Brief introduction

The scientific activities in the DARK team cover astrophysics (origin of the galactic cosmic rays), astroparticle physics (indirect detection of dark matter), and cosmology (nature of dark energy). The experiments in which the team is involved (AMS-02 and the Rubin observatory) try to caracterise the content of the Universe and understand its evolution.

The team, with the support of the technical services of the laboratory, is (or has been) involved in the development of serval detectors and instruments. It is also involved in the analysis of the data of these experiments and their interpretation, with an expertise on statistical methods and machine leaning. These various aspects gives a strong multidisciplinary flavour to the team, with expertises in instrumentation, data analysis, and phenomenology.

Abell 370 is one of the very first galaxy clusters in which astronomers observed the phenomenon of gravitational lensing, the warping of spacetime by the cluster’s gravitational field that distorts the light from galaxies lying far behind it. This manifests as arcs and streaks in the picture, which are the stretched images of background galaxies (credit: NASA, ESA/Hubble, HST Frontier Fields, see here)