IIHE - Interuniversity Institute for High Energies (ULB-VUB)

The IIHE was created in 1972 at the initiative of the academic authorities of both the Université Libre de Bruxelles and Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
Its main topic of research is the physics of elementary particles.
The present research programme is based on the extensive use of the high energy particle accelerators and experimental facilities at CERN (Switzerland) and DESY (Germany) as well as on non-accelerator experiments at the South Pole.
The main goal of this experiments is the study of the strong, electromagnetic and weak interactions of the most elementary building blocks of matter. All these experiments are performed in the framework of large international collaborations and have led to important R&D activities and/or applications concerning particle detectors and computing and networking systems.
Research at the IIHE is mainly funded by Belgian national and regional agencies, in particular the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) en het Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (FWO) and by both universities through their Research Councils.
The IIHE includes 19 members of the permanent scientific staff, 20 postdocs and guests, 31 doctoral students, 8 masters students, and 15 engineering, computing and administrative professionals.

IceCube

The IceCube neutrino observatory at the South Pole is the world's largest neutrino telescope, completed in 2011 and taking data since 2005!

The detector is composed of 80 strings of 60 sensors deployed in the Antarctic glacier, between 1500 and 2500 m of depth. As its name suggests, IceCube covers an instrumented volume of one cubic kilometer. The DeepCore extension of IceCube is composed of 6 additional string in the center of the IceCube array, where the puriest ice can be found. At the surface, the IceTop air shower array equiped each IceCube string with 2 pairs of sensors in an ice tank of 3 square-meter.

IceCube

IIHE students at the South Pole

Falling off the earth is a serious risk at the South Pole. Down there, at the very end of the world, everything is different.. At the Inter-university Institute for High Energies (IIHE) in Brussels we are involved in a world wide effort to search for high-energy neutrinos originating from cosmic phenomena. For this we use the IceCube neutrino observatory at the South Pole, the world's largest neutrino telescope which is now completed and taking data.

Demographics

The IIHE is a diverse institute

At the last count, the IIHE includes 19 members of the permanent scientific staff, 20 postdocs and guests, 31 doctoral students, 8 masters students, and 15 engineering, computing and administrative professionals. The numbers vary over time with people graduating etc, but the IIHE is a diverse institute: Approximately half of the people here are not from Belgian background and at any time we have tens of different nationalities. Many languages are spoken and the working language is mostly English. Typically, between 25 and 30% of the people working at our lab identifies as female.

CMS

The Compact Muon Solenoid forward tracker was partly built at the IIHE.

Here you see the assembly of several of the (black) support structures on which the tracker detectors were mounted. The IIHE contributed to the construction of the over 200 square meter silicon tracker, the most ambitious particle tracking detector ever built. Other contributions were made to the assembly of detector modules and the installation on the detector. Each detector element can identify the path of charged particles to a precision of up to 1/100 millimeters.

CMS

Candidate top quark +W boson collision event at CERN

Shown is a candidate collision event from the 2010 LHC run that was selected in the search for one top quark associated with a W boson at the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at CERN. IIHE scientists are leading the analysis effort in the detailed study of these kind of collisions. Understanding single top production is relevant both for the detailed understanding of the physics of top quark production but also in the context of the Standard Model Quantum Chromodynamics in general as this process is special because of the production of a single heavy quark in association with a gauge boson. This event topology is very similar to that expected for new physics or the elusive Higgs boson, for which this kind of events are a background.

IceCube

Astroparticle Physics revolves around phenomena that involve (astro)physics under the most extreme conditions.

Cosmic explosions, involving black holes with masses a billion times greater than the mass of the Sun, accelerate particles to velocities close to the speed of light and display a variety of relativistic effects. The produced high-energy particles may be detected on Earth and as such can provide us insight in the physical processes underlying these cataclysmic events. Having no electrical charge and interacting only weakly with matter, neutrinos are special astronomical messengers. Only they can carry information from violent cosmological events at the edge of the observable universe directly towards the Earth. At the Inter-university Institute for High Energies (IIHE) in Brussels we are involved in a world wide effort to search for high-energy neutrinos originating from cosmic phenomena. For this we use the IceCube neutrino observatory at the South Pole, the world's largest neutrino telescope which is now completed and taking data.

CMS

LHC reaches record energy - first test collisions recorded by CMS experiment

On Thursday 21 May 2015, protons collided in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the record-breaking energy of 13 TeV for the first time. These test collisions were to set up systems that protect the machine and detectors from particles that stray from the edges of the beam. This set-up will give the accelerator team the data they need to ensure that the LHC magnets and detectors are fully protected. The LHC Operations team will continue to monitor beam quality and optimisation of the set-up, while the detectors will use these 'free' testing collisions for calibration and testing. This is an important part of the process that will allow the experimental teams running the detectors ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb to switch on their experiments fully. Data taking and the start of the LHC's second run is planned for June 2015.

IceCube

IIHE students at the South Pole

At the Inter-university Institute for High Energies (IIHE) in Brussels we are involved in a world wide effort to search for high-energy neutrinos originating from cosmic phenomena. For this we use the IceCube neutrino observatory at the South Pole, the world's largest neutrino telescope which is now completed and taking data.Here you see a really cool phenomenon made by ice crystals that are drifting in the air at low levels and acting as prisms for the light rays passing through them. In this way, a halo around the sun is visible. In this picture, IIHE PhD Student David put his head in front of the sun and the halo becomes visible more easily.