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
24 June 2010For the first time, FLASH produced laser light with a wavelength of 4.45 nanometres; thus, DESY's free-electron laser for soft X-ray light considerably beat its previous record of 6.5 nanometres. At the same time, the peak intensity of single light pulses nearly doubled, with 0.3 millijoule. Prior to this, there was a five-month machine upgrade, above all with a significant improvement of the superconducting linear accelerator and the installation of a seeding experiment together with the University of Hamburg.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: DESY, FLASH, free-electron laser
17 June 2010The University of Hamburg and DESY have won a shared Alexander von Humboldt professorship for the development of accelerators and particle physics. The renowned award goes to Professor Brian Foster, currently head of Particle Physics at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research announced today. Assuming successful conclusions to negotiations, Foster will receive up to 5 million Euros over a period of five years to fund research into the development and realisation of acceleration technologies for particle physics and continued analysis of data from DESY's flagship accelerator, HERA.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: award, DESY, Europe, Germany, Hamburg