Fourth Symposium on Large TPCs for Low Energy Rare Event Detection

Abstract

The Fourth International Symposium on large TPCs for low-energy rare-event detection was held at the Hermite auditorium of the Insitute Henri Poincaréte;, 11 rue Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris on 18–19 December 2008. As in previous instances of the meeting, held always in Paris in 2006, 2004 and 2002, it gathered a significant community of physicists involved in rare event searches and/or development of time projection chambers (TPCs). The purpose of the meeting was to present and discuss the status of current experiments or projects involving the use of large TPCs for the search of rare events, like low-energy neutrinos, double beta decay, dark matter or axion experiments, as well as to discuss new results and ideas in the framework of the last developments of Micro Pattern Gaseous Detectors (MPGD), and how these are being – or could be – applied to the mentioned searches. The rapid evolvement of these devices and the relevance of their latest results need to be efficiently transferred to the rare event community. The creation of this series of meetings followed the motivation of bringing together both know-hows and it is proving to be a fruitful area of collaboration. Once more, the format of the meeting proved to be a success. A short (2 days) and relatively informal program with some recent highlighted results, rather than exhaustive reviews, attracted the interest of the audience. The symposium, fourth of the series, is becoming consolidated as a regular meeting place for the synergic interplay between the fields of rare events and TPC development.Apart from the usual topics central to the conference subject, like the status of some low-energy neutrino physics and double beta decay experiments, dark matter experiments (and in general physics in underground laboratories), axion searches, or development results, every year the conference programme is enriched with original slightly off-topic contributions that trigger the curiosity and stimulate further thought. This time we enjoyed some talks on cosmology and the possible detection of relic neutrinos. The present volume contains the proceedings of the conference. All papers published here have been peer reviewed through process administered by the Editors to meet standards for publication. They correspond to 16 of the talks given in the conference and they all represent high quality work in the above mentioned fields. The successful organization of the Symposium was made possible thanks to the contribution of the members of the Organizing Committee and International Advisory Committee. We want to thank in particular the session chairmen, J Iliopoulos, Ph Gorodetzky, B Mansoulié, J-E Augustin, D Santos, S Jullian and S Loucatos for their contribution to the smooth running of the workshop. The symposium was free of fees, which was made possible thanks to the financial support from CEA/IRFU and CNRS/IN2P3, the two major French research organizations that are gratefully acknowledged. We greatly acknowledge the contribution of the University of Zaragoza to the publication of these proceedings.Finally we want to thank the speakers for the high quality of their talks and all participants for coming to Paris and actively contributing in the meeting.