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
Barbara Warmbein | 10 June 2010I don't usually start stories for ILC NewsLine with the word 'I'. This time I have to make an exception, because for a change I was not merely a spectator and communicator of science, but a facilitator (of sorts). One of the actors in something both very mundane and very exciting: transporting scientific equipment from one lab to another. On Sunday 30 May, the EUDET beam telescope was brought from DESY to CERN, and I was one of its (three) drivers.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: DESY, EUDET, EUDET telescope
3 June 2010Cherrill Spencer was on hand May 4 to see the Expanding Your Horizons Network receive the 2010 National Science Board's Public Service Award. Spencer, a magnet engineer at SLAC, has played a variety of leadership roles with the EYH Network for the past 29 years. This award was presented at a banquet at the State Department in Washington, DC. Expanding Your Horizons Network is a non-profit organization that runs conferences for middle and high school girls. The workshops feature women scientists and engineers, who lead hands-on demonstrations to pique young girls' interest in math, science and engineering.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: Expanding Your Horizons Network, women in science
Min Zhang | 27 May 2010The International Conferences on Calorimetry in High Energy Physics (also known as the Calor Conference series, started in October 1990 at Fermilab) address all aspects of calorimetric particle detection and measurement, with emphasis on high-energy physics experiments. This year, the conference of Calor 2010, the fourteenth in this series, was held in the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP), Beijing, China from 10 to 14 May 2010.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: Beijing, Calor 2010, China, IHEP, International Conferences on Calorimetry in High Energy Physics
Rika Takahashi | 20 May 2010On 17 March, the Science Council of Japan, a special organisation of scientists under the jurisdiction of the Prime Minister for the purpose of promoting science and having it reflected into national policy, released a recommendation on the major research programmes heading in the mid-term-about ten years, and issued a "Master Plan" (in Japanese) where they listed the top large-scale facilities and programmes. The list covers all fields from human and social science to biotechnology, energy and earth science, and of course, physics and engineering. The Council has closely examined a total of 285 big-science proposed projects with more than ten billion yen construction budget and big research programmes with more than one billion yen operational budget, and finally chose 43 of them as Japan's priority. Among those, nine projects listed KEK as one of their implementing agencies, including the upgrade of the KEKB accelerator, J-PARC, next-generation light source projects and the International Linear Collider.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: Japan, Science Council of Japan
13 May 2010Researchers at SLAC and other institutions are creating a sort of pest control for particle beams: squashing the clouds of electrons that gather in accelerators and disrupt experiments.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: electron cloud, SLAC
