Supplier gets ATLAS award
On 3 November the ATLAS collaboration honoured its supplier, Skoda Hute of Plzen in the Czech Republic, for the company's work on forward-shielding elements for the detector. These huge cylinders surround the beam pipe at either end of the detector in order to prevent stray particles from entering ATLAS's muon chambers.
The shields consist of 10 cast-iron pieces with a total weight of 780 t, and although there are many iron foundries in the CERN member states, only a limited number can produce castings of the necessary size - 59-89 t in weight and up to 1.5 m thick.
The forward shielding was designed by the ATLAS Technical Coordination in close collaboration with the ATLAS groups from the Czech Technical University and Charles University in Prague. The Czech groups also supervised the production of the shielding, which was in part a Czech in-kind contribution to ATLAS.
Duke of York opens UK@CERN exhibition
HRH Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, visited CERN on 23 November and, in his capacity as the UK's special representative for international trade and investment, inaugurated the UK@CERN exhibition. This biennial trade show was initially held in 1968, the first such exhibition by a CERN member state.
This year 22 companies displayed goods and services that could be of interest to physicists and engineers working at CERN. The Duke also met UK researchers working at CERN, in particular at the site where the ATLAS detector is being installed at Point 1 on the ring of the Large Hadron Collider.
The 3rd CERN-CLAF School of High Energy Physics is to take place in Malargüe (Mendoza), Argentina, from 27 February until 12 March. This school is intended mainly for young experimentalists from Latin America preparing a PhD in high-energy physics or engaged in postdoctoral work. For further information see http://physicschool.web.cern.ch/PhysicSchool/LatAmSchool.
LEAP '05, the international conference on Low Energy Antiproton Physics, will take place at the Gustav-Stresemann-Institut in Bonn on 16-22 May. Organized by the Research Centre Jülich it will bring together users of past, present and future antiproton facilities. Topics will include symmetries, hadron-antihadron systems, quark-gluon phenomena, atomic physics and future facilities. For further information see www.fz-juelich.de/leap-05.
A course on Small Accelerators will be held at the Hotel Golden Tulip Drenthe, Zeegse, in the Netherlands from 24 May until 2 June. Organized by the CERN Accelerator School and Kernfysisch Versneller Instituut (KVI), Groningen, the course will mainly interest staff in accelerator laboratories, university departments, medical-treatment centres and industries specialized in producing small accelerators or related equipment. For further information see www.cern.ch/schools/CAS.
The 14th IEEE-NPSS Real Time Computing Conference 2005 takes place at the Alba Nova University Centre in Stockholm, Sweden, on 4-10 June. This conference is devoted to the latest real-time applications in plasma physics, nuclear physics, particle physics, astrophysics, space science, accelerators, medicine and biology. For more information see www.physto.se/RT2005.
TAUP 2005, the ninth international conference on Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics, will be held in Zaragoza, Spain, on 10-14 September. Topics include cosmology and particle physics, dark matter and dark energy, high-energy astrophysics and cosmic rays. For further information e-mail the TAUP 2005 Secretariat at taup2005@unizar.es or see www.unizar.es/taup2005.