Xenon Team
The rarest noble gas on Earth
It's important to understand that when it comes to atoms, language can only be used in the same way as in poetry. The poet, too, is not so much concerned with describing facts as with creating images and mental connections... (Niels Bohr)
Applied research
One of the primary objectives of the Xenon team is to develop a new ultra-low activity nuclear imaging system. The aim of this project is to provide a diagnostic tool for hospital nuclear medicine. It is a camera for non-invasive metabolic imaging. It combines liquid xenon technology, multi-photon radioisotopes and Compton imaging.
- 2009/XENON100
- Direct Dark Matter Search. Today XENONnT and tomorrow DARWIN/XLZD
- 2014/XEMIS2
- Compton medical imaging at Nantes University Hospital
- R2D2 and NEWS-G
- Neutrino-free Direct Search for Dark Matter and Double Beta
- 2021/nEXO
- Double Beta without neutrino
Fundamental research
Despite the success of the Standard Model of particle physics, several experimental results suggest that this theory is incomplete. The Xenon team is involved in research into questions that are still open: the possible presence of dark matter in the Universe, and understanding the non-zero mass of neutrinos through the search for double beta decay without neutrino emission. In this context, team members are heavily involved in the XENONnT, DARWIN/XLZD, nEXO NEWS-G and R2D2 projects.
The XENONnT Experiment
The XENON project brings together ~200 researchers worldwide, with the main scientific objective of observing for the first time the signals generated by the direct interaction of Dark Matter particles with a xenon nucleus. The technology used to measure this weak interaction consists of a time-projection chamber containing liquid xenon.
The XEMIS (XEnon Medical Imaging System) project
The XEMIS2 camera is a prototype Compton camera, designed and assembled by Subatech's Xenon team. It is dedicated to gamma metabolic imaging. The camera is currently in the advanced stages of installation at Nantes University Hospital. Designed to image small animals, it opens up a wide range of metabolic gamma imaging applications.
- 9PhD students
- 1post-doctoral fellow
- 5researchers
