From Forward: "To some extent, Astroparticle Physics (ApP) can be considered as the science of rare events, arising in some cases from the most violent phenomena in the Universe, happening fortunately far away! Nonetheless, detecting such weak signals and understanding their nature / origin are of paramount importance in our understanding of the fundamental laws governing the Universe.

 

Identifying rare and weak signals requires imagining appropriate experiments and then going from conceptual design to the realisation of sophisticated and large size facilities with technical performances often beyond the exciting technological abilities. Accordingly, to constitute the indispensable large spectrum of expertise, close collaboration / cooperation between academia and industry is a must. ASPERA, a European ERA-Net project started within FP6 (2006 – 2009) and being continued in FP7 (2009 – 2012), has been developing an ambitious approach for i) facilitating the creation of large enough collaborations in ApP in Europe, ii) strengthening / creating bridges between public research institutions and companies, especially via the organisation of Technological Forums.

 

The present event is focused on lasers and mirrors.

 

Actually, new generation of facilities for the detection of Gravitational Waves (GW) and (very) high energy gamma rays (HEGR) are in R&D phases.

 

The first topic deals with one of the most fascinating predictions of the General Relativity, going back to 1916 and still undiscovered! Detectable signals are expected resulting from merging / collision between black holes, binary neutron stars… The third generation interferometic detectors is planned to be constructed underground and use cryogenics technology, with unprecedented requirements on the characteristics and performances of lasers and mirrors.

 

The realm covered by the second topic spans phenomena due to supernovae, pulsars, merging galaxies… Hunting rare events requires a very high selectivity and hence minimised background. The Cherenkov Telescope Array project anticipates various sized telescopes in order to pin down the sources of the HEGR and uncover the mysteries of underlying mechanisms. Here also, the required characteristics and performances go far beyond the state-of-the-art in the ground-based telescopes.

 

In summary, the ApP community needs to impulse highly challenging R&D in optics, lasers and mirrors. Innovations in all those areas will certainly also allow companies to apply the gained expertise in other fields at the heart of social needs and concerns: energy, environment, health…"