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Eighty years after the first measurement, the mountain is still taking data seven days a week. It monitors the composition of the atmosphere for the World Meteorological Organization and is preparing to observe the southern sky in gamma rays as no one has yet done. This is what sets this candidacy apart from that of an archaeological site: here the activity never stopped.
Four international programmes in operation: two on cosmic rays and gamma rays, one on neutrons from the Sun and one on the atmosphere. None is commemorative: all of them produce data that get published.
Andes Large-area PArticle detector for Cosmic rays and Astronomy. A surface array of 83,000 m² with an underground muon detector of 5,400 m², at an altitude of 4,740 metres. It will be the first instrument able to observe the southern sky in gamma rays above 100 TeV, the region where the galactic accelerators are expected to be found. It is being built right now: the surface array already stands on the plateau and the muon detector is still under construction. Its prototype, ALPAQUITA, is already taking data.
Read milestone 10 · From OMEGA to ALPACA →Global Atmosphere Watch station of the World Meteorological Organization, at 5,240 metres: one of the very few high-altitude global stations on the planet. It measures the free atmosphere of the southern hemisphere from the same spot where measurements have been taken since 1942.
Read milestone 09 → In operation since 1992 Solar neutron telescopeFour square metres of Nagoya University scintillator above the Rossi hall, the highest station in a network of seven mountains. It saw neutrons fresh from the Sun during the flares of 2000 and 2005, and it is still measuring.
Read the experiment record (in Spanish) → In operation since 2008 LAGOThree water Cherenkov detectors of the Latin American Giant Observatory, the Latin American network of high-altitude sites devoted to gamma-ray bursts. Bolivia is a founding country of the collaboration, which began in 2005.
Read milestone 09 → Full index All experimentsFourteen programmes with their period, institutions and status — active, historical, discontinued and the one that was never built. Includes BASJE, SYS and the Brazil–Japan Collaboration.
See the experiments (in Spanish) →What the site offers a group wishing to install an experiment, and what the Institute produces in training and publications.
Altitude, available area, access, power, connectivity, accommodation and logistics. This is the page a foreign group consults before proposing a collaboration, and today it does not exist. ⚠
Between 1952 and 1994 the Laboratory produced some 600 original scientific contributions. The updated list, with DOIs where they exist, has yet to be compiled. ⚠
120 undergraduate and postgraduate theses between 1952 and 1994. The mountain trained a large share of Bolivia's practising physicists, and it still does. ⚠
A property that still fulfils the function for which it was created raises a question the candidacy must answer explicitly: how to protect it without freezing it. An active laboratory changes instruments, puts up some buildings and dismantles others. The compatibility between scientific use and the heritage protection regime is not an obstacle in the nomination dossier — it is one of its most interesting parts.
The Instituto de Investigaciones Físicas (Institute of Physics Research) welcomes proposals for scientific collaboration, for installing instruments and for joint work on the nomination dossier.
Get in touch (in Spanish)