ATLAS is the largest of the four gigantic experiments operating at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) where protons and lead ions are made to collide at unprecedented high energies and luminosities. The LHC allows us to explore the high energy frontier of particle physics, to go into uncharted territory beyond our current knowledge and try to understand the fundamental building blocks and the forces that shape our Universe. After our milestone discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 we need to study its properties. We also continue to search for new physics, to do precise measurements and confront them with the Standard Model predictions, and to study the properties of the quark-gluon plasma which was observed at the LHC.

The Portuguese ATLAS group contributed to the experiment since the beginning. We took part in its construction and continue to operate, maintain, and improve the detector, as well as analyse the data that it records. Our research at LIP spans physics studies in the Higgs sector, top quark, heavy ions, and exotic physics. We also have a strong participation in detector and trigger performance studies, operation, consolidation and upgrade, with main responsibilities in the TileCal calorimeter and the jet trigger.

LIP is member of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN since 1992. The scientific motivations of the research at the LHC are at the heart of our quest for understanding the fundamental physics laws of the universe.

The LHC has collided proton beams at 7 and 8 TeV in 2011-12. In general the performance of the LHC machine and of the detectors has been outstanding. The LHC has delivered an integrated luminosity of about 25 fb-1. A wide range of measurements was undertaken (resulting in about 390 publications). All results appear to be compatible with the predictions of the Standard Model.

In 2012 the LHC community achieved a major discovery with profound consequences in particle physics. The ATLAS and CMS experiments observed a new heavy particle with a mass of 125 GeV, compatible with the Higgs boson. The LIP/CMS group is proud to have been a full partner of this achievement, through the scientific work developed consistently in the past twenty years.

In 2013-14 a long LHC shutdown permitted the upgrade of the collider to a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV and instantaneous luminosity of 1034 cm2 s-1 and above. These operating conditions will bring new opportunities for physics discoveries but also additional challenges for the CMS detector operation.

The LIP/CMS group has been active in many areas of the CMS experiment having contributed significantly to all phases of its long trajectory. The main LIP responsibilities in the construction of the CMS Experiment were the following:

• Design and construction of the Data Acquisition System of one of the major CMS sub-detectors, namely the Electromagnetic Calorimeter (ECAL) used for the measurement of electrons and photons;

• Study, design, construction, installation and commissioning of the Trigger System responsible for the first level of event selection.

In the CMS physics program, the LIP/CMS group made major scientific contributions in the following areas:

• the discovery of a Higgs boson in the two-photons decay channel;

• the study of the Higgs properties, including the measurement of the Higgs couplings;

• the measurement of the top quark mass, a fundamental parameter of the Standard Model;

• the measurement of the Vtb element of the CKM matrix, by studying the decays of the top quark;

• the measurement of the J/Psi(nS) e Υ(nS) production polarizations in pp collisions;

• the search for a light/heavy charged Higgs decaying from/to the top quark;

• the search for the supersymmetric partner of the top quark.

LIP’s Phenomenology group, LIP-Pheno, conducts research bridging theory and experiment in particle and astroparticle physics. Its research, while independent, is centred around areas in which LIP has active experimental activities and aims to identify areas in which LIP’s broader programme may evolve in the future. Its founding purpose is to strengthen the impact of the overall LIP programme through the provision of excellent directed phenomenological research 

The group results from the aggregation of two previously existing LIP groups, Phenomenological Studies at the LHC (LHC Phenomenology) and Heavy Ion Phenomenology (HIP), whose members form the founding core of LIP-Pheno. The members of the group have an excellent publication record and high international visibility. The group was created in January 2018 following an extensive discussion process within LIP.

COMPASS experiment is dedicated to the study of the structure of nucleon. The previous COMPASS programme, which lasted till 2011, focused on the measurement of the gluon polarisation Delta_g/g (via two different approaches, the open charm photoproduction and the high p_T physics), of the longitudinal and the transverse quark spin structure and of the fragmentation functions. With a hadron beam, COMPASS studies the pion polarisabilities and some spectroscopy issues, as the production of new mesons and baryons, namely exotics or hybrids.

