Rika Takahashi | 25 March 2010From the end of March to the beginning of April it is one of the most festive times of the year in Japan, when the cherry blossom trees all over Japan come in to bloom for about ten days and people hold outdoor parties to view and enjoy them. The cherry blossoms are also symbols for farewells and welcomes, because April is the beginning of another school year and a new fiscal year for businesses in Japan. On 23 March, Shuichi Noguchi, one of the leading superconducting radio frequency specialists of KEK, gave his retirement lecture entitled 'Thinking back on my life as a scientist — my life at KEK and the superconducting RF cavity.'
Category: Around the World | Tagged: Japan, KEK
Rika Takahashi | 11 March 2010The word quantum beam, or Ryo-shi beam in Japanese, defined as high-quality beams produced with accelerated leptons or hadrons applying quantum mechanics, isn't really an academic word, but rather a key word for advanced technology. But it is gradually getting its recognition in Japan as a technology that will achieve breakthroughs in many fields, such as new materials developments, nanofabrication, or medical applications.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: Japan, outreach
4 March 2010With the quiet, deft manner of a jeweler showing his wares, physicist Cai Xiao opened a black box that, in a James Bond movie, might hold a stash of diamonds. This one held something every bit as precious. Inside lay a small, green circuit board topped with three shining silver strips: a silicon detector.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: China, Fermilab, IHEP, SiDet
Barbara Warmbein | 25 February 2010Sometimes detector projects that are still at a planning stage can tell detector projects that are already taking data what hardware to use. This is certainly the case when the R&D project has been using, trying and testing a technology that the 'old hand' is considering for its upgrade: a relatively new type of sensor called Silicon Photo Multiplier, or SiPM, developed in Russia. A meeting brought experts from all areas that use SiPMs together at DESY in Hamburg, Germany, for two days earlier this week.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: CALICE, DESY, HCal, Silicon Photo Multiplier, SiPM
11 February 2010The particle physics community is accustomed to global collaboration, and here at KEK, one of those collaborations has just begun on a core technology for the International Linear Collider (ILC), the superconducting accelerating system.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: KEK, S1-global
Rika Takahashi | 4 February 2010Even though the international collaboration in physics research has a long history, Europe-Asia cooperation remains quite weak, compared to the collaboration between Europe and Americas or Asia and Americas. To strengthen the cooperation in physics research between European and Asian countries, the first Asia-Europe Physics Summit, or ASEPS, will be held 24 to 26 March in Tsukuba, Japan.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: ASEPS, Asia, Europe
Barbara Warmbein | 28 January 2010Not all people who have the same goals use the same means to achieve them — just think of the two proposed electron-positron colliders ILC and CLIC. And not all people who use the same means also pursue the same goals. A workshop held in January at CERN in Geneva brought the two linear colliders and many of the world's light sources and B-factories together to discuss one common problem: how to make your beam as small and intense as possible to either produce more particle collisions or produce more brilliant light for your light source users, or in short: how to design or operate low-emittance rings.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: beam emittance, low emittance, low emittance ring
21 January 2010MEDFORD, NY — Today, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Advanced Energy Systems, Inc. of Medford, N.Y. (AES) celebrated the opening of a new hi-tech facility at the AES site that will produce crucial components used in particle accelerators around the world. Brookhaven Science Associates, which manages Brookhaven Lab for DOE, purchased equipment worth approximately $2 million as its contribution to the facility. AES invested in the infrastructure improvements it needed to expand its operations, assisted by a $200,000 grant from the Empire State Development Corporation.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: AES, Brookhaven
14 January 2010Last month the KEK facility in Japan hosted the ninth Project Meeting for the Accelerator Test Facility 2, or ATF2, and a few SLAC staff traveled overseas to participate. The group reviewed progress made in 2009, plans for 2010, and the possibility of extended studies beyond the primary ATF2 goals in 2011, 2012 and beyond. A total of 44 collaborators, including 28 from outside Japan, discussed the technical progress of the ATF2, which began commissioning in December of 2008. The program also covered the future of the project in the face of some major cuts to science funding bodies by the Japanese government.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: ATF2, Japan, KEK
7 January 2010A lively debate across age groups and cultures marked the Third Linear Collider Physics School, held in Ambleside, UK, in August. For the first time, designated discussion periods were set aside for up–and–coming scientists to share their work and opinions on the future of accelerator–based particle physics with international experts. The week–long event held at the Ambleside campus of the University of Cumbria in England expanded on the technical and physics issues of past schools with three discussion topics: the "big questions" in the field: electroweak, Higgs physics and accelerator physics; quantum chromodynamics, exotics and cosmology. The school was organised by Andre Sopczak of Lancaster University together with his colleagues Chris Bowdery and Jonathan Gratus.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: linear collider physics school, school
