The Belle II international collaboration has published its first results in a paper selected as an Editors’ Suggestion in Physical Review Letters The paper reports the first search for a new type of elementary particle that may act as a “portal” between ordinary matter and dark matter, which is understood to make up some 85% of the matter in the universe.

This search has been the thesis work of Laura Zani, who recently joined the CPPM group.

Contact: Justine Serrano

More information:

• Belle II at CPPM

• KEK at Japon

On March 17 2020, the ITkPixV1 chip was submitted to the TSMC foundry for production. With a surface area of more than 4 cm², this chip has been designed in the 65 nm CMOS process and will tolerate an ionizing dose of more than 500 Mrad. It contains more than 1/2 billion transistors and 153,600 pixels of 50x50 µm² organized in 2,400 regions of 8x8 pixels. This is the culmination of nearly 8 years of work by CERN's RD53 collaboration, to which the CPPM's ATLAS team has been a major contributor since its foundation. This is the pre-production version of the chip which will equip, in more than 33,000 units, the 5 internal pixel layers of the future ATLAS post-2026 trajectograph. This is a major step towards improving the ATLAS detector for the High Luminosity phase of CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which has now been completed.

More information about RD53 Collaboration

Following the measures that the government is asking us to implement in the exceptional context of the coronavirus epidemy, CPPM informs you that it is now on restricted access.

CPPM staff can still be reached by e-mail as working remotely.

We will keep you informed of the evolution of the situation.

The International Physics Masterclasses - courses and practical work in particle physics - for high school students from all over the world will take place from 26 February to 8 April 2020. The Centre de Physique des Particules de Marseille is offering five sessions for high school students from the region between 9 March and 7 April.

More information

The paper "Dependence of atmospheric muon flux on seawater depth measured with the first KM3NeT detection units” has been published on Europhysics Journal C and is now fully citable as: Eur. Phys. J. C (2020) 80:99, M. Ageron and al.

The paper is available on-line open access.