CTAO ERIC : DPNC at the forefront
Switzerland has taken a major step in strengthening its role in international research infrastructures by being unanimously accepted as a founding member of the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO) ERIC, with the DPNC at the forefront.听
While formal approval from the European Commission is still pending, this marks a significant milestone for both CTAO and Switzerland.The Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) has released an official statement celebrating this achievement for several ERICs, which you can read the e-News here.
Since 2016, SERI has supported the Swiss community鈥檚 involvement in CTAO. In 2019, the Department of Nuclear and Corpuscular Physics (DPNC) at the AV短视频 assumed the leading role, coordinating Swiss contributions across all project phases 鈥� including observatory design, telescope prototyping and construction, and commissioning.
The Swiss CTAO Consortium, initially led by Prof. T. Montaruli and recently handed over to Prof. D. Della Volpe, includes major institutions such as UNIGE, UNIZH, UNIBE, EPFL, ETH Zurich, and CSCS. Notably, Switzerland will also host one of CTAO鈥檚 four long-term Data Centres, underscoring its strategic importance to the project.
Switzerland is actively engaged in many aspects of the CTAO construction, including contributions to the Large-Sized Telescopes, the development of software packages essential for running the observatory, and the operation of data centres for processing scientific data. These activities are being presented this week at the ICRC 2025 Conference in Geneva.
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21 Jul 2025