The rare event searches in astroparticle physics by means of heat-scintillation cryogenic bolometers (HSCBs), the core of which is made of bulk crystals, is a rapidly expanding field that encompasses the quests for the basic particles of the dark matter (DM) halo of our galaxy and for the nature of the neutrino -that could possibly reveal a new type of matter-, and the spectroscopic exploration of the rare fast neutrons being the ultimate background found on DM direct detection in underground sites. It turns out that large Li2MoO4 single crystals, of mass in the range 350-500 g, would be excellent candidates to build such HSCBs capable to address two kinds of rare events: neutrinoless double beta decays (0n-DBD) and fast neutron backgrounds. We propose to grow not only larger Li2MoO4 crystals, but with unprecedented purity and quality, by means of both combined Czochralski pulling and modelling, single crystals characterizations and exploratory bolometer tests. CLYMENE will break down the boundary between crystal growers and astroparticle physicists and benefit from contributions of both communities converging towards a single interdisciplinary collaborative project. The main purpose of CLYMENE is to set the bases for versatile HSCBs capable of addressing the 0n-DBD detection and to pave the way for the development of a transportable fast neutrons cryogenic monitor. In the CLYMENE project, the feedback between scintillation measurements, detector performances (background) and crystal growth will enable the elaboration of one pilot natural Li2MoO4 crystal of mass 500 g, and three pilot Li2MoO4 crystals of similar masses, one of which will be enriched with 6Li isotope (95 %) and the remaining two will contain a considerable amount of enriched 7Li (99.9 %). The CLYMENE consortium is based on a synergetic interaction between experimented scientists of complementary research teams: a crystal growth laboratory, a growth process simulation laboratory, a crystal technology platform and an astroparticle physics laboratory.

Cometary dust particles rain on Earth. However, they can only be found in collections performed in the cleanest regions of the Earth (the stratosphere and Antarctica). From Antarctic snow at the vicinity of the French-Italian Concordia Antarctic base, we recovered large (> 50-100 µm) particles of very probable cometary origin, the Ultracarbonaceous Antarctic Micrometeorites (UCAMMs). UCAMMs are constituted of a dominant fraction of a solid macromolecular organic matter intimately mixed with a minor mineral component. The organic matter is structurally disorganized, shows large deuterium enrichments and exhibit an unusually large bulk nitrogen concentrations (up to 20 at%). Preliminary studies have shown that several types of organic matter co-exist in UCAMMs, with different nitrogen contents and mixed with different amounts of minerals. The minerals embedded in the organic matter have typical sizes around 50-100 nm. Both crystalline and amorphous minerals are present and exhibit a wide range of compositions. Some precursors of UCAMM organic matter (the most N-rich) could have been formed by galactic cosmic rays’ irradiation of nitrogen-rich ices at the surface of icy bodies in the outer regions of the protoplanetary disk. UCAMMs are remarkable particles as their subcomponents preserved records of early solar system formation and evolution. The association in UCAMMs of minerals (formed at high temperatures) among large amounts of organic matter (necessarily formed at lower temperatures) opens a new window on the study of the origin and formation mechanisms of matter originating from the outer regions of the solar system. This proposal focuses on the formation mechanism and evolution of cometary dust organics and their relation with the mineral components embedded within, following 3 main questions: 1. What is the origin of the subcomponents of cometary matter? "Inner and outer solar system…" 2. What are the variations of the composition of organics and their embedded minerals with heliocentric distance? 3. How did the different environments encountered (radiative interplanetary medium, terrestrial atmosphere, Antarctica) modify the cometary particles collected on Earth? This project proposes innovative analysis protocols of UCAMMs using state-of the-art analysis techniques to characterize both the organic matter, the minerals and their association. Experimental simulations of their evolution from interplanetary space to their collection in Antarctica will be performed on cometary organic analogues and on synthetic UCAMMs produced in the laboratory. The originality of the COMETOR proposal resides in four points: i) the availability in the laboratory of well-preserved cometary samples; ii) the analysis of these complex particles with a combination of complementary and state-of-the-art techniques – including infrared spectroscopy coupled with atomic force microscopy (AFMIR) that