Barbara Warmbein | 12 June 2008Particle physicists have the reputation that they need to smash things up in order to find out what they are about. Sometimes accelerator physicists get to smash stuff up, too: a group of engineers and technicians recently crash-tested a full cryomodule. They wanted to find out what the 12-metre piece of kit would look like if somebody happened to use the beam pipe as a stepladder, drive a tunnel vehicle into a flange or decide to rip out a vacuum pump.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: cryomodule, DESY, FLASH, vacuum crash test, XFEL
5 June 2008Even if you don't want to step through new control room's swish sliding doors, you can have a look inside DESY's new feature because of its doors made of glass: it is a medium-sized room with some technical interior and an ILC colour scheme. There are two computer working stations, each with four monitors and a small conference table; on a big screen you see the pictures from three webcams; and three clocks hang on the wall, showing the local times of DESY/CERN in Hamburg/Geneva, Fermilab near Chicago and KEK near Tokyo.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: CALICE, control room, DESY
29 May 2008The University of Chicago announced today that it has received a $5 million gift to be directed toward the development of future programs in particle physics.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: funding, UIC, United States
22 May 2008To teach 35 eighth-graders about particle physics, Batavia Rotolo Middle School teachers Macy Felter and Elizabeth Selander had them study the ILC, the proposed next-generation particle accelerator.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: Fermilab, outreach, United States
Rika Takahashi | 15 May 2008Accelerators have featured in some movies, Terminator 3, for example. But people outside of the physics world did not notice much. In this summer, cult director Takashi Miike will make the accelerator quite visible in his newest film "Kamisama no Puzzle" (God's Puzzle). Miike, who allegedly influenced Quentin Tarantino, is best known for his grotesque horror films including Ichi the Killer, Audition, Gozu, and One Missed Call. This time, fortunately, it is not his usual line; the movie is a sci-fi romantic comedy based on a prize-winning, bestselling novel by Shinji Kimoto. The story is about twin brothers, one a physics student and the other an aimless self-proclaimed rock musician. The latter agrees to attend physics class for his brother and is obliged to team up with a 17-year-old girl genius to unlock the secrets of the universe and to create one of their own, using an accelerator.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: Japan
Barbara Warmbein | 8 May 2008Theorists and experimentalists aren't always of the same opinion. There is one thing on which opinions aren't polarised though, and that is polarisation. Polarisation is a special characteristic of a particle bunch – a sort of measure of the particles’ combined spin – that, when studied in the right sort of detector at the ILC, is supposed to give clues and answers on phenomena like the Higgs, supersymmetry or searches for new physics and extra dimensions. To study the collisions, and also to understand polarisation better, a few groups of a total of about 30 people around the world are designing and building polarimeters that measure the degree of polsarisation of the particles before and after collisions. They have just had their first 'collaboration' meeting at DESY in Zeuthen, near Berlin, Germany.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: beam delivery system, DESY, Germany, polarimeter, polarisation, polarised electron beam, polarised positron beam
24 April 2008In Japan, several attempts are being made to bring accelerator science, such as the open house at KEK, a summer school for high school students, lectures in high schools and middle schools, science cafés, and so on. Among them, there is also the "Accelerator's Night" series at a bar (read more). The latest one was held on 14 April and called "Accelerator Ladies' Night", produced by members of the ILC fan-club in a bar in Tokyo near Shin-Okubo station, an area famous for its Korean-style barbecue restaurants.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: Japan, outreach
Barbara Warmbein | 10 April 2008When your day job means measuring the F2 structure function of the proton or hunting for the Higgs boson, you don't usually stop and wonder how exactly the ingredients of your events reached their collision point. Some 30 junior researchers have just learnt to do just this: at the recent 'Terascale Accelerator School', the first of its kind organised in Germany and a project of the Helmholtz Alliance, physics students turned into nuts-and-bolts accelerator experts for a week.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: DESY, German Helmholtz Alliance, Germany, school, terascale accelerator school
3 April 2008The latest issue of symmetry launches the next phase of the magazine's development. Our readers now use the magazine in different ways, and we are reaching a much larger audience. While readers are outspoken in wanting to keep the print magazine, many of them are now more comfortable reading online.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: SLAC, symmetry magazine
