Laboratory for Astroparticle Physics

Basic research

The basic research activity of the department is strongly connected to international collaborations working in experimental cosmic ray physics and elementary particle physics.

• Pierre Auger Collaboration is exploring the properties and sources of cosmic rays with extreme energies. When a particle with energy above 10¹⁹ eV enters the upper atmosphere, it creates a huge shower of secondary charged particles, which cover areas of more than 40 sqare kilometers on the ground. Properties of such showers are being measured at the P. Auger Observatory in Argentina. The observatory, covering over 3000 square kilometers, consists of a grid of 1600 surface detectors with 1.5 km pitch, and 24 telescopes for detection of atmospheric fluorescence, allowing for hybrid detection technique.
  Our main contribution to the project are Monte-Carlo simulation studies of the shower development in the Earth's atmosphere and development of a monitoring system for measuring atmospheric parameters for the fluoresence detector.
• Belle Collaboration - the goal of the Belle experiment is the measurement of CP violation in the decays of the B mesons. The experiment operates at the KEKB accelerator, a high luminosity asymmetric energy e⁺ e^- machine in the high energy particle physics research facility (KEK) in Japan.
• Research with synchrotron radiation, which is also part of the department activities, is mainly dedicated to the analysis of atomic and molecular structure of new materials with x-ray absorption methods EXAFS and XANES. In parallel, experimental study of multielectron photoexcitations in free and bound atoms is performed, which can provide information on collective motion of electrons in the atomic system and thereby improve x-ray absorption methods. Research is performed in collaboration with several Slovene and foreign laboratories for material science, physics, chemistry, pharmacology, environmental research and preservation of cultural heritage. We perform measurements at synchrotron radiation facilities HASYLAB at DESY in Hamburg, ESRF in Grenoble, ELETTRA Sincrotrone in Trieste and SRS Daresbury.

R & D

The R&D activity of the department is oriented towards the development of new detector techniques in astroparticle physics and environmental sciences particularly in the field of superconductive strip detectors and remote sensing of air pollution and atmospheric properties. In the field of synchrotron radiation research we have contributed in development of several technologically important materials, for example microporous catalysts, superconducting and ferroelectric ceramics, surfactants, protective coatings, nanostructure materials and some macromolecules used in pharmacology. Our main contributions are in the fields of reconstruction analysis of the measured data, cosmic-ray source analysis, common software framework, Monte-Carlo simulation studies of the shower development in the Earth's atmosphere, and development of a lidar-based monitoring system for measuring atmospheric parameters for the fluoresence detector.