New director at Cornell...
Maury Tigner, who two decades ago was the driving force behind the half-mile-circumference electron accelerator at Cornell, has been named next director of Cornell's Laboratory of Nuclear Studies (LNS). Tigner will succeed Karl Berkelman, who steps down on 30 June. LNS operates the Cornell Electron Storage Ring.
Tigner was professor of physics at Cornell from 1977 to 1994 and in his final year was named the first holder of the Hans A Bethe Chair in Physics, a post that a serious illness forced him to relinquish. In the intervening years, as professor emeritus, he has edited a handbook on accelerator physics and engineering (CERN Courier December 1999 p38), and with his wife has made long visits to Beijing as a visiting scientist at the Institute of High Energy Physics as well as a senior adviser to the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
...and new directors for DESY
The Administrative Council of the German Electron Synchrotron DESY in Hamburg has extended the size of the DESY directorate. The board of directors now has six members instead of five.
The new director is in charge of research with synchrotron radiation, which in the past years has developed to become a second important research field along with elementary particle physics.
Jochen R Schneider was nominated the new director of this field, a position that he assumed on 1 January.
The administrative
council also nominated Robert Klanner as DESY research director. He will be in charge of
elementary particle physics, which was the initial major research field of DESY. He succeeds
Albrecht Wagner, who becomes head of the DESY directorate (director-general).
The prestigious Wolf prize for physics will be shared this year by Raymond Davis of Pennsylvania and Masatoshi Koshiba of Tokyo.
"Their observations of the elusive neutrinos of astrophysical origin have opened a new window of opportunity for the study of astronomical objects, such as the Sun and exploding stars, and the study of fundamental properties of matter," the jury stated.
Davis pioneered solar neutrino measurements by the radiochemical method, while Koshiba led the design and construction of the versatile Kamiokande neutrino detectors in Japan. The $100 000 prizes will be presented at the Israeli Knesset on 21 May.
Dennis Skopik, former director of the Saskatchewan Accelerator Laboratory, Saskatoon, becomes deputy associate director of physics at the Jefferson Laboratory, Newport News, Virginia, where Larry Cardman is associate director for physics.
CERN physicist Emanuele Quercigh has been awarded the Gold Medal of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Comenius University, Bratislava, and the Slovak Academy of Sciences' Diorys Ilkovic Gold Honour Medal for Achievements in Physics. Quercigh plays a leading role in heavy-ion experiments at CERN, in which Slovak physicists have themselves made important contributions. In the search for new forms of nuclear matter, these studies have provided evidence for the substantially increased production of strange particles (up to 15 times as many omega-minus particles) in lead-lead collisions.
The 2nd workshop on Electronic Publishing - New Schemes for Electronic
Publishing in Physics will be held at CERN on 31 March. Further information is available from
Anita Olofsson at CERN, tel. +41 22 767 2431, e-mail "anita.olofsson@cern.ch". See also
"http://documents.cern.ch/AGE/fullAgenda.php3?ida=a99231#s5".
An International
Workshop on High Energy Photon Colliders will be held at DESY, Hamburg, on 14-17 June.The
event will cover physics opportunities at high-energy gamma-gamma and gamma-electron
collisions, and accelerator, interaction region (such as lasers and optical systems) and detector
issues. The chairmen for the meeting are R Heuer (University of Hamburg/DESY) and V Telnov
(Budker INP/DESY). For details, e-mail "gg2000@mail.desy.de". See also
"http://www.desy.de/~gg2000".
A workshop entitled CP Violation and Rare Processes:
Standard Model and Beyond will be held at DESY, Hamburg, on 26-29 September. It will cover
topics on CP violation in K, B and lepton sectors; rare decays and scattering processes; mass
matrices for quarks and leptons; standard model analyses; and effects from physics beyond the
standard model. The event will be organized by A Buras (TU-Munich). See
"http://www.desy.de/desy-th/workshop.00/index.html".
A Euro Summer School on Exotic
Beams (within the framework of High-Level Scientific Conferences of the EU) will take place on
31 August - 8 September in Leuven, Belgium. For more details, contact Mark Huyse, IKS,
Celestijnenlaan 200D, B-3001 Leuven, Belgium, tel. +32 16 327272, fax +32 16 327 985, e-mail
"mark.huyse@fys.kuleuven.ac.be".
CERN Courierwelcomes feedback
but reserves the right to edit letters. Please e-mail "cern.courier@cern.ch".
I was surprised, initially, by the almost total exclusion of experimentalists (except for Ernest Rutherford), but primarily for the exclusion of Micheal Faraday.
Faraday's experimental contributions in the areas of electromagnetic, optical and electrochemical phenomena were of the highest order, but even more important was his epoch-making concept of fields.
Much, if not most, of 19th- and 20th-century physics was based on this concept (as were the contributions of seven physicists in the list).
Thus I must
take exception to Physics World'srating.
Tom Ypsilantis, Bologna.
