The prize was instituted in 1979 as a memorial to the Russian scholar Alexander Karpinsky, who in May 1917 became the first elected president of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Karpinsky Prize is awarded bienially to a Russian researcher for achievements in natural sciences, ecology and humanities. This year it was presented to Skrinsky, seen here with Albrecht Wagner, in acknowledgment of his outstanding pioneering work on particle accelerators and accelerator technologies. These include new fundamental concepts on storage rings, linear colliders and electron cooling. The prize is accompanied by a scholarship of one year's research in Germany for a young scientist nominated by the laureate.
Gerardo Herrera Corral, of the Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del IPN (CINVESTAV) in Mexico City, has been awarded the 2001 research prize of the Mexican Academy of Sciences for his experimental studies in high-energy physics.
This major award is given every year to a young scientist who has made a distinguished contribution to any area of pure science. This is the first time that this prize has been given to an experimentalist in high-energy physics, and is an important sign of the growth of experimental high-energy physics in Mexico. Herrera Corral, seen here receiving the prize from the Mexican President Vincente Fox, leads the team of six Mexican institutes in the ALICE Collaboration at CERN. (Erik Meza.)
After an earlier year at CERN, he came to the laboratory in 1967, where he worked on the SPS and collaborated closely with John Adams on the design and commissioning of the accelerator. In 1980 he joined the PS and worked on the antiproton accumulator. Later he became a member of the LHC Committee and was entrusted with the task of writing a report on the design of the future accelerator. Drawing on this experience Wilson, seen here with his assistant Suzanne von Wartburg during an EPAC meeting in 1994, took over as head of the CERN Accelerator School (CAS) in 1992. In this capacity he was responsible for organizing around 25 schools, not including special schools in India and China, and in particular he took part in the development of joint schools with Japan. Although now retired and having handed over the reigns of CAS to Daniel Brandt, Wilson will continue to pursue his interests in accelerators.
PHYSTAT2003 will be held at SLAC in Stanford, California, on 8-11 September. It will cover statistical issues in the fields of particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology. This is the fourth conference in the series that started at CERN with the "Confidence Limits Workshop" in January 2000. More information about this year's conference at SLAC can be found on the web at http://www-conf.slac.stanford.edu/phystat2003.
The EuroConference on Hadron Structure Viewed with Electromagnetic Probes, a conference on electromagnetic interactions with nucleons and nuclei, will take place on 7-12 October at Santorini, Greece. The conference programme will include QCD structure of hadrons, nucleon form factors and polarizabilities, highly exclusive processes, and nucleon correlations in nuclei. The conference is part of the 2003 Euresco Conference Programme, and further information is available from the website at http://www.esf.org/euresco/ 03/pc03117.
Florida symposium fetes Paul Dirac
When Paul Dirac, one of the founders of modern physics, retired from Cambridge University in 1970, he joined the Department of Physics at Florida State University (FSU), where he continued to work on problems in fundamental physics and taught a variety of courses. He died in Florida in 1984 and is buried in Tallahassee's Roselawn Cemetary. So it was fitting that one of the last events to celebrate Dirac's centenary in 2002 was the Dirac Centennial Symposium organized by the FSU.
The symposium, organized by Howie Baer and colleagues, was a one-and-a-half day celebration of Dirac's achievements and their continuing impact upon research at the frontiers of physics. More than 150 participants heard talks by a variety of eminent speakers, including Laurie Brown and Leopold Halpern, who provided some historical perspective; Pierre Ramond, who generalized Dirac's equation and introduced fermions into string theory; Brian Serot, on building atomic nuclei using the Dirac equation; Paul Langacker, who dealt with one of Dirac's pet ideas in a talk on time variation of physical constants; and Joe Polchinski, who brought monopoles up to date with duality and string theory. In the keynote banquet speech, Dirac's daughter Monica presented a personal portrait of her father. A commemorative volume summarizing the talks is to be published by World Scientific.
Yet 15 students from the class of Ken Wester, a physics teacher at Columbus High School, Mississippi, made the trip. Wester participated in CERN's High School Teachers Programme last year, and was so enthralled that he organized for his final-year students to visit CERN. The 18-year-olds arrived on 10 March and spent two days at the laboratory, visiting the CMS construction site and the AD antimatter factory, before leaving on a tour of Switzerland and Germany. The students are seen here with their teacher by the model of CMS in Building 40, together with CMS spokesman Michel Della Negra.
The TESLA test facility was one of the highlights of a recent visit to DESY by John Marburger, director of the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
Marburger, a physicist and former director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, was at the laboratory to learn more about the status of the TESLA X-ray laser and the TESLA linear collider, as well as international collaboration at DESY. As the scientific advisor to the US President, Marburger plays a critical role in the development of the country's scientific strategy. His office is currently working with other partners to produce guidelines for a possible decision-making process to build an international linear collider. Marburger is seen here with Susan Elbow, American consul general in Hamburg, Albrecht Wagner, director of DESY, and Hans Weise, coordinator of the linear accelerator of the TESLA Test Facility.
David Syz, state secretary for economic affairs in Switzerland, visited CERN on 3 March with his board of directors.
During the visit Syz heard about Technology Transfer at CERN and the openlab project, and visited the assembly area for ATLAS, where the ATLAS spokesman Peter Jenni described the progress with various components, including the toroid magnet coils seen here.