During the visit, Saphir academics had the opportunity to present the progress of research lines, international collaborations and training work with students, among the various activities carried out by the institute. They also discussed the opportunities, weaknesses and threats facing our institute.
By Jorge Román
On Friday 27 May, a delegation from the Millennium Science Initiative, led by its Executive Director, Nicole Ehrenfeld, visited the offices, computational cluster and laboratories of the Saphir Millennium Institute located at the Casona de Las Condes campus of the Universidad Andrés Bello (UNAB).
Milenio regularly visits the centres it funds to learn more about their work and projects, but these visits were suspended for two years because of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. The Saphir Millennium Institute is the first centre to be visited after this pause. Ehrenfeld explained that the personal contact with the people who make up the centres makes it easier to learn about the difficulties they have encountered and to create spaces for dialogue to exchange ideas, lessons learned and good practices. These spaces for dialogue are even more important with centres like Saphir, which do frontier science, as it is difficult for Milenio to understand everything that the centres it funds do (although they are always evaluated by international expert committees).
Francisca Garay, Saphir's Alternate Director, presenting the work of the Institute.
Francisca Garay, Saphir's Alternate Director, presenting the work of the Institute.
"Saphir is much more than its research associates," Francisca Garay, Saphir Millennium Institute's Alternate Director, told the event, "we are also our adjunct researchers, senior researchers, young people, students, technicians and engineers. In her presentation, Garay spoke about Saphir's lines of research, about the projects on which its research and technical staff are working, about the international projects with which we are collaborating, about the training of students, engineers and technicians, the scientific production and scientific dissemination carried out at Saphir, among other topics.
From the standard model to water potability
To understand the work being done at Saphir, you need to know a bit about particle physics. Therefore, Alfonso Zerwekh (academic at the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María and research associate at Saphir) talked about the standard model, which, although it is the most successful particle physics theory to date, is unable to explain several anomalies that have been discovered (such as the fact that it cannot explain gravity or the existence of dark matter). This means that the standard model is incomplete or needs to be reformulated.
At this point, Giovanna Cottin (academic at the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez and young researcher at Saphir) talked about how the theoretical physics group collaborates with the experimental physics group to make better use of the data generated in the experiments and reinterpret them in the light of theories other than the standard model. This collaboration, Cottin explained, is key to developing new theories that expand the standard model to explain well various phenomena observed in the subatomic universe.
Forty people, including researchers, Millennium representatives, host university authorities, engineers, students and Saphir staff participated in the event on Friday 27 May.
Forty people, including researchers, Millennium representatives, host university authorities, engineers, students and Saphir staff participated in the event on Friday 27 May.
Other projects Saphir is working on include the measurement of radon gas in Chile (a radioactive gas that is the second cause of lung cancer in the world) and the design and construction of detectorsdetectors, both for CERN's Atlas experiment and for other particle physics experiments around the world.
Finally, the presentation discussed the projects on machine learningmachine learning projects, computational techniques for analysing massive amounts of data (such as those produced in proton collisions at CERN's Atlas experiment), identifying patterns in them and generating predictions. This area of research, as well as serving as an input for experimental and theoretical physics, has applications beyond the subatomic.
An example of the latter is what the team of Universidad de Tarapacá academic and Saphir adjunct researcher Sebastián Olivares is doing. In addition to working on machine learning for particle physics, it is developing an algorithm capable of identifying bacteria and other dangerous microorganisms in water. This will make it possible to determine the potability of water in a few hours instead of days or weeks, which is how long current techniques take.
Analysis and visit to laboratories
The visit of the Milenio delegation continued with a collective SWOT analysis exercise. collective SWOT analysis exercise (an analysis of the Saphir Millennium Institute's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) which generated discussions on science funding and diversity in the scientific community.
The activities concluded with a visit to the Saphir laboratories located on the UNAB Casona de Las Condes campus.
The Millennium Science Initiative delegation, led by its Executive Director Nicole Ehrenfeld, visited Saphir's laboratories, where the team of technicians and engineers develop state-of-the-art electronics for various particle physics experiments.
The Millennium Science Initiative delegation, led by its Executive Director Nicole Ehrenfeld, visited Saphir's laboratories, where the team of technicians and engineers develop state-of-the-art electronics for various particle physics experiments.