Newsline

Image of the week

Large-scale powering scheme has scientists’ pulses racing

Images: IPNL

For the first time, a large-scale calorimeter prototype for the ILC, fully equipped with embedded power-pulsed electronics, successfully passed a test beam at CERN a few weeks ago. A prototype of more than one cubic metre in size of CALICE’s Semi-Digital Hadronic Calorimeter successfully recorded and tracked 1 million particles from CERN’s SPS accelerator beam (muons and pions). Thanks to power pulsing, the detector front-end electronics was periodically disabled and enabled, following the beam cycle. Read more and view more photos about the test beam.

Research Director's Report

Marking our progress – Detailed Baseline Design report

by Sakue Yamada

During ACFA KILC12 workshop in Daegu last month ILC, the International Detector Advisory Group gave useful insight and recommendations to the Detailed Baseline Design report working group, paving the way to the report completion by the end of 2012.

Director's Corner

Jean Trân Thanh Vân receives Tate medal

by Barry Barish

Today I pay tribute to a very special Vietnamese physicist, Jean Trân Thanh Vân, who has been awarded the 2011 Tate Medal. No field of physics is more international than particle physics and Trân epitomises that spirit. He has dedicated much of his professional life to creating ways to bring physicists together from around the globe, and especially his initiatives to bring Vietnam into the global world of physics.

Video of the week

The potential of superconducting niobium cavities

Video: Fermilab

There are more than 30,000 particle accelerators in operation around the world. At Fermilab, US, scientists are collaborating with other laboratories and industry to optimise the manufacturing processes for a new type of powerful accelerator that uses superconducting niobium cavities.

In the News

  • from INFN
    15 May 2012

    An INFN research project on neutrinos has made it possible to observe for the first time the presence of chains of marine vortices in the Mediterranean at depths of more than 3000 meters, large water structures of diameters of approximately 10 km, moving slowly at speeds of approximately 3 centimeters per second.

  • from CERN Bulletin
    14 May 2012

    Although discovering new particles is increasingly looking like a routine exercise for the LHC experiments (see previous features), it is far from being an obvious performance, particularly when the mass of the particles is high. Created in the high-energy proton-proton collisions produced by the LHC, these new excited states of the Λb particle have been found to have a mass of, respectively, 5912 MeV/c2 and 5920 MeV/c2. In other words, they are over five times heavier than the proton or the neutron.

  • from CERN
    14 May 2012

    Space, time and gravity are under the cultural spotlight at CERN this month with the arrival of Gilles Jobin, the laboratory’s first choreographer in residence and winner of the Collide@CERN Geneva prize, which is supported by the Canton and City of Geneva. Jobin is an internationally renowned Swiss choreographer with a company in Geneva

  • from bulletins electroniques
    11 May 2012

    … L’intérieur d’Iwate pourrait voir également l’installation d’un accélérateur de particules (l’International Linear Collider, successeur du LHC [2] du CERN [3]) …