Anil Sonay, member of the IFAE-ATLAS group at gave the talk “The search for rare top production and decay processes with the ATLAS experiment at the LHC” at [Pheno 2021](https://indico.cern.ch/event/982783/) on 24-26 May 2021

Ten months after the beginning of the upgrade to Advanced Virgo+, Phase I of the installation is completed. The upgrade includes the new instrumented baffle designed and built at IFAE to control and monitor the stray light inside the experiment.

Thorsten Lux gave a talk about the ND280 Upgrade and Cesar Jesus-Valls ptesented a poster related to the scintillator tracker (SuperFGD) at [TIPP2021](https://tipp2021.triumf.ca/) on 24-28 May 2021

May 25 – 28, 2021 Online. IFAE researchers contributed talks to the meeting

Two members of the Theory group contributed talks to [MESON 2021](https://indico.meson.if.uj.edu.pl/event/1/) 17-20 May 2021

The Dark Energy Survey collaboration has created the largest ever maps of the distribution and shapes of galaxies, tracing both ordinary and dark matter in the universe out to a distance of more than 7 billion light years. The analysis, which includes the first three years of data from the survey, is consistent with predictions from the current best model of the universe, the standard cosmological model. Nevertheless, there remain hints from DES and other experiments that matter in the current universe is a few percent less clumpy than predicted.

Cristian Alarcon has just joined the Theory Group.

IFAE Theory group researchrs Pere Masjuan and Pablo Sánchez contributed talks to the workshop

Pol Forn presented the project AvAQus in the talk ‘Introducing project AVaQus: Annealing-based variational quantum processors’

The Virgo, LIGO and KAGRA scientific collaborations today announced the first observation ever of binary systems consisting of a neutron star (NS) and a black hole (BH). The existence of these systems was predicted by astronomers several decades ago, but they had never been observed with confidence, either through electromagnetic or gravitational signals, until now.

The network team at PIC achieved an important milestone after 2 years of development. The network at PIC has been migrated from a 20Gbps to a 200Gbps link in a very smooth way.

“[Measurement of the tttt production cross section in pp collisions at sqrt(s)=13 TeV with the ATLAS detector](https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.11683)” has been submitted to JHEP. Members of the IFAE-ATLAS team (Aurelio Juste, Nicola Orlando, and Anil Sonay) have played a leading role in this publication, from designing the analysis strategy to the final multivariate technique and statistical analysis employed.