The French-Spanish Laboratory for Astrophysics in Canarias (FSLAC), is a joint international research Laboratory between the French CNRS and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) that operates since January 2021.

This new structure builds on the collaboration that began in the 1980s with the decision to install the French THEMIS telescope in Tenerife. The scientific cooperation agreement providing for the creation of FSLAC was signed on March 15th, 2021. FSLAC is jointly supervised by the two organizations.

This unit is an “International Research Laboratory” (IRL) of CNRS, e.g. a long lasting joint research structure created outside of the French territory. IRLs exist to bring together teams of researchers, students, postdoctoral fellows, engineers, and technicians from the CNRS and foreign partner institutions. IRLs are international schemes in which research work is jointly conducted around a shared scientific focus. These structure, within an identified location, the significant and lasting presence of scientists from a limited number of French and foreign research institutions.

The IRL2009 FSLAC administrative location is at c/o IAC Via Lactea, ES38205 La Laguna, Island of Tenerife, Spain. The staff may work at 3 possible locations, either the Teide Observatory (Tenerife, for the Themis team), or the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (La Palma, for the high-energy team), or our base offices at La Laguna (Tenerife, everybody) located next to the IAC headquarters.

The base offices are located at Avenida Menceyes 93, in La Laguna, offering 7-8 work stations, and is also invited to the IAC premises ( both at headquarters and at the IACTEC building). The IRL by itself offers some computing facilities, a shared cloud storage and a mail service, over a 10Gb internet access provided by the RedIRIS academic network via the IAC (homologous to the French “Renater”). The IAC being a much larger institute of almost 500 persons offers the same type of shared services at a larger scale.

The main purposes of FSLAC are to strengthen and facilitate the scientific and technological French activities in the Canary Islands (Spain) and to strengthen and formalize a long lasting tradition of collaboration between IAC and CNRS.

These collaborations are concentrated in three instrumentation projects of the French and Spanish communities, and their associated scientific fields:

• 1. in the field of gamma-ray astronomy at very high energies around the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA, ESFRI roadmap 2016) facilities development in the Canary Islands, namely the CTA North Observatory in La Palma
• 2. in the field of solar physics, where both parties have been jointly engaged since many years in the building and exploitation of the French telescope THEMIS, located in Tenerife since 1994, and also the forthcoming next generation of solar telescopes, EST (ESFRI roadmap 2016)
• 3. in the field the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) observations with the development of the KISS spectrometer and the NIKA2 cameras to be installed on the QUIJOTE telescope at the Teide Observatory

FSLAC is currently structured in two teams, one involved in the development of the CTA northern observatory (team “Haute Energie”), and the other involved in the maintenance and exploitation of the THEMIS solar telescope (team “THEMIS”)

• The THEMIS team maintains, operates and makes available to the whole of the French, Spanish and European communities the platform ‘THEMIS Solar Telescope’, which is an astronomical telescope dedicated to the study of solar magnetism and solar magnetic instabilities. THEMIS is one of the four ~1 meter class solar telescopes that are world leaders in their respective communities.
• The high-energy team currently participates to the building of the platform “CTA northern array”, a gamma-ray Cherenkov observatory which, when completed, will become the foremost global observatory for very high-energy gamma-ray astronomy over the next decade and be-yond. The scientific potential of CTA is extremely broad: from understanding the role of relativistic cosmic particles to the search for dark matter.

Ramon Garcia Lopez, FSLAC director, high-energy astrophysicist
Bernard Gelly, FSLAC deputy-director, solar physicist
Richard Drouet, Optomechanics research engineer
Didier Laforgue, Software & command-control research engineer
Fabia Acero, high-energy astrophysicist
Etienne Pariat, solar physicist

• Switchbacks: Could Solar Jets Hold the Key? : Sorbonne Université press release on the publication of an article with FSLAC implication
  
• Publication of 'Le Grand Atlas du Soleil', with the participation of a FSLAC researcher.

CNRS explanatory sheets (pdf) about International Research Laboratories