APS announces winners for 2004
The American Physical Society has announced many of its awards for 2004, with recipients who work in particle physics and related fields, from neutrino astrophysics to colliding-beam techniques.
Wick Haxton of the University of Washington has won the Hans A Bethe Prize, which recognizes outstanding work in the areas of astrophysics, nuclear physics, nuclear astrophysics or closely related fields. The society said the prize was "for his noteworthy contributions and scientific leadership in the field of neutrino astrophysics, in particular for his success in merging nuclear theory with experiments and observations in nuclear physics and astrophysics".
Nuclear physics is also recognized by the Tom W Bonner prize for outstanding experimental research in the subject. The winner is George F Bertsch of the University of Washington, "for his many varied contributions to nuclear-structure and reaction theory, which have guided and illuminated experiments for four decades".
The Edward A Bouchet Award recognizes a distinguished minority physicist who has made significant contributions to physics research. It has been awarded this year to Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, "for providing a deeper understanding of the correspondence between string theory in d space-time dimensions and Yang-Mills theory in d-1 dimensions, and for communicating fundamental principles of theoretical physics to the general public, including Spanish-speaking audiences".
CERN's Gabriele Veneziano is the recipient of the Dannie Heineman Prize for mathematical physics, which he receives "for his pioneering discoveries in dual-resonance models which, partly through his own efforts, have developed into string theory and a basis for the quantum theory of gravity".
Cosmology is the focus of the 2004 Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award for outstanding achievement by a woman physicist in the early years of her career. This has been awarded to Suzanne Therese Staggs of Princeton University, "for her original and lasting contributions to experimental cosmology, in particular in the area of cosmic microwave background studies, and for leadership in multi-institutional collaborations to measure CMB anisotropy".
Arie Bodek of the University of Rochester receives the W K H Panofsky Prize in experimental particle physics, "for his broad, sustained, and insightful contributions to elucidating the structure of the nucleon, using a wide variety of probes, tools and methods at many laboratories".
The J J Sakurai Prize for outstanding achievement in particle theory is shared this year by Ikaros Bigi of the University of Notre Dame and Anthony Ichiro Sanda of Nagoya University, "for pioneering theoretical insights that pointed the way to the very fruitful experimental study of CP violation in B decays, and for continuing contributions to CP and heavy flavour physics".
The Robert R Wilson Prize for achievement in the physics of particle accelerators is also shared between researchers at institutes in Japan and the US. Katsunobu Oide of KEK and John Seeman of SLAC are rewarded for "technical leadership and direct contributions to the development of high-luminosity B-factories at KEK and SLAC. These machines have set new world records for luminosities in colliding-beam storage rings".
Particle physics also features this year in the Leroy Apker Award for undergraduate achievement from a PhD-granting institution. Peter Onyisi of the University of Chicago is the winner for the paper "Looking for new invisible particles", about the search for new physics that might be indicated by exclusive photons with missing energy in the opposite direction in the CDF detector at Fermilab.
CERN and Caltech win network-speed prize
CERN demonstrated the newest Grid technology and highlighted advances in networking through optical fibres at the International Telecommunication Union's exhibition Telecom World 2003, held in Geneva on 12-18 October.
Using the latest high-speed, high-quality Virtual Rooms Videoconferencing System (VRVS) technology developed by Caltech, the Internet2 conference in Indianapolis was transmitted live to the stand.
Among the many activities, visitors watched the awards ceremony in Indianapolis for the new Internet2 land-speed record, which was achieved by an international team in the framework of the European Union DataTAG project. On 1 October, 1 Tbyte of data was transmitted across more than 7000 km between Starlight in Chicago and CERN in less than 30 minutes. This is equivalent to transferring a full CD in 1 s or a full-length DVD movie in 7 s.
Just before the award ceremony, CERN and Caltech broke the record again with a multi-gigabit per second transfer between the exhibition centre and Los Angeles. This time, the data were transmitted a greater distance, measured as the product of the achieved bandwidth (bits/second) and the terrestrial distance between the nodes.
Neutrino research and national security share White House's Enrico Fermi Award
John Bahcall, Raymond Davis Jr and Seymour Sack are the winners of this year's Enrico Fermi Award. The award is administered by the US Department of Energy for the White House, and recognizes scientists of international stature for their lifetimes of exceptional achievement in the development, use or production of energy.
The trio received the award on 22 October at a conference in Washington, DC. The conference, Nuclear Energy and Science for the 21st Century: Atoms for Peace Plus Fifty, marked the 50th anniversary of the speech by President Eisenhower to the UN General Assembly on the peaceful uses of the atom.
Bahcall, from the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and Davis, of the University of Pennsylvania, received the award "for their innovative research in astrophysics leading to a revolution in understanding the properties of the elusive neutrino, the lightest known particle with mass".
Sack, who retired from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1990 and continues as a research associate, received the award "for his contributions to the national security of the US in his work assuring the reliability of nuclear weapons."
Horst Wenninger retires from CERN
Horst Wenninger, who has been and continues to be a major influence on the development of CERN, retired in September after 35 years.
After participating in bubble-chamber experiments at CERN while working as an assistant at the University of Heidelberg in the 1960s, Wenninger joined the BEBC project in 1968. He worked as a member of the BEBC construction and operations team for almost 20 years, becoming the group leader during the time of its full exploitation, and seeing the termination of the project in 1984.
In 1989, Wenninger became leader of the new Accelerator Technologies (AT) Division, which regrouped major technology groups working on the LEP II energy upgrade programme. At the same time he continued R&D on superconducting magnets, prepared specific technologies for the LHC, such as cryogenics and vacuum, and was appointed research-technical director when the LHC project was fully approved in 1996.
He took an active part in the launch of Technology Transfer (TT), in particular with groups at CERN working on superconducting cavities and the TESLA collaboration.