At the end of August nearly 100 physicists met in Ambleside in England’s beautiful Lake District for the Photon 2000 conference organized by Lancaster University. Held roughly every two years, this conference concentrates on theoretical and experimental advances in the understanding of the high-energy behaviour of the photon, particularly the way it interacts with quarks – the production of matter from light.
In the first talk, Maria Krawzyck pointed out that this year is the 100th anniversary of Planck’s quantization of electromagnetic phenomena, which led to the concept of the photon.
The large volume of data coming from CERN’s LEP electron-positron collider in the last few years provides a unique tool to study the collisions of high-energy photons, and all four LEP experiments presented exciting new results in this field.
These results are complemented by the study of photons in their collisions with protons in data coming from the two experiments at the HERA electron-proton collider at DESY, and the very high volumes of data from the CLEO detector at Cornell’s CESR electron-positron ring which provide precise measurements at lower energies.
At the end of the conference delegates looked forward to their “dream machine”, a dedicated high-energy photon collider, which is one option available for the new generation of linear electron-positron colliders now being planned.