COMPASS uses high intensity beams, that is, a polarised muon (or hadron) beam impinging on a longitudinally or transversely polarised target (or a liquid hidrogen target) followed by a two stage spectrometer: a first one with a large angular acceptance, followed downstream by a second one with a reduced acceptance, designed to detect particles up to more than 100 GeV/c. In its original design, as stated in the first Proposal, each spectrometer is equipped with a magnet surrounded by trackers, a set of electromagnetic and hadronic calorimeters, muon filters and a Cerenkov detector (RICH) for particle identification.

The data acquisition system is based in a parallel read-out of the front-end electronics plus a distributed set of event-builders, specially designed to cope with huge data volumes.

The High Acceptance Di Electron Spectrometer (HADES) (http://www-hades.gsi.de) is a versatile detector for a precise spectroscopy of e+e- pairs (dielectrons) and charged hadrons produced in proton, pion and heavy ion induced reactions in a 1 - 3.5 GeV kinetic beam energy region. The detector has been set-up in 1996-2002 at GSI (https://www.gsi.de) by an international collaboration of 19 institutions from 10 European countries. The main experimental goal is to investigate the properties of dense nuclear matter created in the course of heavy ion collisions and ultimately learn about in-medium hadron properties. Overview talks with presentation of HADES physics can be found in http://www-hades.gsi.de/?q=node/10.

In the following years, HADES will operate in the new accelerator SIS100 at the future FAIR facility (http://www.faircenter.eu/) with the mission of providing high-quality dielectron data at baryon densities and temperatures not accessible by other detectors, neither in the past nor in the foreseeable future. In recent years HADES has produced a series of relevant physics results, mostly with elementary particles or light ions owing to granularity limitations in the forward time-of-flight (TOF) detector. A list of publication summarizing this results can be found in http://www-hades.gsi.de/?q=node/204.

The main contribution of LIP team to the collaboration was the design and construction of a high granularity (1200 channels in 8 m2), high resolution (70 ps (0,00000000007s), the time that it takes the light to cross a distance of 3cm) timing RPC (Resistive Plate Chambers) based TOF wall. This new system reduced the limitations imposed to the spectrometer by the old scintillator based TOF that prevent it to measure with heavy systems, a fundamental part of the physics program. In 2012, the RPC-TOF wall took part for the first time in a very successful heavy-ion production run with Au-Au collisions at 1.25AGeV during 5 weeks (one of the main objectives of the physics program). After accurate calibration, the RPC-TOF wall showed an excellent performance.

Nuclear reactions are a key instrument to understand how protons and neutrons interact inside nuclear matter. By studying these reactions at different energies we can uncover details of the structure of exotic nuclear systems as well as reproduce the processes that take place in stars explosions and lead to the production of the elements in our universe. NUC-RIA (NUClear Reactions, Instrumentation, and Astrophysics) focuses on the study of these processes working within international collaborations in European facilities devoted to the production and understanding of the properties of exotic nuclei. 

The FAIR (Facility for Antiprotons and Ion Research) facility in Darmstadt, Germany, will be the world-wide leading facility in the production of exotic nuclei. By accelerating them at energies close to the speed of light, these nuclei can be studied in the R3B (Reactions with Relativistic Radioactive Beams) experiment. The NUC-RIA group has performed analysis of reaction data on halo nuclei at relativistic energies, as well as contributed to the development phases of the CALIFA electromagnetic calorimeter. 

The high temperatures that can be reach in star explosions translate into very low energy reactions, involving most of the time radioactive nuclei. The study of these processes is as well a topic on which the group works, participating in experiments at the HIE-ISOLDE/CERN facility in Geneva, Switzerland. 

The development of instrumentation associated to the detection of ionizing radiation and the production of thin films for nuclear reaction processes (via thermal evaporation) are also aspects that the group works on.

