Barbara Warmbein | 30 September 2010A woman kneels, almost devoutly, in front of a piece of beam pipe. One man is lying flat on his belly, squinting along the underside of a long step illuminated by blue warning lights. Another sits cross-legged opposite a barrel wheel of a particle detector and studies its forms. A new meditation class for particle physicists? No - just the world’s first global particle physics photo walk.
Category: Feature | Tagged: photography, photowalk
Rika Takahashi | 30 September 2010On 27 September, the Japan's local winners of the first Global Particle Photo Walk were announced. This Photowalk was held at five particle physics laboratories in the world on 7 August (see Feature Story this week). The winning photo taken by Yuki Hayashi features scientists working at the Accelerator Test Facility (ATF) at KEK. But they are not Japanese scientists. They are three of the nine French scientists and engineers who were visiting the ATF from the end of July to install and test their four-mirror optical cavity.
Category: Feature | Tagged: ATF, Japan, photography, photowalk
23 September 2010After almost six months of operation, experiments at the LHC are starting to see signs of potentially new and interesting effects. In results announced by the CMS collaboration today, correlations have been observed between particles produced in 7 TeV proton-proton collisions.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CERN, LHC
16 September 2010An important milestone was reached on the way to the European XFEL superconducting linear accelerator: the start of the industrial production of the superconducting accelerator structures. Yesterday and today, kick-off workshops took place to coordinate the future collaboration of DESY with two industrial firms. The superconducting accelerator structures are a joint contribution of DESY and INFN Milano, coordinated by DESY.
Category: Feature | Tagged: DESY, Europe, XFEL
Barbara Warmbein | 9 September 2010In a hall for test beam experiments at CERN, next to the CLOUD climate experiment and an irradiation facility, sits a detector prototype that is in many ways a first. It's the first ever hadronic sandwich calorimeter (HCal) prototype made of tungsten. It's the first prototype for a detector for the Compact Linear Collider Study CLIC, developed by the linear collider detector R&D group (LCD group) at CERN. And it's the first piece of hardware that results directly from the cooperation between CLIC and ILC detector study groups. Now its makers are keen to see first particle showers in their detector.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CALICE, CERN, CLIC, detector R&D, hadronic calorimeter, HCal, tungsten calorimeter
Barbara Warmbein | 19 August 2010This week marks the beginning of a small series in ILC NewsLine on future projects in particle physics beyond the linear collider. Today's Director's Corner summarises the talks on future projects from the recent International conference on High Energy Physics. This article gives a small inventory of ideas that are being discussed. Selected projects will then be presented in more detail in future issues, to highlight new accelerator concepts, technology and challenges for the possible future projects. They fall into several different categories. Most immediate are projects that in some way build on or complement the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Another category are projects that deal with neutrino or flavour physics. And there are ion colliders and projects that look at new ways of acceleration to make accelerators shorter and thus less costly. None of them have officially been accepted, and like all plans for the future these concepts are evolving. They may never be built, or be built in different ways described here
Category: Feature | Tagged: future accelerators
12 August 2010Every day, KEK welcomes scientists and students from around the world. Some of them come here as collaborators who work on the international projects and programmes using cutting-edge facilities at KEK. Some visit as users who wish to use the beamlines at the Photon Factory to look into the smallest worlds. Many graduate students will write up their hard work here into their thesis. Many of them stay only days or weeks, but some of them stay longer to concentrate on the R&D for months or even years, like Dr. Philip Bambade from LAL in Orsay, France.
Category: Feature | Tagged: ATF, ATF2, Japan, KEK
Perrine Royole-Degieux | 5 August 2010How do you gather 2,000 Parisians and tourists in the middle of summer to talk about particle physics during a whole night? Probably following this recipe: find a magic venue, invite fascinating speakers and well-known artists, explore the frontier between science and cinema and advertise, advertise, advertise. Well, at least this is how the "Nuit des particules" – Particle Night – organised on 27 July at the Grand Rex theatre in Paris by the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP2010) this year happened to be a success.
Category: Feature | Tagged: France, ICHEP, outreach, Paris, public event, public lecture
29 July 2010Batavia, Ill.—New constraints on the elusive Higgs particle are more stringent than ever before. Scientists of the CDF and DZero collider experiments at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermilab revealed their latest Higgs search results today (July 26) at the International Conference on High Energy Physics, held in Paris from July 22-28. Their results rule out a significant fraction of the allowed mass range established by earlier experiments.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CDS, DZero, exclusion plot, Fermilab, Higgs, Higgs boson, Higgs mass, Tevatron
29 July 2010Geneva, 26 July 2010. First results from the LHC at CERN1 are being revealed at ICHEP, the world’s largest international conference on particle physics, which has attracted more than 1000 participants to its venue in Paris. The spokespersons of the four major experiments at the LHC – ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb – are today presenting measurements from the first three months of successful LHC operation at 3.5 TeV per beam, an energy three and a half times higher than previously achieved at a particle accelerator.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CERN, LHC
