Thomas Zoufal (DESY) | 2 June 2011Brian Foster, recently awarded the Humboldt professorship by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, has begun work in Germany this week. He hopes to advance particle physics by exploring new methods of acceleration, analysing unique physics data and of course playing his violin.
Category: Feature | Tagged: DESY, Germany, Humboldt Professorship, University of Hamburg
26 May 2011With the LHC up and running, some might imagine physicists just waiting for a Higgs boson to pop up in one of the four experiments, before publishing a paper and moving on to solve science’s next Big Mystery. However this picture is very far from the reality of experimental particle physics today, where results are based on statistics, statistics and yet more statistics.
Category: Feature | Tagged: discoveries, Higgs boson, LHC, particle physics
Rika Takahashi | 26 May 2011Shin-ichi Kurokawa is a mover and shaker in the world of accelerator physics, both excelling in science and effectively bringing the community together to form strong, productive relationships. The European Physical Society has recognized Kurokawa's accomplishments, awarding him the Rolf Widerøe Prize.
Category: Feature | Tagged: accelerator prize, EPS, KEK, Rolf Widerøe Prize
Perrine Royole-Degieux | 19 May 2011Maurice Bourquin, emeritus professor at the University of Geneva and former president of the CERN Council, is one of the pioneer scientists from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer Experiment collaboration. Just after the AMS-02 detector was launched, he answered ILC NewsLine’s questions about AMS history, AMS challenges, and the interplay between collider and space experiments.
Category: Feature | Tagged: AMS, antimatter, astroparticle, CERN, dark matter, ISS, space
Leah Hesla | 12 May 2011The Digital Hadron Calorimeter offers high-resolution images of particle showers. With the help of hundreds of thousands of readout pads, tiny pieces of each charged particle’s path within hadronic showers are recorded. The DHCAL brings scientists not only detailed images, but now also complete ones, having expanded its potential in recent months by tens of thousands of additional readout channels.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CALICE, DHCAL
5 May 2011One hundred years ago, on 8 April 1911, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and his staff at the Leiden Cryogenic Laboratory were the first to observe superconductivity. In a frozen mercury wire, contained in seven U-shaped capillaries in series, electrical resistance suddenly seemed to vanish at 4.16 K.
Category: Feature | Tagged: superconductivity
5 May 2011These are the electrifying moments to make a scientist’s life worth living: take up work at a laboratory, carry out measurement series and, suddenly, see absolutely unexpected results – a tiny detail which is wrong. The measurements are repeated and tested for possible mistakes – but the unexpected proves true.
Category: Feature | Tagged: superconductivity
28 April 2011Geneva, 22 April 2011. Around midnight this night CERN’s Large Hadron Collider set a new world record for beam intensity at a hadron collider when it collided beams with a luminosity of 4.67 × 1032 cm-2s-1. This exceeds the previous world record of 4.024 × 1032 cm-2s-1, which was set by the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s Tevatron collider in 2010, and marks an important milestone in LHC commissioning. Read the CERN press release.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CERN, LHC