AMS (Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer) is a broad international collaboration involving around 500 researchers from 56 institutes in 16 countries operating a cosmic-ray observatory installed on the International Space Station (ISS). ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) are two of the main supporting organizations for the experiment. AMS-02 is a particle detector designed to directly detect the cosmic-ray particles arriving at Earth vivinity from the Universe. Its main goals are to perform a detailed measurement of the cosmic-ray spectrum, to search for cosmological antimatter and to search for dark matter. The whole set of AMS subdetectors allow to identify a large particle spectrum up to the iron element region. The long exposure time together with its large acceptance will enable to collect an unprecedented statistics, up to the date of March 2015 more than 61 000 million events were acquired. The AMS/LIP group actively took part in the experiment conception and construction with a particular relevance in the Ring Imaging Cerenkov detector (RICH). The AMS detector assembly was done partialy in different laboratories and the final integration took place at CERN (CERN Européenne pour la Research Nucleare) in a dedicated clean room in 2010. The detector was subsequently tested at CERN with proton and electron beams and transported at the end of August to NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) where it underwent the final testing procedures before its launch aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour mission STS-134. AMS was successfully installed on 19th May 2011 in the ISS and started data taking on the 21st May. The AMS experiment, unique in the current astroparticle physics scenario, creates a unique window of opportunity to embrace a huge scientific challenge and constitutes an excellent training platform for graduate studies. The experiment is expected to be carried out in Space for a period equal to the foreseen Space Station lifetime (at least up to 2020) collecting in a continuous rate of approximately 40 million events per day. The work of the Portuguese group is centered on AMS data analysis and in the contril and performance studies of the RICH subdetector and reconstruction algorithms for velocity and charge of cosmic-ray particles. This group also embraces the study of the solar modulation effect in cosmic rays and will focus on the proton and electron fluxes study at low energu (up to 100 GeV), as well as on its time variability study. Another research topic is the isotopic separation and the light isotope spectra study.

The observations of gamma-ray telescopes in the last decade changed radically our perception of the Universe and raised new puzzles on the mechanisms powering the most energetic phenomena: gamma-ray bursts and relativistic outflows such as jets from black hole accretion disks or pulsar winds. High-intensity flares with an energy spectrum extending beyond the GeV have been observed. This phenomenon was not foreseen by the laboriously built models and its experimental study has just begun. The next step will be led by instruments able to survey continuously large portions of the sky, and sensitive to the energy gap between satellites and ground arrays (50 GeV — 0.5 TeV).

Present and planned large field-of-view (FoV) gammaray observatories are installed in the Northern Hemisphere, missing in particular the galactic center. While a wide FoV Southern Hemisphere observatory will surely be proposed and built, the question is whether it will be similar to the existing extensive air shower (EAS) arrays, or an innovative solution able to cover the energy gap between satellites and ground in wide FoV observations. The technological challenges of lowering the energy threshold of air shower arrays have been considered nearly impossible to overcome, as they stem directly from the physics of air showers. The goal of LATTES is to design, prototype and construct a a ground array able to monitor the Southern gammaray sky above 50 GeV, bringing to ground the wide fieldof-view and large duty cycle observations characteristic of satellites, with comparable sensitivity and a cost one order of magnitude lower. Such an instrument will be a powerful time-variance explorer, able to issue pointing alerts to IACTs (Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes), boosting the efficiency of these powerful instruments, and thus fully complementary to CTA. It will collect abundant and highly relevant data and play a fundamental role in the search for emissions from extended regions, as the Fermi bubbles or dark matter annihilation regions.

To overcome the huge technology issues involved, LATTES proposes an innovative concept: a compact EAS array of hybrid detector units, covering an area of at least 20,000 m2, to be placed at high altitude (about 5,000 m above sea level, a.s.l.) in the Southern hemisphere. Each detector unit combines two autonomous RPCs (Resistive Plate Chambers), with good space and time resolution) with a WCD (Water Cerenkov Detector), ensuring trigger efficiency and efficient background rejection, and thus good sensitivity all the way down to 50 GeV.

The proposed solution is conceptually and technologically innovative but relies on wellgrounded R&D in which LIP had a leading role. In fact, the detector concept was originally developed at LIP and the LIP-Coimbra team members have a recognized world-leader expertise in RPCs. The LATTES concept has been proposed during 2016 by scientists from Portugal (LIP), Brazil (CBPF) and Italy (INFN-Padova and Roma). Scientists from other countries, namely from Spain and Check Republic, have attended the LATTES meetings in 2016 as observers. To pursue such an ambitious goal, a sound international collaboration has to be formed. The collaboration is taking form and should get the first dedicated fundings during 2017.

