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A cavity made in KEK’s Cavity Fabrication Facility

by Rika Takahashi

KEK's recently established Cavity Fabrication Facility is a one-stop shopping facility for fabricating superconducting radiofrequency cavities. The fully equipped facility provides a unique and valuable opportunity: a full sequence of R&D for cavity fabrication on one laboratory’s premises.

Around the World

From CERN Bulletin: Rencontres de Moriond 2012

At the biggest particle physics winter conference, the Rencontres de Moriond held in La Thuile in Italy from 3-17 March, scientists presented loads of new results, including some on the search for the Higgs boson and on new physics beyond the Standard Model. The CERN Bulletin covered some of these results in last week's edition.

Impact of a Higgs boson on supersymmetry | Uncertain signals from the Higgs boson | Straight to the Top | Direct and indirect searches make the whole picture | Searches for Dark Matter, SUSY and other exotic particles | Addressing symmetry breaking and mass hierarchy | Seeing less would be just as good | New physics further constrained by LHCb results

Director's Corner

GDE Executive Committee meets face to face

by Barry Barish

The Global Design Effort Executive Committee met face to face in Washington, DC, last month. One of the main goals was to agree on the detailed plan towards completing the Technical Design Report, including decisions about the level of detail that will be included in the actual report and how to ensure that the backup documentation will be readily available.

Image of the week

Wrestling under an X-ray beam

A beam of particles helps authenticate an early Vincent van Gogh painting

Image: Kröller-Müller Museum

DESY's synchrotron radiation source DORIS has helped settle a decades-old question of whether van Gogh painted the 1886 Still life with meadow flowers. Using macro scanning X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, scientists were able to analyse the canvas's layers of paint with greater detail than had been possible previously.

Earlier X-ray analyses had shown that a painter - suspected to be van Gogh - had painted a scene of two wrestlers on the canvas before painting the flower still life over it several months later. DESY's work revealed even more, in particular, the color palette the painter used for the two wrestlers and their relative state of dress. Both attributes helped authenticate the work as a van Gogh.

A beam of particles (figuratively) painted picture of greater detail.

Read the DESY press release

In the News

  • from Discovery News
    19 March 2012
    Success! LHC Sets New Energy Record

    Over the weekend, physicists and engineers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) nudged proton beam energies to a new record: 4 Tera-electron volts (TeV). This record comes shortly after CERN announced last month they’d be cranking up the juice through 2012.

  • from Science
    16 March 2012
    Key Neutrino Measurement Signals China’s Rise

    Racing to beat competitors around the world to make a key measurement, they worked through the 23 January holiday and surrounding festivities. “Those of us working on the data analysis didn’t take time off,” says Yifang Wang, co-spokesperson for the Daya Bay collaboration and director of the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Beijing. “We were determined to do this.”

  • from Scientific American
    16 March 2012
    Not So Fast: Independent Measurement Shows Neutrinos Don’t Exceed Speed of Light

    Albert may still be right. An attempt to repeat an experiment that showed a subatomic particle traveling faster than the speed of light suggests that the earlier result may have erred, and that Einstein’s famed special theory of relativity remains intact.

  • from symmetry breaking
    14 March 2012
    Scientists send encoded message through rock via neutrino beam

    Scientists recently proved possible a new way to converse when radio waves won’t do. For the first time, physicists and engineers have successfully transmitted a message using neutrinos.