Alexander Skrinsky celebrates his 70th year
Alexander Skrinsky, or Sasha as his friends and colleagues call him, was 70 on 15 January. The occasion was celebrated on 14-16 January at the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics (BINP) in Novosirirk, where he is director, with an international seminar entitled Selected chapters of modern high energy physics and charged particle accelerators.
An outstanding member of Gersh Budker's Siberian school, Skrinsky went to Novosibirsk after graduating from Moscow University in 1959, and progressed to become director. From the earliest days, he led the pioneering team working on electron-electron and electron-positron colliders. The successful commissioning of these machines, which earned him the Lenin Prize in 1967, opened a new era in experimental high-energy physics. An attempt to extend this work to heavy particles stimulated the development of electron cooling, a technique today exploited all over the world. Now the high-energy physics community is developing the International Linear Collider project, the conceptual design of which was suggested 30 years ago by Skrinsky together with Budker and Vladimir Balakin.
Skrinsky's early fascination with spin dynamics resulted in major developments for polarized beams in colliders, leading to the discovery and subsequent development of resonance depolarization for high-precision measurements of particle masses. For this, Skrinsky and other physicists at Novosibirsk received the State Prize of the USSR in 1989.
Skrinsky's wide physics interests are a continual source of fresh ideas, including the optical klystron - a special free-electron laser - and various industrial applications of radiation technologies. For the past few years he has been developing the concept of an international muon collider using ionization muon cooling as he proposed together with Budker in the 1970s. At present he is actively supporting an upgrade of the complex of colliders at Novosibirsk, which will include new acceleration options such as round beams and monochromatization. The aim is to achieve copious production of φ mesons and τ leptons.
As a leader of a major Russian physics centre and as a head of the nuclear-physics section of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Skrinsky contributes to the scientific programme of major accelerator laboratories and furthers the interests of Russian physicists in various international projects, in particular construction of the Large Hadron Collider and its detectors at CERN, and experiments at the B-factories at KEK and SLAC. He is an active member of several international committees on scientific politics in high-energy physics.
CERN and Fermilab offer joint hadron-collider summer schools
For the past few years, experiments at Fermilab's Tevatron collider have been exploring uncharted territory at the high-energy frontier of particle physics. With CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) operations to start in 2007, a new era in the exploration of the fundamental laws of nature will begin. In anticipation of this era of discovery, Fermilab and CERN are jointly launching a series of Hadron Collider Physics Summer Schools, with the aim of offering students and young researchers a complete picture of both the theoretical and experimental aspects of hadron-collider physics. The first school will take place on 9-18 August 2006 at Fermilab; the following one will be at CERN in the summer of 2007.
Preparing young researchers to tackle the current and anticipated challenges of hadron colliders, and spreading the global knowledge required for a timely and competent exploitation of the LHC physics potential, are concerns equally shared by CERN, the LHC host laboratory, and by Fermilab, the home of the Tevatron and host to the CMS collaboration's LHC Physics Center in the US.
The first school will include nine days of lectures and discussions, with one free day in the middle of the period. The emphasis will be on the physics potential of the first years of data-taking at the LHC, and on the experimental and theoretical tools needed to exploit that potential. The school will be focused to attract senior graduate students and recent PhDs in both experimental and theoretical particle physics.
The lectures and discussions will include an introduction to the theoretical and phenomenological framework of hadron collisions, and current theoretical models of frontier physics, as well as an overview of the main detector components, the initial calibration procedures and physics samples, and early LHC results. Examples of physics analyses drawn from the current Tevatron experience will help inform these exchanges.
Scholarship funds will be available to support some participants. Updates, application procedures, and more details will be available at the website for the first school: http://hcpss.fnal.gov.