International relations

Relations in Europe

At the European level, APC has established several partnerships with institutions that are internationally recognized for the quality of their research programs. A collaboration agreement was signed in 2018 with the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center (NCAC) of the Polish Academy of Sciences and AstroCeNT (Particle Astrophysics Science and Technology Center), which allowed the organization of thematic workshops, the creation of international cotutelles for doctoral programs, or the financing of R&D programs. For the latter, the LAr TPC of the DUNE and DarkSide neutrino and dark matter detectors, the technological development of SiPM, the Virgo project, big data and data analysis techniques are all topics of the program. Other projects are underway and will be realized in the coming months.

APC is also a strategic partner of the NCAC in the Horizon 2020DarkWave project. The DarkWave project is looking for promising dark matter candidates Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPS), whose direct detection could revolutionize our understanding of the Universe.

TheAPC laboratory is the French functional center of AstroParticle Physics European Consortium (APPEC). ThAPPEC consortium gathers 19 funding agencies, national policy makers and research institutes from 17 European countries, responsible for the coordination and funding of national efforts in the field of astroparticles, with a strategic roadmap established for the period 2017-2026.

International collaborations


At the international level, the laboratory is part of an important network of collaborations.

For space missions, APC regularly collaborates with CNES, European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA. Collaboration projects are also underway with the Japan aerospace exploration agency (JAXA) (LiteBIRD) and with the China national space administration (CNSA) (SVOM).

Partnerships have been signed with other major astroparticle physics laboratories or universities. These structures are the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC)  the Pierre Binetruy center in the framework of Internation Research Lab (IRL) in association with theUniversity of Berkeley, the International Research Programme ALFA in Argentina,  the Kavli-IPMU in Japan. For universities, projects have been carried out with the University of Oxford,University of Hamburg and University of Chicago.

These collaborations have allowed the implementation of meeting and exchange programs such as the annual cycle of conferences “Cosmological Frontiers in Fundamental Physics” with the Perimeter Institute (Waterloo, Canada) and the Solvay Institutes (Brussels), or the participation in the international PhD program IDAPP (a network including seven Italian Universities and three French University, plus three Laboratories: Italian, French, German) active in the Astroparticle area.

In a strong will of IN2P3 to develop collaborations with Japan, the IRL International Laboratory for Astrophysics, Neutrino and Cosmology Experiments (ILANCE) has been created in April 2021. It is a new international laboratory of physics of the two infinities between IN2P3 and the University of Tokyo. The scientific program of ILANCE will be very broad, ranging from neutrinos to the primordial universe, including dark matter, gravitational waves and particle physics. APC teams will be involved in many projects covering all the above mentioned research areas.