{"id":17701,"date":"2024-09-11T09:04:10","date_gmt":"2024-09-11T07:04:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lncmi.cnrs.fr\/annuaire\/pugnat-pierre\/"},"modified":"2026-10-01T09:54:07","modified_gmt":"2026-10-01T07:54:07","slug":"pugnat-pierre","status":"publish","type":"team","link":"https:\/\/lncmi.cnrs.fr\/en\/annuaire\/pugnat-pierre\/","title":{"rendered":"PUGNAT Pierre"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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.<\/em><\/p>\n\n

I am a \u201chybrid\u201d physicist whose work alternates between that of a senior researcher in fundamental physics and that of an applied physicist or engineer. In 2008, I was contacted by the director of the LNCMI-Grenoble laboratory to lead the hybrid magnet project aimed at producing a continuous magnetic field of 42+T by combining resistive and superconducting technologies. When I joined the team in Grenoble, I already had in mind the goal of building the most powerful Sikivie-type haloscope for the search for axionic dark matter, building on the physics research I had initiated and led at CERN since 2002 with the OSQAR experiments [1<\/a>] [2<\/a>]. I began this research project at CERN alongside my primary R&D activities, which were entirely devoted to the superconducting magnets of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) [3<\/a>]. A Sikivie-type haloscope is a laboratory detector for very specific cosmic particles. It detects the conversion into photons, within an intense magnetic field, of very weakly interacting particles believed to be present in the halo of our galaxy as a major component of dark matter, and\/or originating from extraordinary events in the universe such as supernovae. Thanks to the intense magnetic field and flux provided by the LNCMI-Grenoble hybrid magnet modular platform and the Institut N\u00e9el\u2019s expertise in ultra-low-temperature cryogenics and quantum amplifiers, haloscopes with sensitivity exceeding the state of the art are currently being built as part of the GrAHal (Grenoble Axion Haloscopes) collaboration [4<\/a>], [5<\/a>], [6<\/a>]. This collaboration also includes a team from the IBS in South Korea (DMAG, formerly CAPP) for the development of high-Q tunable RF cavities needed to amplify the very weak signal, as well as a theoretical physics group at the LPSC in Grenoble. As several extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics also predict to explain the strong CP problem, I am fully convinced that there is great potential for major discoveries in ultra-low-energy particle physics\u2014i.e., sub-eV\u2014thanks to the Grenoble hybrid magnet, which is entering its operational phase up to 42 T [7<\/a>], [8<\/a>]. Stay tuned\u2014major discoveries or significant non-discoveries are on the horizon ;-)\u2026 <\/p>\n\n

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