Abruzzo, historically known as Abruzzi, is a region of Southern Italy with an area of 10,763 square km and a population of 1.3 million. It is divided into four provinces: L'Aquila, Teramo, Pescara, and Chieti. Its western border lies 80 km (50 mi) east of Rome. Abruzzo borders the region of Marche to the north, Lazio to the west and north-west, Molise to the south and the Adriatic Sea to the east. Geographically, Abruzzo is divided into a mountainous area in the west, which includes the highest massifs of the Apennines, such as the Gran Sasso d'Italia and the Maiella, and a coastal area in the east with beaches on the Adriatic Sea.
Gran Sasso d'Italia is a massif in the Apennine Mountains of Italy. Its highest peak, Corno Grande 2,912 metres (9,554 ft), is the highest mountain in the Apennines, and the second-highest mountain in Italy outside the Alps. The mountain lies within Gran Sasso e Monti della Laga National Park.
The province of L'Aquila is the largest, most mountainous and least densely populated province of the Abruzzo region of Italy. It comprises about half the landmass of Abruzzo and occupies the western part of the region. It has borders with the provinces of Teramo to the north, Pescara and Chieti to the east, Isernia to the south and Frosinone, Rome and Rieti to the west. Its capital is the city of L'Aquila.
The province of Teramo is a province in the Abruzzo region of Italy. Its capital is the city of Teramo. The province has an area of 1,948 square kilometres (752 sq mi), a population of 313,029 (2012), and is subdivided into 47 comuni, see comunes of the province of Teramo. The province of Teramo shares its northern border with the province of Ascoli Piceno in the Marche region, southern and southwestern borders with the province of L'Aquila in the Abruzzo region, and a western border with the province of Rieti in the Lazio region. To the south is the province of Pescara in the Abruzzo region and to the east is the Adriatic Sea.
Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) is the largest underground research center in the world. Situated below Gran Sasso mountain in Italy, it is well known for particle physics research by the INFN. In addition to a surface portion of the laboratory, there are extensive underground facilities beneath the mountain. The nearest towns are L'Aquila and Teramo. The facility is located about 120 km from Rome.
Campotosto is a comune and town in the province of L'Aquila, in the Abruzzo region of central Italy. Olympian Mariano Antonelli was born here.
Crognaleto is a comune and city of slightly less than 2,000 people in the Province of Teramo, central Italy. Crognaleto sits at an elevation of 1,105 metres (3,625 ft) and has its communal administrative offices in the frazione of Nerito. The commune of Crognaleto sits on the slopes of the Monti della Laga mountain range and extends across both the northern and the southern slopes of the Vomano Valley. It lies within the Gran Sasso e Monti della Laga National Park.
The Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare is the coordinating institution for nuclear, particle, theoretical and astroparticle physics in Italy.
Astroparticle physics, also called particle astrophysics, is a branch of particle physics that studies elementary particles of astrophysical origin and their relation to astrophysics and cosmology. It is a relatively new field of research emerging at the intersection of particle physics, astronomy, astrophysics, detector physics, relativity, solid state physics, and cosmology. Partly motivated by the discovery of neutrino oscillation, the field has undergone rapid development, both theoretically and experimentally, since the early 2000s.
The Gran Sasso and Monti della Laga National Park is a natural park in central Italy. Established in 1991, it covers an area of 2,014 square kilometres (778 sq mi), mostly within the provinces of Teramo, L'Aquila, and Pescara in Abruzzo, with small areas in the provinces of Rieti in Lazio and Ascoli Piceno in Marche. The terrain is predominantly mountainous with alpine plains.
The Capannelle Pass is a mountain pass in Italy. It sits at an altitude of 1300 meters above sea level in the Province of L'Aquila in Italy's Abruzzo Region. It is located on the Italian State Highway 80 which passes near the Gran Sasso in the Apennines.
The Autostrada A24, or Strada dei Parchi is an autostrada 166 kilometres (103 mi) long in Italy located in the regions of Lazio and Abruzzo connecting Rome to Teramo, near the Adriatic Sea. Starting from the Grande Raccordo Anulare, the A24 runs broadly north-east across the Abruzzese Apennine Mountains. Between L'Aquila and Teramo it passes through the 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) Gran Sasso Tunnel. The private company Strada dei Parchi S.p.A. currently manages the motorway. The name "Parks Motorway" comes from the fact that the Maiella National Park, the Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise National Park and the Gran Sasso e Monti della Laga National Park can be reached from this motorway. It is a part of the E80 European route.
GALLEX or Gallium Experiment was a radiochemical neutrino detection experiment that ran between 1991 and 1997 at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS). This project was performed by an international collaboration of French, German, Italian, Israeli, Polish and American scientists led by the Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik Heidelberg. After brief interruption, the experiment was continued under a new name GNO from May 1998 to April 2003.
Science and technology in Italy has a long presence, from the Roman era and the Renaissance. Through the centuries, it has made many significant inventions and discoveries in biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, astronomy, and other sciences. In 2019, Italy was the world's sixth-highest producer of scientific articles, publishing more than 155,000 documents. From 1996 to 2000, it published two million. It ranked 26th in the Global Innovation Index for 2024.
The DarkSide collaboration is an international affiliation of universities and labs seeking to directly detect dark matter in the form of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). The collaboration is planning, building and operating a series of liquid argon time projection chambers (TPCs) that are employed at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Assergi, Italy. The detectors are filled with liquid argon from underground sources in order to exclude the radioactive isotope 39
Ar, which makes up one in every 1015 (quadrillion) atoms in atmospheric argon. The Darkside-10 (DS-10) prototype was tested in 2012, and the Darkside-50 (DS-50) experiment has been operating since 2013. Darkside-20k (DS-20k) with 20 tonnes of liquid argon is being planned as of 2019.
The CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso (CNGS) project was a physics project of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). The aim of the project was to analyse the hypothesis of neutrino oscillation by directing a beam of neutrinos from CERN's facilities to the detector of the OPERA experiment at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory (LNGS), located in the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy. The CNGS facility was housed in a tunnel which diverged from one of the SPS–LHC transfer tunnels, at the Franco–Swiss border near Geneva. It used the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) accelerator as a source of high-energy protons.
The Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI) is an international school for advanced studies located in L'Aquila, Italy.
Assergi is a frazione of the comune of L'Aquila, located about 11 km (6.8 mi) from the capital. With a population of just over 500, it is situated at an altitude of approximately 1,000 meters, below the western slope of the Gran Sasso in a small plain called the Piana di Assergi (Plain of Assergi). Assergi was formerly included in the comune of Camarda, which is directly to its south.
Lucia Votano is an Italian astroparticle physicist, and the first woman to direct the Gran Sasso National Laboratory, from 2009 to 2012. Her research focuses on neutrinos, and she was the coordinator of the OPERA experiment, that led to the first detection of tau neutrinos from muon neutrino oscillation.
The Cryogenic Observatory for SIgnatures seen in Next-generation Underground Searches (COSINUS) is a scientific collaboration aimed at developing cryogenic detectors for the direct detection of dark matter, particularly in relation to results observed by other experiments like DAMA/LIBRA. The goal of COSINUS is to confirm or refute these results by using different detection techniques while maintaining high sensitivity to dark matter interactions.