allows infrared analysis at the ~ 50-100 nm scale; iii) the production of analogues of cometary solids and the real-time observation of their evolution under irradiation thanks to the unique JANNuS platform, coupling a transmission electron microscope with two ion accelerators; iv) the search for soluble organic compounds (including amino acids) in UCAMMs with the very high mass resolution Orbitrap technique to probe the input of prebiotic molecules on the early Earth by cometary dust. The expected results will have implications in the fields of astrophysics, planetology-cosmochemistry and astrobiology. They will bring an original contribution to the understanding of the formation and evolution of solid matter in the outer regions of the protoplanetary disk, as well as important inputs for the interpretation of data from Rosetta and Stardust samples, from samples returned by future space missions such as Hayabusa 2, OSIRIS-Rex, and for the observations of protoplanetary disks by the future James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The OASIS project aims at optimizing the science production of the Advanced GAmma-ray Tracking Array (AGATA) gamma-ray spectrometer. Presently installed at the Grand Accélérateur National d'Ions Lourds (GANIL) at Caen, France, AGATA has passed the demonstrator phase of its early implementation (15 high-purity germanium detectors) and now contains 32 such detectors with infrastructure to accommodate 45 detectors covering 1pi of solid angle. AGATA is a new generation gamma-ray spectrometer designed to overcome the inherent limitation of the previous generation of Compton suppressed HPGe detector arrays. By replacing the Anti-Compton shields, which occupy a significant amount of solid angle, with HPGe detectors solid angle converage, and hence efficiency, can be increased. However, for this approach to produce high quality gamma-ray spectra an alternative Compton suppression technique has to be developed. This is gamma-ray tracking: The energy and position of individual gamma-ray interaction points inside the HPGe is determined using highly segmented detectors combined with digital electronics and pulse-shape analysis. These interaction points are then tested for the hypotheses that they belong to a fully absorbed gamma ray. For the gamma-ray tracking to work the gamma-ray interaction points have to be located to within 5 mm inside the detectors. A very important additional increase in performance comes from the very high effective angular granulation of AGATA given by knowing the interaction positions giving very good Doppler Correction capabilities, something very important in modern experimental nuclear structure research. Because of the high performance of AGATA it is considered a very important detector for the future and present nuclear structure research facilities in Europe, such as FAIR, HIE-ISOLDE, SPES, and SPIRAL2. Since the first physics campaign with AGATA started has showed its high performance in experimental situation where the sensitivity is dominated by the Doppler broadening of the gamma-ray peaks, for high-count rate situations, and when it is beneficial to have a very compact gamma-ray spectrometer - AGATA has proven the be a technical success in many ways. During the work analyzing experimental data the AGATA collaboration, and the gamma-ray tracking community, has however seen that the performance of AGATA in terms of Compton suppression from the gamma-ray tracking is not what simulations suggests it should be. It is believed in the gamma-ray tracking community that cause for this is related to problems with the pulse-shape analysis. Although the nominal position resolution from the pulse-shape analysis is within the required limits several indications points to that the pulse-shape analysis does not perform as good as is needed. The OASIS project aims at carefully investigating the reasons for this using computer simulations to try to reproduce and understand the deficiencies seen in experimental data. One particular problem that will be addressed within the OASIS project is that of correctly determining the number of actual interaction that a gamma-ray has had with the AGATA.Several novel ideas are to be investigated. Finally, many aspects of analyzing -ray spectroscopy data have to be reviewed when using AGATA. This mainly comes from the fact that there is more detailed information to look at offering new possibilities. What was previously simple calibration procedures using source data, such as efficiency calibrations, now has complex dependencies on the experimental situation and choices made for the gamma-ray tracking algorithms. Other methods, e.g. to determine angular correlations and distributions, also need to be developed specifically for gamma-ray tracking. A part of OASIS is dedicated to this work, making sure that the gamma-ray tracking community will have thoroughly tested and quantified procedures.