Neutrinos, the puzzling elementary particle, with neutral electric charge and tiny mass, interact with matter very rarely, and are among the most abundant particles in the Universe. They were predicted in the 1930's to maintain energy conservation in the nuclear beta decay and were observed only in 1956. There are 3 different types of massive neutrinos and they can transform into one another via the quantum process of “neutrino oscillations”, only possible if neutrinos have a non-zero mass. This was observed by the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) experiment, solving the problem of the “missing solar neutrinos”. Besides this unique behavior, it is not excluded that neutrinos are Majorana particles, i.e. that a neutrino is its own anti-particle, with potential implications on the explanation of the matter/anti-matter asymmetry in the universe.

The LIP neutrino physics team was created in 2005 to participate in SNO and integrated since the beginning (2006) the SNO+ experiment, for which the main goal is the observation of the extremely rare (if it exists) neutrinoless double beta decay (0NDBD) process to probe the possible Majorana character of neutrinos and measure its absolute mass.

SNO+ reuses the SNO detector, that consists of a 12 m diameter spherical vessel, surrounded by about 9500 PMTs mounted on a geodesic structure, installed at a depth of 2 km in SNOLAB, Canada. SNO+ will use 780 tons of Tellurium-loaded liquid scintillator as the active medium.

Besides the search for 0NDBD, measurements of neutrinos from the Sun, the Earth, Supernovae and nuclear reactors are also planned. The installation of the detector is in progress and it will be commissioned with water only before starting the scintillator fill in 2016.

The LIP team carries out activities in several domains, from the optical calibration to the search of 0NDBD signals requiring the estimation of several types of backgrounds, but also in physics studies with reactor anti-neutrinos and geoneutrinos.

The LIP-SHIP group was recently created with the aim of developing the technology of the timing detector of the SHiP experiment and also participate in its physics program.

The SHiP /Search for Hidden Particles) experiment.

The discovery of the Higgs boson at LHC in 2012 made the Standard Model (SM) of elementary particles complete: all the particles predicted by the model have been found, and their interactions, tested at LHC till now, are consistent with those predicted by the SM. The era of guaranteed discoveries in particle physics has come to an end with the detection of the Higgs boson.

The quest for new particles has however not ended. We are certain that the SM does not represent the full picture. Several well-established observational phenomena – neutrino masses and oscillations, dark matter, and baryon asymmetry of the Universe – cannot be explained with known particles alone and clearly indicate that new physics should exist. The fact that no convincing signs of new particles have been found so far suggests that they are either heavier than the reach of the present days accelerators or interact very weakly.

The SHiP experiment is designed to search for extremely feebly interacting, relatively light particles, at the intensity frontier, the so call Hidden sector. In addition, the SHiP experiment can also probe the existence of Light Dark Matter and include a rich program of neutrino physics.

The LIP-SHiP group is proposing for the timing detector (an important part of the SHiP detector) an alternative option (to the traditional.

The LIP RPC group has its roots in previous work on Parallel Plate Avalanche Chambers done in collaboration with the old Charpak group at CERN.

In 1998/9 we participated in the R&D effort for the time-of-flight (TOF) detector of the ALICE (CERN) experiment, within which we co-invented the timing Resistive Plate Chamber (tRPC) technology. These devices revolutionized the TOF detection technique, opening way for very large area TOF detectors, which were, are or will be present in many HEP experiments (ALICE, BESIII, BGO- EGG, CBM, FOPI, HADES, HARP, STAR).

Besides the original work in ALICE, along with numerous international and local collaborators, we contributed to the field a number of developments that expanded the RPC applications range, continuing the work presently on some of these lines:

• very large area/channel tRPCs

• shielded tRPCs for robust multihit capability in dense arrays

• the use of ceramic materials and warm glass for enhanced count-rate capability

• application of RPCs to animal and human Positron Emission Tomography (RPC-PET)

• simultaneous high-resolution measurement of positions and times (TOFtracker)

• very low maintenance, environmentally robust, RPCs for deployment in remote locations

• large fast-neutron TOF detectors

Our group designed and built the HADES TOF Wall detectors and it is now the sole responsible for the operation of the system, which has shown so far flawless performance. This work will be carried into the future FAIR facility (Germany), as HADES is a FAIR experiment. 
Besides the development of technology expanding devices, we keep an interest in RPC’s physical modelling and other fundamental issues, such as gas mixture properties and aging. In close collaboration with the detector lab we also design and produce detector-support electronics, such as front-end amplifiers and high-voltage power supplies.

We participated briefly in the ALICE and CBM experiments, in the FP6 EU projects I3-Hadron-Physics and DIRAC-PHASE-I, and, currently, in AIDA2020 (http://aida2020.web.cern.ch/). We are members of CERN’s RD51 and SHiP collaborations.

The RPC group cooperates with several other LIP groups (neutron detectors, AUGER, LATTES, HADES and SHiP), supporting their RPC-related activities. See the specific reports for further details.

The RD51 collaboration [RD51] aims at facilitating the development of advanced gas-avalanche detector technologies and associated electronic-readout systems, for applications in basic and applied research. The main objective of the R&D programme is to advance technological development and application of Micropattern Gas Detectors.

The invention of Micro-Pattern Gas Detectors (MPGD), in particular the Gas Electron Multiplier (GEM),  the Micro-Mesh Gaseous Structure (MICROMEGAS), and more recently other micro pattern detector schemes, offers the potential to develop new gaseous detectors with unprecedented spatial resolution, high rate capability, large sensitive area, operational stability and radiation hardness. In some applications, requiring very large-area coverage with moderate spatial resolutions, more coarse Macro-patterned detectors, e.g. Thick-GEMs (THGEM) or patterned resistive-plate devices could offer an interesting and economic solution.

The design of the new micro-pattern devices appears suitable for industrial production. In addition, the availability of highly integrated amplification and readout electronics allows for the design of gas-detector systems with channel densities comparable to that of modern silicon detectors. Modern wafer post-processing allows for the integration of gas-amplification structures directly on top of a pixelized readout chip. Thanks to these recent developments, particle detection through the ionization of gas has large fields of application in future particle, nuclear and astro-particle physics experiments with and without accelerators.

The RD51 collaboration involves ~ 450 authors, 75 Universities and Research Laboratories from 25 countries in Europe, America, Asia and Africa. All partners are already actively pursuing either basic- or application-oriented R&D involving a variety of MPGD concepts. The collaboration established common goals, like experimental and simulation tools, characterization concepts and methods, common infrastructures at test beams and irradiation facilities, and methods and infrastructures for MPGD production.

[RD51] RD51 proposal (http://rd51-public.web.cern.ch/RD51-Public/Documents/RD51Proposal_21082008.pdf)

Aim of the project

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a powerful diagnostic technique employed in functional medical imaging (molecular imaging). Our overall objective is to develop a radically new technology for TOF PET systems targeted at human whole-body scanning, with resolution down to the physical limit of the PET technique and with a sensitivity improved by over one order of magnitude with respect to current commercial systems, without increase in cost. Such breakthrough would provide physicians with superior capabilities for diagnosing and detecting oncological and other diseases and investigating disease mechanisms, potentially allowing a paradigm shift in PET clinical use.

As the basic feasibility studies have been already carried out, this project specifically aims at designing building, testing and developing a first prototype of a full-size human whole body TOF-PET scanner with a field-of-view of 2 m and a borehole of 90 cm (Fig. 1).

The demonstration of this technology, offering a radically different alternative to crystal-based gamma detection systems, may open totally new avenues for future research in large-area gamma detection, even beyond medical applications.

Fundamental idea

Sensitivity is a fundamental parameter of PET systems. It determines the amount of radioactive tracer to be administered to the patient, the observation time and the noise level in the image for a given image granularity. Any improvement in system sensitivity will allow a corresponding improvement in one of these parameters or in a combination of them.

However, a practical view should be kept in that a successful new technology should provide the expected benefits without any significant increase in cost over the presently available commercial systems. This is by far not evident with many of the currently researched approaches and some compromise may be necessary [ERI06].

Our proposal for high-sensitivity PET at reasonable cost involves the TOF-PET technique along with a dramatic extension of the FOV [BLA03, ERI08], up to whole-body size (2 m), using a low-cost per unit area particle detector, with excellent spatial resolution, uniform in the Field-of-View owing to its Depth-of-Interaction capability and time-of-flight resolution of 300 ps.

Furthermore, a very large field-of-view, taking the whole image simultaneously (single-bed), has supplementary potential advantages over narrow-FOV PET. These include the possibility of imaging simultaneously the whole body, allowing a more complete study of dynamic processes, covering the whole subject at any given instant with a better temporal segmentation. Other advantages include the possibility of achieving better quantitation through improved scatter correction, since there is no activity outside the FOV.

Innovative approach

Our approach is based on a detector technology already used in High Energy Physics Experiments for time-of-flight measurements on charged elementary particles: timing Resistive Plate Chambers (tRPCs). Such gaseous detectors have been deployed in areas over one hundred square meters at reasonable cost, while generally providing an excellent time resolution below 100 ps rms.

Several years ago our group proposed that such detectors might find useful application in TOF-PET technology, both for whole-body human scanning and small animal imaging [BLA03]. The application is based on the "converter plate" principle and takes decisive advantage of the naturally layered structure of tRPCs and of its economic construction in large areas. The expectable low efficiency for 511 keV photons is more than offset [COU07a, ERI08, CRE09] by the possibility to afford a very large field of view (FOV), on the order of 2 m.

The concept has also been independently reviewed [ERI08], although on a different set of assumptions, confirming that it may replace with advantage the present state-of-the-art crystal-based scanners for whole-body scanning.

[BLA03] Perspectives for positron emission tomography with RPCs, Blanco, A; Chepel, V; Ferreira-Marques, R; Fonte, P; Lopes, M.I; Peskov, V; Policarpo, A., Nucl. Instrum. and Meth. A 508 (2003) 88-93.

[COU07a] RPC-PET status and perspectives, M.Couceiro, A.Blanco, Nuno C.Ferreira, R.Ferreira Marques, P.Fonte, L.Lopes., Nucl. Instrum. and Meth. A 580 (2007) 915-918.

[CRE09] Whole-body single-bed time-of-flight RPC-PET: simulation of axial and planar sensitivities with NEMA and anthropomorphic phantoms, P. Crespo et al., 2009 IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium Conference Record (NSS/MIC), Jan 2010, Page(s): 3420 - 3425

[ERI06] Future instrumentation in positron emission tomography, L. Eriksson et al., 2006 IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium Conference Record, Volume 4, Oct. 29 2006-Nov. 1 2006 Page(s): 2542 - 2545.

[ERI08] Potentials for large axial field of view positron camera systems, L. Eriksson et al., 2008 IEEE MIC Conference, published in the Conference Record.

Radiotherapy (RT) plays a growing, well established role in the management of cancer disease in modern societies. Nevertheless, it is also well known that even with newer, state-of-the-art machinery delivering highly conformal RT, effective cure rates or minimization of toxicity still present today margins for improvement. With the aim of improving further the efficacy of external photon beam RT, LIP has been exploring within this research line the capability of using orthogonal ray imaging systems to monitor to some extent both the dose that is being delivered to the patient (RTmonitor) as well as its morphology within the irradiated field (OrthoCT). In this way, simulations and experimental work have shown (see Fig.) that pertinent dose-changing morphological or physiological alterations may be detected, which results in important information for assisting and potentially improving RT treatments.

In the photon RT field, LIP collaborates tightly with the University of Coimbra, the Oncology Institute of Coimbra (IPOCFG,EPE), the Department of Radiotherapy of Coimbra University Hospital Center (CHUC, EPE), and with the Oncology Institute of Porto (IPOPFG,EPE). Several expert members are now fully supported with master and postdoc fellowships granted by the Radiation for Life project. This 1.2-million-Euro funded project was proposed within a tight collaboration between LIP and the University of Coimbra. Upon successful approval for funding, the project deployed in the Summer of 2013. One of its research lines is this orthogonal ray imaging initiative.

In the context of particle therapy (protons and carbon ions), orthogonal ray imaging may also be called prompt-gamma imaging since here escaping photons are gamma rays created in excited nuclei during the interactions of the incoming projectiles with the atomic nuclei of the patient. In this context LIP is actively collaborating with the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, with the Heidelberg Ion Beam Therapy Center, in Germany, and with the University of Munich, also in Germany.

The group was formed in 2013 to apply the know-how accumulated in LIP in the course of the previous work on position-sensitive scintillation detectors (PSSD) to the areas of medical imaging and imaging techniques used in drug discovery. In the past years we confirmed, both by Monte Carlo simulation and experimentally, applicability of our auto-calibration and position reconstruction techniques to both clinical gamma cameras of classical design and a compact high-resolution cameras with SiPM readout. We also created an integrated software tool that incorporates the whole development workflow for PSSD: interactive design and simulation via a computer model as well as experimental data processing and event reconstruction. We collaborate with medical imaging units of Coimbra University (ICNAS and AIBILI) and Coimbra University Hospital. Recently, a collaboration was established with the Radiation Detectors and Applications Group at Politecnico di Milano.

The group on Spin-off Technologies for Cancer Diagnosis (STDC) was created ten years ago around the development of a new Positron Emission Tomography scanner (ClearPEM) for breast cancer diagnosis, exploiting technologies developed at LIP for the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.

Scientific research, technological development and laboratory testing of new PET scanners is pursued at the laboratory infrastructure TagusLIP, dedicated to the development of new nuclear medicine technologies. The TagusLIP infrastructure is installed at Taguspark.

The ClearPEM project was developed by a national consortium of research institutes and clinical centers under the LIP leadership. The consortium is formed by institutions specialized in the areas of physics, nuclear medicine, radiation detectors, biophysics, medical engineering, electronics, computing, mechanical engineering and robotics, and by the start-up company PETsys, which collaborated to develop new technologies applied to cancer detection.

The ClearPEM consortium collaborated in the development of multi-modality imaging systems integrating PET and Ultra-Sound with institutes of the international Crystal Clear Collaboration, namely CERN Switzerland, INFN-Milano Italy, Univ. Hospital Nord Marseille France, Hospital San Gerardo Monza Italy.

Since 2011 the LIP/STCD group is part of the consortium EndoTOFPET funded by the FP7 framework program of the European Union. This project is being developed until July 2015 with the aim of developing an endoscopic PET and ultrasound probe, associated with an external PET detector for detection of prostate and pancreatic cancer. LIP coordinates the Work Package 4, responsible for the electronics and data acquisition systems.

The LIP/STCD group is part of the FP7 Marie Curie Training Network (ITN) PICOSEC, focused in the development of sensors with very good time resolution for Time-of-Flight PET.

The irradiation of organisms with ionizing radiations occurs due to natural causes or sources produced by humans. The measurement and control of the amount of absorbed radiation by the body when irradiated is the purpose of dosimetry. The dosimetry finds application in the most varied fields: ambient radiation and well-being of the general population, control in hospital (patients and clinical staff), manned and unmanned space missions, monitoring and control in industrial facilities.

The LIP dosimetry group has an extensive work of more than 20 years in this field.

The planned installation of a proton accelerator at the CTN / IST campus in Bobadela, Sacavém, will open new lines of research for the group. Taking advantage of past experience in the use of scintillating optical fibers, both in high-energy detectors and in medical applications, we are developing studies of its application also in situations of irradiation with proton beams. Optical fibers may have sub-millimeter diameters, allowing much better spatial resolution than traditionally used ionization chambers.

