The neutrino discovery, by Reines & Cowan, paved the technical ground behind the establishment of much of today’s neutrino detection. Large instrumented volumes can and have been achieved via a key (implicit) principle: detector transparency. Much of that technology has yielded historical success since the 50’s, including several Nobel prizes. The discovery of Neutrino Oscillation phenomenon is a stunning example, solving the long standing “Solar” and “Atmospheric” anomalies by SNO and SuperKamiokande — along with many other experiments. Despite the remarkable success, much of such a “transparent technology” is known to suffer from some key limitations even after 70 years of maturity towards perfection. The challenge continues to be to endow detectors with powerful active background rejection while allowing large volume articulation. Indeed, poor particle identification is a long standing issue, only alleviated by adding external shield (active or passive), which implies a major overburden to the underground laboratories. In this seminar, I shall present for the first time a new technology, under intense R&D, called “LiquidO” relying heavily on detection medium opacity for the first time. The effort is led by the LiquidO proto-collaboration (~20 institutions over ~10 countries). We shall compare LiquidO to its transparent counterpart for maximal appreciation. While not perfect, LiquidO seems to one able to offer several detection features that might lead to breakthrough potential in the context of both neutrino and rare decay physics. This will be briefly highlighted too.


MINI-CV:
Now @ CNRS-IN2P3 National Staff Scientist (since 2007) affiliated to the "Linear Accelerator Laboratory" (Orsay, France)
•Spokesperson LiquidO Collaboration [with Prof. Suekane (RCNS, Japan)]
•Spokesperson Double Chooz Collaboration
•Coordinator JUNO Dual-Calorimetry System
•CNRS-IN2P3 Responsible for JUNO, Double Chooz and LiquidO R&D Projects
•Director LNCA Underground Laboratory (Chooz, France)
PAST: PhD(Oxford on Neutrino Physics in MINOS).

In this talk I will present the status of construction and operation of neutrino telescope in Lake Baikal, the detector Baikal-GVD of gigaton volume. In particular, basic elements of the GVD, data processing and preliminary results, and as well,  main features of the Baikal-GVD site and optical properties of water will be shown. Off-line analysis of two famous cosmic events, GW170817 and IC170922A, and the beginning of multi messenger program are discussed.

Olga Suvorova, leader researcher of Laboratory of High Energy Neutrino Astrophysics, Institute for Nuclear Research of Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. Research interests: high energy neutrino, dark matter, astrophysics, cosmic rays. She has worked in Baksan Underground Scintillation Telescope (Russia, Northern Caucasus and Moscow, 1982-2009); ANTARES (France, Saclay and Strasbourg, 2000-2003); ULTIMA (France, Grenoble, 2007-2009); Baikal-GVD (Russia, Baikal and Moscow, 2009-since now).

De 1960, date de la réalisation du premier laser par Theodore Maiman, au prix Nobel de Physique 2018 attribué à Gérard Mourou et Donna Strickland, les lasers ont révolutionné les techniques de fabrication et notre vie quotidienne. Leur utilisation est devenue incontournable dans de nombreux domaines tels que le transport, les communications, la microélectronique ou la santé.

Lors de cette présentation les mécanismes physiques responsables de l’absorption et de la diffusion de l’énergie laser dans un matériau seront décrits. Les principales applications de ces sources seront également présentées avant de se focaliser sur le formidable potentiel des lasers ultrabrefs, dont la durée des impulsions est de quelques dizaines de femtosecondes, dans le domaine de la micro/nanofabrication.

Début 2017, la mission spatiale LISA, constituée de 3 satellites formant un interféromètre de 2,5 millions de km de côté, a été sélectionnée par l’agence spatiale européenne, pour un lancement à l’horizon 2034. Après un an de consolidation du concept technique (Phase 0), LISA est actuellement en phase A (définition préliminaire) jusque mi-2020.
LISA observera des sources d’ondes gravitationnelles de fréquences comprises entre 0,1 mHz et 1 Hz. Les principaux objets astrophysiques attendus incluent les systèmes binaires de trous noirs supermassifs (jusqu’à z=13),  des milliers de binaires compactes galactiques, des binaires extrêmes, peut-être des fonds stochastiques primordiaux et l’ensemble des sources inattendues…
Dans cet exposé, nous présenterons les principales sources astrophysiques et leur interêt scientifique. Nous détaillerons ensuite la mission LISA (et son précurseur LISA Pathfinder), ses caractéristiques techniques, les principaux défis technologiques et performances espérées (et mesurées dans le cas de LISA Pathfinder). Nous conclurons en présentant l’organisation de la contribution française et sa place dans le Consortium LISA.

