APS announces winners for 2005
The American Physical Society has announced many of its awards for 2005, with recipients who work in particle physics and related fields, from the physics of supernovae to accelerator techniques.
Stan Woosley of the University of California at Santa Cruz has been awarded the Hans A Bethe Prize, which recognizes outstanding work in the areas of astrophysics, nuclear physics, nuclear astrophysics or closely related fields. Woosley receives the prize "for his significant and wide-ranging contributions in the areas of stellar evolution, element synthesis, the theory of core collapse and type Ia supernovae, and the interpretation of gamma-ray bursts - most notably, the collapsar model of gamma-ray bursts". Nuclear physics is also recognized in the award of the Tom W Bonner Prize for outstanding experimental research in nuclear physics, given to Roy Holt of Argonne National Laboratory. Holt has been recognized for "his pioneering role in experimental studies of the structure of the deuteron, and especially for his innovative use of polarization techniques in these experiments".
The 2005 Dannie Heineman Prize for mathematical physics goes to Giorgio Parisi of INFN-Seigone, "for fundamental theoretical discoveries in broad areas of elementary particle physics, quantum field theory, and statistical mechanics; especially for work on spin glasses and disordered systems".
CP violation figures in the citations for two of the 2005 prizes awarded for particle physics. Pier Oddone of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory receives the W K H Panofsky Prize in experimental particle physics, "for his insightful proposal to use an asymmetric B-Factory to carry out precision measurements of CP violation in B-meson decays, and for his energetic leadership of the first conceptual design studies that demonstrated the feasibility of this approach".
On the theoretical side, the J J Sakurai Prize for outstanding achievement in particle theory is awarded to Susumu Okubo of the University of Rochester. Okubo receives this prize for his "groundbreaking investigations into the pattern of hadronic masses and decay rates, which provided essential clues into the development of the quark model, and for demonstrating that CP violation permits partial decay rate asymmetries".
Tests of CPT symmetry (see CERN Courier December 2004 p27) feature in the 2005 Francis M Pipkin Award. It honours exceptional research accomplishments by a young scientist in the interdisciplinary area of precision measurement and fundamental constants, and aims to encourage the wide dissemination of the results of that research. For 2005, the award goes to Ronald Walsworth of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics "for broad investigation in precision measurements involving masers; in particular, for using hydrogen and noble-gas masers in achieving record sensitivities to violations of Lorentz and CPT symmetry in neutrons and protons, and for innovative applications of masers to imaging".
A third particle physics award is the Robert R Wilson Prize for achievement in the physics of particle accelerators. For 2005 this is awarded to Keith R Symon of the University of Wisconsin "for fundamental contributions to accelerator science, including the FFAG concept and the invention of the RF phase manipulation technique that was essential to the success of the ISR and all subsequent hadron colliders".
Particle physics also features in the Dissertation Award in Nuclear Physics to Andriy Kurlov. He receives the award "for his theoretical work on electroweak radiative corrections to precision low-energy processes, including calculations of neutrino-deuterium scattering needed to interpret solar neutrino data and other calculations to constrain limits for physics beyond the Standard Model".
Lastly, the Einstein Prize, which recognizes outstanding accomplishments in the field of gravitational physics, has been awarded to Bryce DeWitt of the University of Texas. DeWitt receives this "for a broad range of original contributions to gravitational physics, especially in quantum gravity, gauge field theories, radiation reaction in curved space-time, and numerical relativity; and for inspiring a generation of students." Sadly, DeWitt died on 23 September 2004, aged 81. A tribute to this exceptional physicist will be published in a forthcoming issue.
Black hole expert receives the prestigious Grossmann Award
Roy Kerr, emeritus professor of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, has been honoured with the Marcel Grossmann Award, which recognizes outstanding work in general relativity, gravitation and relativistic theories. Kerr receives the award for his discovery in 1963 of a solution to the equations of general relativity, describing space-time around rotating black holes - which have since become known as "Kerr black holes".
Kerr heard the news at the Kerr Fest Black Hole Symposium, held at Canterbury in honour of his 70th birthday. He will receive the award at the next Marcel Grossmann Meeting in St Petersburg in 2006.
Industrial collaborators honoured by ALICE
The ALICE collaboration has presented its second round of awards to three companies for their novel and remarkable contributions to major detector systems: Advance Technology and Materials (ATM), Fischer Advanced Composite Components (FACC) and North Crystals. The awards presented to these three leaders in advanced, modern materials were beautifully sculpted from one of the oldest materials used by mankind to manufacture tools - Mexican Obsidian.
ATM is a young, private Chinese company with headquarters in Beijing. An offspring of a previously state-supported network of research institutes, ATM has emerged as a leader in advanced materials, such as tungsten alloys and refractive metals. The company won the contract with ALICE to produce complex absorber parts fabricated from a high-density tungsten alloy. These parts, totalling more than 50 t, are the heart of the experiment's finely tuned muon filter. Located in the centre of the 15 m long muon spectrometer, they had to be built with sub-millimetre precision, in complex, interlocking shapes to surround the delicate beam pipe of the collider.
FACC is another young company, located in Upper Austria, which has become a major manufacturer of composite parts for some of the biggest aircraft builders. It won the contract to develop and manufacture the panels that form the cylindrical field cage of the time projection chamber for ALICE; with a volume close to 100 m3, it is the largest device of this nature in the world. FACC developed and constructed the panels, not much thicker than thin card, which form cylinders 5 m long and 5 m in diameter, capable of supporting tonnes of force with essentially no deformation.
North Crystals, located in Apatity near Murmansk, Russia, has made the transition from a state-owned institute - this time in the former Soviet Union - to a world leader. As well as the spectrum of crystals developed and produced for telecommunications, medical imagery and consumer electronics, North Crystals has developed crystals for state-of-the-art electromagnetic calorimeters - in close collaboration with the Kurtchatov Institute, Moscow. The company was honoured for its remarkably successful collaboration and development of these crystals, currently being assembled into the Photon Spectrometer for ALICE.
Scientific American accolade for Hands-on-CERN website
"2004 will go down in history as the year the rovers Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars, the year the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft entered Saturn's orbit, the election year in which the issue of stem-cell research loomed large, and the year predicted to contain the costliest hurricane season ever recorded in the US", reads the website that describes Scientific American's Science & Technology Web Awards 2004.
So it is a pleasure to find that Hands-on-CERN (http://hands-on-cern.physto.se) is among the 50 sites honoured this year. Developed by Stockholm's Erik Johansson, it uses events from the DELPHI experiment at CERN's Large Electron Positron collider to explore the smallest components of matter (CERN Courier March 2002 p18).
According to the citation, "the site does a brave job of making the business of elementary particles, accelerators, detectors and collision exercises comprehensible to a general audience. The crowning jewel of the site is WIRED, or World Wide Web Interactive Remote Event Display, where students can study actual particle collisions... The site represents quite a feat in ultimately making this branch of physics more accessible for all."