Spiro takes over leadership of DAPNIA
Michel Spiro became head of the French Atomic Energy Commission's (CEA) Department of Astrophysics, Particle Physics, Nuclear Physics and Associated Instrumentation (DAPNIA) on 1 January. He took over from Joël Feltesse, who was recently appointed chair of CERN's scientific policy committee.
Spiro's long and illustrious career covers all aspects of DAPNIA's mandate. Following early work on bubble chambers, he went on to play an important role in CERN's UA1 experiment en route to the discovery of W and Z bosons in 1983. He has also worked on solar neutrino physics with the Gallex experiment at Italy's Gran Sasso laboratory and has more recently been a major figure in the hunt for dark matter in the form of massive compact halo objects.
Spiro further extended his interests to nuclear physics in 1996 when he became director of the CEA project INCA, which is designed to study the incineration of actinides using accelerators. He is currently the chairman of CERN's LEP experiments committee and is the co-author of numerous popular works on physics.
Jenni gets memorial medal
ATLAS collaboration spokesman Peter Jenni received the Memorial medal of Prague's Charles University for his "significant contribution to the collaboration between the Charles University in Prague and the European Laboratory for Particle Physics - CERN" on 20 September 2001.
Jenni has been a strong advocate of Czech participation in the LHC and the wider CERN programme since his first visit to Prague in 1991. He received the medal from university rector Ivan Wilhelm, who is also member of the ATLAS collaboration, in the historical Karolinum building.
The laudatio was read by Jaromir Plasek, vice-dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, in the presence of physicists collaborating with CERN from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and the Czech Technical University in Prague.
Outreach prize invites nominations
Each year the High-Energy Particle Physics Board of the European Physical Society awards a prize for outreach, which is intended to recognize outstanding outreach achievement related to high-energy physics and/or particle astrophysics.
The prize can be attributed to a scientist or a non-scientist and consists of a diploma specifying the work of the recipients and an award of SwFr 2000. This year's prize will be awarded at the 12th General EPS Conference (Trends in Physics) on 26-30 August in Budapest. Nominations should be sent to Jorma Tuominiemi (e-mail Jorma.Tuominiemi@cern.ch) before 15 March.
The seventh edition of the LNF Spring School, Bruno Touschek will be held in Frascati National Laboratories, Italy, on 20-25 May 2002. The school is designed for graduate students and young postdoctoral researchers, including those from the ESOP (Electron Scattering Off confined Partons; http://www.nat.vu.nl/~bacchett/esop/) and EURODAPHNE (http://www.lnf.infn.it/theory/tmr/) networks.
Last year lectures covered CP-violation, cosmic rays, transversity in the nucleon and exclusive processes in QCD. Further information and a complete list of past programmes, can be obtained from the school Web site (http://wwwsis.Inf.infn.it/Infss02) or by contacting the school (giulia.pancheri@lnf.infn.it).
The Fourth Workshop on RICH Detectors at the NESTOR institute will be held on 5-10 June 2002 in Pylos, Greece. Full information is available at the Nestor Web site (http://www.nestor.org.gr/rich2002).
DESY celebrates 10 years of Zeuthen lab
Germany's DESY laboratory celebrated the 10th anniversary of its Zeuthen site on 30 January. Formerly the East German Academy of Science's Institute for High-Energy Physics, the Zeuthen laboratory, south-east of Berlin, was incorporated into DESY in 1992, playing a significant role in the reunification of German science.
The anniversary celebrations included a colloquium to celebrate both the history and the achievements of DESY Zeuthen and also the commissioning of the laboratory's new Photo Injector Test Facility. This facility will be used to test and optimize electron sources for the TESLA linear collider and X-ray lasers. For details visit http:/www-zeuthen.desy.de/.
SLAC marks decade of World Wide Web
America's first World Wide Web server was switched on by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in 1991. To mark the 10th anniversary of the occasion, SLAC hosted the Once and Future Web symposium on 3-4 December 2001, details of which can be found on the Web site (http://www-project.slac.stanford.edu/webanniv/).