Partners: CNRS, INFN, FAU, CERN (+ collaborators: University of Manchester, Lund University)
Project description
The Dark Matter Test Science Project (TSP) operated within the European Science Cluster of Astronomy and Particle physics ESFRI research infrastructures (ESCAPE) project.
This project was a collaboration between scientists in European Research Infrastructures and experiments seeking to explain the nature of dark matter (such as HL-LHC, KM3NeT, CTA, DarkSide). The goal of this Science Project was to highlight the synergies between different dark matter communities and experiments, by producing new scientific results as well as by making the necessary data and software tools fully available.
Many of the European Research Infrastructures within ESCAPE have experiments that are searching for Dark Matter. There is a clear complementarity between these experiments under a variety of dark matter hypotheses. Connecting results and potential discoveries from different experiments requires the engagement of all scientific communities involved – astrophysics, particle physics and nuclear physics – as already recommended within the update of the European Strategy of Particle Physics.
Technical challenge
Besides the interpretation of results in terms of dark matter theories, synergies also exist between different communities and experiments in the tools needed to produce those results, in particular in terms of data management, data analysis and computing.
ESCAPE researchers funded by EOSC-Future have developed a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) that takes full advantage of these synergies. The VRE hosts both FAIR data and software, so that data analyses from different experiments can be executed in full.
The EOSC Future added value
The following lists the services developed by ESCAPE that are essential to this science environment and are contributed to EOSC Future:
- AAI: A fully developed AAI solution following the AARC blueprint, so scientists in the TSP’s can use a single user identity for all aspects of work
- Data Lake: federated storage services with open and embargoed datasets
- Rucio – data location catalogue and policy engine. ESCAPE FTS (File Transfer Service) – for moving data around; integrated with the AAI service and the storage endpoints. Additionally: caching and streaming services to deliver data to processing and analysisA software catalogue to publish all of the needed analysis components, and make them available for the various groups involved in the TSP work
- Virtual Research Environment: An analysis environment, with a Jupyter notebook deployment, and access to scalable compute resources, tying in all these services
Main results
- Delivered the services above, and implemented five different data analyses from experiments looking for dark matter (more being onboarded) on the VRE
- Talk & proceedings at the TOOLS20 conference (review of state-of-the-art tools for high energy physics and cosmology
- Engagement via Consortia (ECFA, APPEC, NUPECC, JENAS)
- DM is a recognised challenge for the communities
- Invited poster by DM postdoc at the JENAS conference 2022
- Two plenary talks at the biggest international conference for computing in high energy physics (CHEP), one on the DM Science Project and another one on the VRE [1][2]
- A full list of publications can be found at this link
Other resources
- Link to EOSC Future Science Project webinar on 6 June 2023: https://eoscfuture.eu/eventsfuture/dark-matter-an-eosc-future-science-project-webinar/
- Final ESCAPE event, presentation by all postdocs in EOSC-Future has been recorded and published on YouTube including a demo: https://projectescape.eu/events/escape-future
VRE demo: