International Cooperation

Neutrino Detection Telescope TREND Put into Operation

In 2008, a research group composed of 20 researchers or about from six Chinese and French institutes was established, including experts in particular engaged in cosmic ray experiment from the Institute of High Energy Physics, CAS and French experts engaged in CODALEMA experiment. The project was located at the 21CMA base. The Chinese academic pacemaker was Prof. Wu Xiangping, chief scientist of the project on epoch of reionization, while on the French side Prof. Martineau-Huynh and Dr. Saugrin from the France China Particle Physics Laboratory. Through dozens of in-situ experiments in the last two years, they tested the reliability of the event reconstruction using manual control interfering sources. At the beginning of year 2010, the researchers installed 3 sets of plastic scintillation detectors at the 21 CMA base with a space about 200m from each other for cross-check and verifying of the cosmic ray events. As a large radio telescope working at the lowest frequency range (50 - 200 MHz) in China, and mainly engaged in “the research on the epoch of reionization”, 21CMA is, in the meantime, used to explore the possibility of detecting cosmic rays and cosmic tau neutrinos by making use of its unique advantages in technique and in its geographic location. This leads to the establishment of TREND（Tianshan Radio Experiment for Neutrino Detection）. In 2010, TREND antenna array successfully detected lots of cosmic ray events that have been confirmed by the scintillation detector array. The first results were published in Astroparticle Physics 34(2011)717.The success of TREND is a good example of the cooperation between the two laboratories in the frame of FCPPL, and it will play a positive role in the cooperation and development of FCPPL in the research of Astrophysics and Particle Physics.

Evidence of Cold Climate in Dinosaur Age Revealed

French Postdoctoral researcher Romain Amiot at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, together with Wang Xu at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the CAS, and a team of scientists from several countries recently published in PNAS an article entitled “Oxygen isotopes of East Asian dinosaurs reveal exceptionally cold Early Cretaceous climate”. Their research suggests that the dinosaur age was not always warm, at least at some time during the Early Cretaceous, e.g. approximately 120 Million years ago, when the famous Jehol Biota flourished, Northeast China was dominated by temperate climate with chilly winter. This conclusion may bear some implications for understanding why many dinosaurs were feathered.