2 September 2010About 90 students from all parts of Japan gathered at the Summer Challenge programme held at KEK, Tsukuba from 21 to 29 August 2010. Starting in 2007, this programme intended for junior students who are interested in high-energy physics was the fourth in the series this year.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: KEK, Summer Challenge programme
Min Zhang | 2 September 2010The European X-ray Free Electron Laser (European XFEL) and the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) are two important international cooperative science facilities mainly led by Germany. China has participated in the R&D of some detectors, low-temperature systems, high-performance undulators, superconducting material and special material for these projects. On 29 August 2008, the project "Basic Research on the FEL and FAIR" supported by China's national programme for key basic research and development (officially called 973 programme) started. The project is coordinated by the Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Science (IHEP), and about ten different research institutes, universities and corporations in China participate in this project, including the Institute of Modern Physics, Peking University, Tsinghua University, Orient Tantalum Industry Corp. (OTIC), etc.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: China, FAIR, IHEP, XFEL
Rika Takahashi | 26 August 2010Vietnam and Japan have been nurturing cooperative relationship in many fields for many years. For the field of science and technology, both governments signed the Japan-Vietnam Science and Technology Co-operation Agreement to promote and deepen the co-operation in science and technology in 2006. Following year, Shinzo Abe, then Prime minister of Japan, proposed at the East Asia Summit (EAS) to launch a youth exchange initiative totaling 35 billion Yen over five years including the invitation to 6,000 young people from the member countries of ASEAN and EAS to Japan, which was accepted with great welcome. Now, these invitations are bringing many Vietnamese scientists to KEK.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: Asia, EAS, East Asia Summit, Japan, Vietnam
Leah Hesla | 26 August 2010Achieving resonance in a scientific collaboration is no small feat, but scientists at Fermilab, DESY and KEK have come together to do exactly that: They've improved the mechanism that keeps superconducting radio frequency cavities in tune.Members of Fermilab's Technical Division and DESY staff, with financial assistance from KEK, recently built four new tuning machines that set SRF cavities to the correct frequency and alignment. More highly automated than their predecessors, the machines save time and labor and ensure greater consistency in RF cavity quality. They work by squeezing or stretching individual cells in a nine-cell cavity and allowing all of them to perform identically and impart the same acceleration to the beam.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: cavity, DESY, Fermilab, KEK, SRF technology, tuning machine
Leah Hesla | 12 August 2010Last May, in only two weeks' time, a team of Accelerator Division Instrumentation Department employees installed, powered, debugged and started up a brand new, home-made beam position monitoring system at KEK's Accelerator Test Facility. It worked flawlessly.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: Fermilab, KEK
Leah Hesla | 5 August 2010Electrician Stan Kramer spent the better part of a recession-hit 2009 unemployed. Then, last March, he received the call from Arlington Electric that he was needed for a newly created job at Fermilab. Fermilab hired Arlington to do electrical work at the New Muon Laboratory with funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: Fermilab, New Muon Laboratory, NML, Recovery Act, United States
Min Zhang | 22 July 2010A 1.3-Gigahertz low-loss type large-grain nine-cell superconducting cavity called IHEP-01 produced at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Beijing, China, achieved an accelerating gradient of 20 Megavolts per metre in its first vertical test at KEK on 1 July. This may not be the design gradient yet, but it marks an important progress on the research and development of superconducting radio frequency (SRF) technology in China.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: 1.3 GHz, Beijing, cavity gradient, China, IHEP, IHEP-01, nine-cell cavity, SRF technology
Barbara Warmbein | 15 July 2010Some ideas are so good that you have to export them when you move from one country to the other. This is especially the case in a global project like the ILC, where three regions and people from all over the place work together to make sure that whatever the LHC will find, the next generation of particle accelerators can study in detail. So when theorist Gudrid Moortgat-Pick moved from Durham, UK, to Hamburg, Germany, she took the concept of the interdisciplinary linear collider forum with her to create it in Germany. The first meeting of the new working group took place at DESY in June.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: DESY, German Helmholtz Alliance, German linear collider forum, Germany
8 July 2010Picture this: For the first time, amateur photographers around the world collide with the past, present and future of particle physics.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: photography, photowalk
Barbara Warmbein | 1 July 2010Textbooks were being rewritten during last week’s Physics at LHC conference. “I was sitting in the session, listening to the ALICE talk by Andrea Dainese from Padova on Wednesday morning, and suddenly I knew: I could replace all the textbook bubble-chamber pictures from the sixties in my lectures,” said DESY’s Thomas Naumann, a member of the ATLAS collaboration.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: booklet, LHC, particle data booklet, PDG