The project is dedicated to the study of the Fermi-surface topology and its interplay with quantum phase transitions in strongly correlated electronic systems. Complementary theoretical calculations will be performed invoking both first-principles-based electronic structure and Kondo-like model Hamiltonians. A rich diversity of Fermi-surface instabilities will result in various critical phenomena. In particular, we will investigate Lifshitz transitions and metal to Mott or Kondo insulator transitions which are conceivably associated with unconventional orders (magnetic, orbital, charge, spin-liquid, or hidden orders, Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov state). High-quality crystals of f-electron compounds and organic materials will be studied under extreme conditions of very low temperature, high magnetic field and pressure, e.g., by specific-heat measurements, torque magnetometry and Raman spectroscopy. Fermi-surfaces will be studied by de Haas-van Alphen (dHvA) and Shubnikov-de Haas (SdH) quantum oscillations and high-resolution Angle-Resolved Photoemission Spectrocopy (ARPES). One of our scientific ambitions is to provide a classification of Fermi-surface instabilities within a coherent experimental and theoretical analysis.

DALPS has the ambition to create a new consortium gathering Micromegas, Transition edge sensors (TES), Metallic Magnetic Calorimeters (MMC) and Silicon Drift Detectors (SDD) that will improve the sensitivity of X-ray detectors in the context of the International AXion Observatory (IAXO). IAXO’s main goal is to look for new hypothetical fundamental particles called axions coming from the Sun. The detectors developed in DALPS will be installed in BabyIAXO, an intermediate experimental stage of IAXO, with already relevant physics reach and with potential for discovery. Axions are one of the most promising solutions in order to explain the absence of Charge-Parity symmetry violation in the strong interaction. More generic axion-like particles (ALPS) are invoked in a number of cosmological and astrophysical scenarios. These neutral, very light particles interact so weakly with ordinary matter that they could contribute to dark matter. A number of long standing astrophysical anomalies could also be solved by the presence of axions. Most of the axions search techniques rely on their interaction with photons via the conversion of axions into photons (and vice versa) in the presence of electromagnetic fields. Helioscopes search for axions produced in the solar core by the conversion of plasma photons into axions giving rise to a solar axion flux at the Earth surface with a distribution around 1-10 keV. IAXO will achieve a sensitivity on the axion coupling 1-1.5 orders of magnitude better than the best limits obtained by CAST using a large scale multi-bore superconducting magnet. Each bore will be equipped with X-ray optics coupled to low background detectors. The sensitivity gain is translated into a factor ~20 in terms of the axion-photon coupling. In order to reach that, the required levels of background are extremely challenging: 10-7 counts keV-1 cm-2 s-1, a factor 10 better than current levels. The objective of DALPS is to build high sensitivity, low background X-ray detectors, key components for the sensitivity of a helioscope, for the babyIAXO Technical Design Report. Micromegas detectors are the baseline technology for the X-ray detectors of babyIAXO. However, other technologies like TES, MMC and SDD show a lower energy threshold and better energy resolution. Yet, their background level in our region of interest has never been studied. The four technologies will be optimized in terms of efficiency, background level, energy resolution and threshold. The SOLEIL synchrotron will be available to evaluate the performance at different energies. The advantages of proposing four technologies are twofold: (i) a sub-keV energy threshold will permit the study of the fine structures in the axion spectrum and will extend the physics case of babyIAXO, allowing axion precision measurements in case of discovery and (ii) if equivalent performances were achieved, the ideal configuration for babyIAXO, and eventually IAXO, would be a combination of them as in case of signal, this configuration would minimize systematic effects and would reinforce the discovery claim. Moreover, a study on how to optimise IAXO sensitivity in the high mass regime (ma~eV) will be carried out taking into account the complementarity of helioscopes and crystal detector searches. Theoretically motivated axions and ALPS are reachable by current or near future experimental realizations triggering an increasing interest for the detection of such particles and their signatures. A large part of the parameter space explored by IAXO is not attainable by any other experimental technique. DALPS will contribute to the feasibility of babyIAXO and IAXO in a context where 18 worldwide institutions, including CERN and DESY, have shown their support. DALPS will allow to establish a visible French contribution in an experiment that will play a prominent role in the low energy frontier in the next years.