Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
Astroparticle physicists in Europe say they have their own ‘magnificent seven’ — though the 200 physicists and science funding reps who met in Brussels this week surely didn’t style themselves as Yul Brynner, leader of the gunslingers in the 1960s film. 
On the physicists’ agenda: discussing which future large-scale experiments could answer the greatest of the universe’s unsolved mysteries, including dark matter and gravitational waves. AStroParticle ERAnet (ASPERA), a network of government agencies responsible for coordinating and funding European national research efforts in astroparticle physics, organized the meeting.
Topping the physicists’ list of seven is the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). It’s a collection of up to 100 different-sized Cherenkov telescopes (which detect high-energy particles from the ground by making the atmosphere part of the telescope) to study high-energy cosmic ray air showers and their gamma ray sources.
Next is KM3NeT, a neutrino telescope that will be built beneath one cubic kilometer of the Mediterranean Sea. Made of a network of thousands of optical sensors, the telescope will search for neutrinos ejected from distant supernovae or colliding stars.
Number three is a dark-matter experiment that would dramatically scale up the detectors used to search for the nature of dark matter. Current detectors use targets that are tens of kilograms; ArDM, the Argon Dark Matter experiment, will have a 1,000 kilogram target. The detector will use argon rather than germanium or other elements to trace the tiniest effects dark matter has when it collides with normal matter, and serve as a prototype for other large-target detectors.
Numbers four and five are a ton- and a megaton-scale detector, to search for the decay of protons and the mass and fundamental nature of neutrinos respectively. A sixth project aims to design a large telescope array for detecting charged cosmic rays. And the seventh of the Magnificent 7 is the design of a third-generation, underground gravitational antenna, which will be a more sensitive receiver than established gravitational wave observatorys, such as LIGO and VIRGO.
Of course, money for these multibillion dollar projects still needs to be wrangled up. That why ASPERA presented its Magnificent 7 at a meeting open to international funding agencies and scientists. Should the cheques roll in, the most advanced of the projects, such as CTA and KM3NeT, could be under construction by 2012, reports Physorg.
But turning the Magnificent Seven into reality in a timely way is a big challenge, Stavros Katsanevas, coordinator of European programme, told Physorg. Still, he said optimistically: “We are confident that none [of the seven] will be killed, contrary to what happens in the film.”
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