Short CV:

- Maitre de conférences à l’Université Paris Diderot, membre du laboratoire APC, depuis 2005
- A l’APC : instrumentation pour LISA :
—> caractérisation des modulateurs acoustiques-optiques pour LISA Pathfinder
—> stabilisation de fréquence laser sur raie moléculaire
—> génération de signaux interférométriques réalistes, optiques et électriques, pour LISA (expérience banc LISA On Table)
- Responsabilités LISA 
—> Correspondant IN2P3 pour le projet LISA
—> Membre du SEO LISA et de la Core Team Instrument

  I will present robotics application of insect-inspired autoadaptive sensors (Time-of-travel local motion sensor, CurvACE, M2APix) where motion detection is at a premium, such as collision-free navigation of aerial robots (Octave, Lora, Beerotor robots) and odometry of terrestrial robots (BioCarBot robot).

In most animal species, vision is mediated by compound eyes, which offer lower resolution than vertebrate single-lens eyes, but significantly larger fields of view with negligible distortion and spherical aberration, as well as high temporal resolution in a tiny package.

Compound eyes are ideally suited for fast panoramic motion perception. Engineering a miniature artificial compound eye is challenging because it requires accurate alignment of photoreceptive and optical components on a curved surface.

In this talk, I will detail:
(i) a unique design method for biomimetic compound eyes called CurvACE (1) featuring a panoramic, undistorted field of view in a very thin package. The design consists of three planar layers of separately produced arrays, namely, a microlens array, a neuromorphic photodetector array, and a flexible printed circuit board that are stacked, cut, and curved to produce a mechanically flexible imager. Following this method, we have prototyped and characterized an artificial compound eye bearing a hemispherical field of view with embedded and programmable low-power signal processing, high temporal resolution, and local adaptation to illumination. The prototyped artificial compound eye possesses several characteristics similar to the eye of the fruit fly Drosophila and other arthropod species.

(ii) a novel analog silicon retina featuring auto-adaptive pixels that obey the Michaelis-Menten law The novel pixel, called M2APix (2), which stands for Michaelis-Menten Auto-Adaptive Pixel, can auto-adapt in a 7-decade range and responds appropriately to step changes up to +/-3 decades in size without causing any saturation of the Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) transistors. Thanks to the intrinsic properties of the Michaelis-Menten equation, the pixel output always remains within a constant limited voltage range. The results presented here show that the M2APix produced a quasi-linear contrast response once it had adapted to the average luminosity.

(iii) application of these bio-inspired sensors where motion detection is at a premium, such as collision-free navigation of aerial robots (3) (i.e. Beerotor) and odometry of terrestrial robots (4) (i.e. BioCarBot).


(1) D. Floreano, R. Pericet-Camara, S. Viollet, F. Ruffier, A. Brückner, R. Leitel, W. Buss, M. Menouni, F. Expert, R. Juston, M. K. Dobrzynski, G. L’Eplattenier, F. Recktenwald, H. A. Mallot, N. Franceschini (2013)
« Miniature curved artificial compound eyes »
Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences of USA, PNAS, 2013 Jun 4, 110(23):9267-72

(2) S. Mafrica, S. Godiot, M. Menouni, M. Boyron, F. Expert, R. Juston, N. Marchand, F. Ruffier, S. Viollet (2015)
« A bio-inspired analog silicon retina with Michaelis-Menten auto-adaptive pixels sensitive to small and large changes in light »
Optics Express (OSA), Vol. 23, Issue 5, pp. 5614-5635

(3) F. Expert and F. Ruffier (2015)
« Flying over uneven moving terrain based on optic-flow cues without any need for reference frames or accelerometers »
Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, 10, 026003 (IOP)

(4) S. Mafrica, A. Servel, F. Ruffier (2016)
« Optic-Flow Based Car-Like Robot Operating in a 5-Decade Light Level Range »
2016 IEEE Int. Conf. Robot. Autom. (ICRA 2016), Stockholm, Sweden, May 16-21, 2016



Mini-Bio

Franck Ruffier received an engineering degree in 2000 and a Ph.D. degree from INP-Grenoble in 2004, as well as a habilitation to supervise research (HDR in French) from Aix-Marseille University in 2013. He was visiting scientist invited by Prof. Michael Dickinson, Univ. of Washington, Seattle, USA during 2 months in 2012 as well as in 2008 by Dr. T. Mukai at RIKEN, Nagoya, Japan. Franck Ruffier published more than 80 articles in international Journals, referred Proceedings and  12 book chapters  as well as he filed 9 patents. His present position is CNRS research scientist at the Institute of Movement Science (ISM). His main areas of interest are bio-inspired vision and robotic.