The activity of the LIP group for "Radiation Environment Studies and Applications for Space Missions" is based on the LIP knowhow in the areas of radiation interaction simulations, radiation detection and instrumentation for experimental particle physics. The Space Radiation Environment and Effects activities were triggered by the application of the Geant4 simulation toolkit to astroparticle experiments in a first contract celebrated between LIP and the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2003. Since then, the work developed has been supported mainly by contracts between LIP and ESA, LIP being either fully responsible for the projects or for parts of the projects. These activities have been a source of collaboration between LIP and other institutes, companies and the industry, and also of collaboration with external scientists and include:

• Study and model the the radiation environment in Space, including planetary radiation environments, namely the Moon, Mars, Europa, Ganymede and asteroids radiation environments.
• Analysis of Space mission energetic particle/radiation data.
• Follow up of the evolution on SEP (Solar Energetic Particle events ) models and their test with radiation monitor data, initiated with the project "Portuguese Participation in the Heliospheric Network".
• Study and development of detector design concepts for radiation monitors (based in Si sensors and/or in scintillators) and exploitation of these designs in different planetary and interplanetary environments, both for platform support and for scientific data analysis.
• Study, model and ground testing of the effects of radiation in EEE components.
• Study biological effects of the radiation environment in space and in planetary atmospheres ands surfaces.
• Study and develop mitigation strategies for radiation hazards, both for spaceship systems and components and for human spaceflight.

LIP Coimbra Astrophysics Instrumentation Group research activities are developed in the framework of LIP strategic objectives on "Radiation Environment Studies and Applications for Space Missions". Our group is part of H2020 AHEAD (Activities in the High Energy Astrophysics Domain) project (ref. 654215) started September 1st, 2015 for 42 months, with a global budget of 4,982,477€, where 61,225€ were granted to LIP. The overall objective of AHEAD is to integrate national efforts in high-energy astrophysics and to promote the domain at the European level, to keep its community at the cutting edge of science and technology in this competitive research area and ensure that space observatories for high-energy astrophysics will be solid proposals to future ESA call for missions.

Our group will contribute do WP8 of AHEAD. The WP8 title is "Development and characterization of optics for next generation X-ray telescopes". The goal of this work package is to further develop and characterize key X-ray optics technologies for the next generation X-ray missions. In the framework of AHEAD consortium effort, together with our partners of the Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cósmica, Bologna, Italy, we will participate in novel focal planes development, simulation and testing.

XIPE (X-ray Imaging Polarimetry Explorer) mission was one of the three 2015 M4 call selected missions for phase A by ESA. After phase A period, aimed at studying technical and scientific aspects of the three concepts, one mission will be selected in June 2017 to be launched by 2026. XIPE might be the first X-ray polarimetry launched into space, opening a whole new observational window. The XIPE scientific payload is composed of a mirror assembly and focal plane detectors. The focal plane instrument is based on GPD photoelectric X-ray polarimeters. The GPD measures photons linear polarization by reconstructing the emission direction of the ejected photoelectrons. As XIPE Instrument Team partner, our group has the task of optimize the GPD gas mixture.

The activities in the computing infrastructures domain encompass the support to scientific research, the participation in R&D projects aimed to keep LIP in the forefront of IT technologies, and the participation in digital infrastructure initiatives. These activities are mainly focused on grid computing, cloud computing and on big data challenges.

LIP is member of the Portuguese National Distributed Computing Infrastructure (INCD) in partnership with LNEC and FCCN. INCD is a digital infrastructure approved in the context of the Portuguese Science Foundation (FCT) strategic infrastructures roadmap. INCD provides computing and data services to the national scientific and academic community in all domains. It supports researchers and their participation in national and international research projects.

LIP participates actively in several international computing infrastructures acting as national contact point, namely: Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), European Grid Infrastructure (EGI), Iberian Grid Infrastructure (IBERGRID).

LIP has been participating in many R&D projects in the context of the European framework programme, among them the recent: EGI-INSPIRE (FP7), EGI–ENGAGE (H2020), INDIGO-DATACLOUD (H2020), , EOSC-hub (H2020), and DEEP-Hybrid-DataCloud (H2020).

Members of advanced computing group have previous work in Grid, HPC computing models, high performance communication libraries and distributed data structures. More recently it has developed R&D on the combination of traditional multicore CPUs with acceleration devices.

The group, part of the LIP-Minho, since the beginning of 2014, without abandoning research in fields close related with the Computer Science and Engineering has been directing its activity to areas more related to the general interests of LIP investigation.

In particular is noteworthy support for the development and optimization of code applications related to HEP and the search of explicit distribution strategies for access to large volumes of data in order to improve efficiency and execution times.

Another important dimension of activity is support for advanced training in Scientific Computing.