Search

The MEG experiment searching for lepton flavor violating muon decay, finished data taking successfully in 2013. The final sensitivity of the experiment was 5.3 × 10−13, and since the experiment did not find any signal, the upper limit of the branching ratio of the µ → e+γ was set to be 4.2 × 10−13 at 90% C.L.. The MEG II experiment will have a target sensitivity improved by an order of magnitude down to 6 ×10−14 with three years data taking. In 2018 after the detector integration, the muon beam data taking took place with a limited number of readout channels. In 2019, the engineering run and the physics run will be started. The Mu3e experiment will search for the lepton flavor violating decay µ+→ e+e−e+ with unprecedented sensitivity. Construction of the detector is going to start in 2020 and for the first phase a single event sensitivity of 2 × 10−15 is expected.

CaloCube is an R&D project borne to develop a novel calorimeter design, optimized for high-energy cosmic ray measurements in space. A small prototype made of CsI(Tl) elements has been built and tested on particle beams. A final version, made of 5×5×18 crystals and with dual readout (two photodiodes for each crystal), to cover the full required dynamic range, is under construction and will be tested at CERN SPS in Summer 2016. The dual readout compensation technique were developed and the feasibility to extract ÄŒ erenkov signals from CsI crystals verified.

There are several suggestions to probe space-time fuzziness (also known as space-time foam) due to the quantum mechanics nature of space-time. These effects are predicted to be very small, being related to the Planck length, so that the only hope to experimentally detect them is to look at particles propagating along cosmological distances. Some phenomenological approaches suggest that photons originating from pointlike sources at cosmological distance experience path length fluctuation that could be detected. Also the direction of flight of such photons may be subject to a dispersion such that the image of a point-like source is blurred and detected as a disk. An experimentally accessible signature may be images of point-like sources larger that the size due to the Point Spread Function of the instrument. This additional broadening should increase with distance and photon energy. Some concrete examples that can be studied with the AGILE and FERMI-LAT γ -ray satellite experiments are discussed.