The "Institut de Planetologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble" hosts about 50 scientific staff members, 30 engineers and technicians and 30 students and visitors. It is funded by the University Grenoble Alpes and the CNRS. The "plasma and high-energy astrophysics'' (sherpas) group is one of the 5 major groups of research of IPAG. It is led by Prof. G. Henri and, apart himself, it consists of 8 academics whom research activities are divided between theory, modeling and observations. The most important research topics developed in the team are: the high-energy emission processes, the accretion-ejection processes and the transport and instability phenomena in magnetised plasma. These topics are mainly developed in the context of black hole environments (AGNS and BHB) but part of them have been also applied to YSO (e.g. jets) or gamma-ray burst (e.g. cosmic rays production). J. Ferreira has strong expertise on MHD processes. He was involved in the JETSET Marie Curie RTN that very successfully built an interdisciplinary community centered on rigorous and novel approaches to plasma jet studies. P.O. Petrucci and G. Henri have strong expertise in the modeling of jet emission, high energy processes in black hole environment and high energy observations. They belong to the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS) and Cerencov Telescope Array (CTA) consortium.
The "Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planetologie" is the largest french institute in astrophysics and covers most fields of astronomy and planetary sciences. It hosts 300 persons including about 120 permanent researchers, 80 engineers and technicians, and 100 Postdocs, PhD students and visitors. Research at IRAP is supported by CNRS, the university and by CNES. IRAP is strongly involved in academic activity: a large fraction of people at IRAP has teaching duties at the university, and IRAP staff manages 2 masters in astrophysics at UPS. IRAP keeps close ties with CNES and ESA on the design of space based instruments. As examples of relevance to the science of the CHAOS project, IRAP has a prime participation in high-energy projects such as INTEGRAL (PI of the SPI instrument), XMM (contribution to the XMM-Survey Science centre), or HESS (calibrations). It is also strongly involved in the development of new facilities (SVOM, CTA, IXO/ATHENA...). This empirical work is also combined with theory, numerical simulation and modeling. This is precisely the role of J. Malzac and R. Belmont. They have a strong expertise in high-energy radiation, particle acceleration and MHD processes. They also have a long and successful history of developing state-of-the-art numerical simulation codes and lead the modeling activity in high-energy astrophysics at IRAP.
The Service d’Astrophysique at the Commisariat à l’énergie atomique (CEA) in Saclay is a world-class research institute. AIM (Astrophysique, Instrumentation, Modélisation Paris-Saclay) gathers 60 researchers, 40 engineers, and 60 PhD and postdocs. The AIM teams gather expertise on data analyses at all wavelengths, in algorithmic and signal processing. They benefit from the instrumental knowledge drawn from their participation to the construction and testing of large array of ground-based and space-borne telescopes. The laboratory has a long record of participation to successful space missions. S. Corbel and J. Rodriguez are members of the « High-Energy Cosmic Phenomena » laboratory, (a team of 13 astrophysicists and 6 students) that is actively studying the accretion and ejection phenomena around black holes and neutron stars, and the remnants of supernova explosions. This group has a long history in high-energy astrophysics, has discovered several new types of high-energy objects, and is part of the main, present or future, international X-ray and gamma-ray instruments. It has contributed to the design and building of the XMM and INTEGRAL telescopes of the European Space Agency, to the NASA Fermi telescope, and to the ground-based TeV telescope HESS. The team has long promoted multi-wavelength campaigns to discover new facets of the high-energy sources.