Physics World
replies:
Michael Faraday just missed the Top 10, finishing in joint 11th place with Ludwig
Boltzmann and Max Planck. Like Dr Ypsilantis I was surprised by the lack of experimenters in the
Top 10. Indeed, I told the BBC Web site: "Einstein and Newton were always going to be one and
two, but what was surprising about the Top 10 was that there were seven out-and-out
theorists."
The Physics Worldarticle from which the Top 10 was taken (December 1999
pp7-13) also reveals that Einstein's top three physicists were Newton (2nd in the Physics World
poll), Faraday and Maxwell (3rd).
Peter Rodgers, editor, Physics World.
Adding a few more drift chambers, the "muon pattern would give a window on the energy and composition of the primary cosmic-ray particles", "boosting studies...in the knee region (near 1015 eV)".
In high-energy cosmic-ray events, three key parameters are unknown: the primary energy, the primary composition and the height of the initial interaction in the atmosphere. Therefore, simultaneous measurements of several distinct physical quantities are needed to disentangle these parameters.
The cosmic-ray community has made remarkable progress in this direction, so that today's main obstacle is not the lack of high-quality data but the lack of reliable simulations of cosmic-ray interactions with the atmosphere.
LEP detectors would face the same problem and would be limited to the measurement of only the muon component of cosmic air showers.
An experiment in the Baksan Valley in the Russian Caucasus has been
taking cosmic-ray muon data for some eight years under similar conditions. Seven events have
more than 3500 muons each - and no anomalies are claimed!
Friedrich Dydak, CERN.
A special event at the Jefferson Laboratory, Newport News, Virginia, celebrated the special contributions to physics in general, and the success of the laboratory in particular, of eminent theorist and Chief Jefferson Scientist Nathan Isgur (left) and Injector Group Head Charles Sinclair (right).
Louis Michel 1923-99
Eminent French theorist Louis Michel died in December. Born in Roanne, France, he studied at the Ecole Polytechnique before carrying out research at Manchester, in the fledgling CERN Theory Group at Copenhagen and at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, before returning to France, where he held posts at Lille, Paris, the Ecole Polytechnique, and finally the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques at Bures-sur-Yvette.
His name will always be linked with his first major research success: the description of the decay spectrum of a muon into an electron and two neutrinos using a single "Michel parameter". Corollary work on lepton polarization was soon brought to the fore with the discovery of parity violation in lepton decays. In the same period, he established for strong interaction physics the conservation of isotopic parity (later known as G-parity). Extensions of his muon work subsequently bore additional fruit with the discovery of the tau lepton in 1975.
Other landmarks of Michel's work include his framework for handling the analysis of polarized particles and the 1959 Bargmann-Michel-Telegdi equation describing relativistic spin precession in an electromagnetic field.
In the 1960s his counsel in the underlying theory of relativistic symmetries was much sought after. Later, his mastery of modern mathematics allowed him to make valuable contributions to studies of internal symmetries and spontaneous symmetry breaking, both in elementary particles and condensed matter physics. Most recently, he developed mathematical tools to describe crystals and quasi-crystals.
He played a major role in the rebuilding of postwar French theoretical physics, with the creation of the Ecole Polytechnique theory centre, and he served on many committees, including a term as president of the French Physical Society and almost 20 years with various CNRS boards, including the scientific council.
Michel was a member of key international scientific collaborations, and his numerous students in turn went on to fulfil major roles. His understanding of physics and his mastery of mathematics were much in demand for keynote talks at international meetings.
A member of the French Academy of Sciences, Officer of the Legion of Honour and
Commander of the Order of Merit, abroad he was a member of the Academy of Catalonia (Spain),
was awarded the Wigner Medal, and delivered the Leigh Page Prize lectures at Yale. Louis Michel
was a French physicist who played on an international stage.
Raymond Stora.
Andrej Amatuni 1928-99
On 10 October, Andrej Amatuni, full member of the Armenian National Academy of Sciences, professor and principal researcher of the Yerevan Physics Institute, died of a heart attack on a plane en route to a conference in Japan.
Amatuni was born in Leningrad and received his higher education from Yerevan State University. He continued his studies at Moscow Lomonosov State University. Working at the Yerevan Physics Institute from 1956, in 1958 he joined a group headed by academician Artem Alikhanian, working on the Yerevan 6 GeV electron synchrotron, brought into operation in 1967, and at the time one of the world largest machines of its kind. In 1965 he was a visiting scientist at CERN.
Amatuni's interests went on to span a variety of elementary particle physics, but finally he returned to the problems of charged particle acceleration and to the development of non-conventional acceleration schemes. In his last years he headed a group that solved some important problems of charged particle interactions with plasma.
Besides being a brilliant physicist, Amatuni was an outstanding research organizer. from 1965 to 1977 he served as a first deputy to the director of Yerevan Physics Institute and from 1973 to 1991 he was the director of this, the largest scientific centre in Armenia.
His contributions to science were recognized by scientific communities worldwide. He was awarded the title of Honoured Scientist of Armenia and received many decorations from the USSR, Armenia and Russia.
Andrej Amatuni was a highly intellectual, cultured, sympathetic, accessible and vital personality. His absence will be strongly felt, not only by those at his home institute, but also by his numerous friends and colleagues over the world.