ALICE Awards honour European companies
The third annual ALICE Awards ceremony, held at CERN in March, recognized three companies for their exceptional work on the ALICE detector. VTT Microelectronics of Finland received an award for producing the thin bump-bonded ladders (detector arrays, each comprising 40,960 active cells) for the silicon pixel detector in the inner tracking system. The company had to overcome a number of technical hurdles: complex and expensive equipment was procured or upgraded and processes underwent a detailed study and careful tuning. The ladders are the thinnest ever produced and mounted on a pixel detector.
The Belgian company Canberra Semiconductors NV received its award for producing silicon detectors, also for the inner tracking system. The technologies involved for the pixel, drift and double-sided micro-strip detectors required high performance and technological expertise. The most demanding detector, the silicon drift, was developed in a joint programme between ALICE and Canberra. The delivery of the pixel and the double-sided strip detectors was on time, and Canberra increased its micro-strip production when another company was unable to produce the amount expected. Delivery of the drift strips is also expected to be on time.
The third company to receive an award was Note Lund AB of Sweden for manufacturing the 4800 front-end cards for the time projection chamber (TPC). These contain the complete read-out chain for amplifying, shaping, digitizing, processing and buffering the TPC signals. The board has to process and store signals with high resolution and range. The company first produced two prototypes and then, together with ALICE TPC engineers, refined the layout of the board and the manufacturing procedure. Mass production started in September 2004 and has progressed on schedule and within budget.
The ALICE Awards winners stand with CERN's secretary-general, Maximilian Metzger.
La Thuile meeting celebrates 20 years
This year saw the 20th meeting in the series "Les Rencontres de Physique de la Vallee d'Aoste". Nature's gift for the first of the series in 1987 was the type-II supernova explosion SN1987A in February that year, which gave participants a major topic to discuss. The 20th meeting was not accompanied by such a bang on the cosmic scale, but four Nobel laureates and many distinguished speakers provided participants with enough ammunition for discussions to continue into the night.
The organizers of the meetings, Giorgio Belettini and Mario Greco (later joined by Giorgio Chiarelli), began with the vision of a winter conference composed only of plenary talks, in contrast to the well-established Moriond series (see CERN Courier May 2005 p37). In the La Thuile meetings, researchers not only talk about their own work and experiments, but also cover the whole subject in their respective fields in concise, self-contained, 30-minute talks - a recipe that has proved successful. With the support of the local government of the Aosta valley the organizers soon homed-in on the small village of La Thuile and the new hotel and conference complex that had just opened. The cooking school on site also helped to attract European and American physicists alike.
The 55 talks at the 20th meeting included four from Nobel laureates. Carlo Rubbia talked about thinking big in dark-matter searches and proposed replacing existing dark-matter detectors with new ones weighing tonnes instead of kilograms. Sheldon Glashow reviewed neutrino physics "from desperate remedy to profound enigma", while Samuel Ting described the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer project and space physics. James Cronin presented the Pierre Auger project and even some first results.
Other highlights included Rocky Kolb's talk about astrophysics since SN1987A, and his second talk on dark matter and dark energy in which he explained how the field has come of age 20| years on. Nicola Khuri gave an interesting presentation on science and development, discussing the problems that developing countries face in pursuing fundamental science. In the many talks from all fields of particle physics, a sign of the times perhaps was the relatively little time given to accelerator experiments - with the Large Hadron Collider still around the corner, these days much information comes from neutrino, cosmic-ray, microwave-background, gravitational-wave and other non-accelerator-based facilities.
• For further information see www.pi.infn.it/lathuile/lathuile_2006.html.