Pierre Pugnat, physicist, head of the Grenoble hybrid magnet project at LNCMI (CNRS, EMFL, Univ. Grenoble-Alpes) and research physicist associated with CERN as spokesman for the OSQAR experiments.

I’m a “hybrid” physicist whose activities alternate between those of a senior researcher in fundamental physics and those of an applied physicist or engineer. I was approached in 2008 by the director of the LNCMI-Grenoble laboratory to take charge of the hybrid magnet project aimed at producing a 42+T DC magnetic field by combining resistive and superconducting technologies. When I joined Grenoble, I already had in mind the construction of the most powerful Sikivie-type haloscope for the search for axionic dark matter, as a continuation of the physics I had initiated and directed at CERN since 2002 with the OSQAR experiments [1] [2]. I began this research topic at CERN in parallel with my main R&D activities, which are entirely devoted to the superconducting magnets of the Large Hadron Collider, the LHC. A Sikivie haloscope is a laboratory detector for very specific cosmic particles. It detects the conversion into photons in an intense magnetic field of very weakly interacting particles thought to be present in the halo of our galaxy as the main component of dark matter, and/or originating from extraordinary events in the universe such as supernovae. Thanks to the intense field and magnetic flux provided by LNCMI-Grenoble’s modular hybrid magnet platform, and Institut Néel’s expertise in ultra-low-temperature cryogenics and quantum amplifiers, state-of-the-art haloscopes are being built within the GrAHal(Grenoble Axion Haloscopes) collaboration. This collaboration also includes a team from IBS South Korea (DMAG, ex-CAPP) for the development of the high-Q tunable RF cavities required for very low signal amplification, as well as a theoretical physics group from LPSC Grenoble. As several extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics to explain the CP-strong problem also predict, I am fully convinced that there is potential for major discoveries in ultra-low-energy particle physics, i.e. sub-eV, thanks to the Grenoble hybrid magnet, which is entering its operating phase up to 42 T. Stay tuned for major discoveries and important non-discoveries to come ;-)…