Cosmic Ray Physics

Veronica Bindi is Full Professor and Chair of the Physics and Astronomy Department of the University of Hawaii at Manoa (USA). For more than 10 years, she has been part of the team at CERN (Switzerland) that led the construction, integration and operation of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) installed on the International Space Station on May 2011 to search for dark matter and study galactic cosmic rays. She is working on AMS data analysis with a particular focus on solar modulation, heliophysics and space radiation. She has received a National Science Foundation career award and a grant from NASA supporting future manned missions to Mars.

Mercedes Paniccia is Senior Research Associate at University of Geneva (Switzerland). She is member of the AMS Collaboration since 2003. She has contributed to the construction of the silicon tracker, to the calibration and the commissioning of the electromagnetic calorimeter, to the operation of the AMS detector, and to data reconstruction and analysis. Since 2017, she leads the AMS data analysis group at University of Geneva whose research focuses on the measurement of cosmic-ray nuclei fluxes and isotopic composition of light nuclei, with the aim of studying the propagation mechanism of cosmic rays in the galaxy.

Martin Pohl is professor emeritus at University of Geneva (Switzerland). He has been working on experimental particle physics at colliders before turning to astroparticle physics in space. He was the head of the University of Geneva group for AMS until his retirement in 2017. He is the author of a textbook on particle physics, as well as the main author of two introductory online courses on the same subject (Coursera). He has recently published "Particles, Fields, Space-Time: From Thomson's Electron to Higgs' Boson" (CRC Press, 2020).