ultra-high energy cosmic ray composition. The depth of maximum of air showers determined using fluorescence telescopes...

The ARGO-YBJ detector at the YangBaJing Cosmic Ray Laboratory (4300 m a.s.l., Tibet, P.R. China) has been put into operation since November of 2008. It is the first EAS detector combining a very high mountain altitude with a full coverage detection surface. The high time-space granularity combined with the full coverage make ARGO-YBJ a unique device to study the EAS characteristics. In...

"Pi of the Sky" is a robotic telescope project aiming for continuous observation of a large part of the sky with high temporal and optical resolution using wide field-of-view CCD cameras. Its primary goal is to look for optical afterglows associated with the gamma ray bursts (GRB), but it is also well suited to study any kind of short timescale astrophysical phenomena. The prototype apparatus...

In late 2008, CMS collected 300 million events from atmospheric cosmic ray muons in a dedicated long run, with the full detector operational, assembled in the P5 experimental area at LHC. Using these data, CMS has measured the charge asymmetry of cosmic muons, as a function of the muon momentum, from 10 GeV/c up to the Tev/c scale. While the analysis of cosmic muons is not part of the physics...

We are assembling a 1t liquid argon detector at CERN using the two-phase technique to detect both charge and luminescence produced by recoil nuclei from WIMP interactions. We have investigated background suppression capabilities and impurity effects in argon using the scintillation light and its decay time. We are studying ways to efficiently collect and detect the VUV-light to reach a...