HELEN brings Latin Americans to CERN
The training programme supported by the High Energy Physics Latin American- European Network (HELEN) is in full swing. For 2006, the programme has assigned about 70 fellowships to be spent at CERN by Latin American students and young physicists. The fellowships are centred on the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), theory, the DataGRID and technology transfer. Other fellowships are to be spent at European and Latin American universities, bringing the total for the first year of the programme to more than 100 fellowships, with an average duration of three months.
Now a small but active HELEN community is building up at CERN, and has established a HELEN club to allow the exchange of views and to help newcomers in the complex CERN environment. Jose Salicio Diez of the Physics Department coordinates HELEN at CERN.
Latin American students who have arrived at CERN to take up fellowships during the first months of 2006 relax in front of the LHC collaboration buildings, together with the deputy coordinator of HELEN, Veronica Riquer (centre), from Rome University and INFN.
New products
Bede X-ray Metrology has launched the BedeMetrix-F with ScribeView, a new strained-silicon process-control system for high-volume semiconductor manufacturing. ScribeView gives a very small spot that enables inline measurements in the scribe line or on pads on patterned wafers. The overall system uses high-resolution X-ray diffraction to measure epilayer strain, composition, thickness and relaxation. For more information tel: +44 191 332 4700, e-mail info@bede.co.uk or see www.bede.com.
Optical Surfaces Ltd offers a range of standard and custom precision flats up to 600 mm in diameter manufactured in high-stability materials such as glass, Zerodur and silica. These devices for measuring surface flatness of polished areas determine variations between work surfaces and the surface of the optical flat. Uses include high-precision applications in astronomy, laser-beam steering and optical windows. For further information tel: +44 208 668 6126, e-mail sales@optisurf.com or see www.optisurf.com.
Southern Scientific now supplies the indentiFINDER, a digital, hand-held, gamma-spectroscopy and dose-rate system, in a number of different versions, providing gamma dose-rate measurements up to 1 Sv/h. Versions are also available with He-3 neutron detectors. Combining high sensitivity with a wide dose-rate range, the systems can identify different isotopes from within an extensive library. For further details contact Steve Kidd, tel: +44 1903 604000, e-mail info@ssl.gb.com or see www.ssl.gb.com.
Varian Inc has introduced a new series of helium mass-spectrometer leak detectors for testing the integrity of systems, chambers etc, using helium as a tracer gas. The new VS series includes portable and cart-mounted mobile leak detectors. For further information contact Lauren Lum, tel: +1 650 424 5286, e-mail lauren.lum@varianinc.com or see www.varianinc.com.
The next Crimean Summer School and Conference on New Trends in High-Energy Physics, will be on 16-23 September in the hotel Parus, Yalta, Crimea. For further details see http://crimea2006.bitp.kiev.ua/. Applications should be sent to Crimea-2006, BITP, Kiev-143, 03680 Ukraine; e-mail crimea@bitp.kiev.ua; or fax +38 044 5265998.
The 10th Topical Seminar on Innovative Particle and Radiation Detectors will take place at the University of Siena, Italy, from 1-5 October. Attendance will be by invitation. Interested physicists should write to the organizing committee, indicating name, address, affiliation and, if applicable, the title of a contribution. The deadline for submitting an abstract is 15 July. For further information see www.bo.infn.it/sminiato/siena06.html.
HQL06, the International Conference on Heavy Quarks and Leptons, will be held on 16-20 October in the Deutsches Museum in Munich. Organized by the Physics Department of the Technical University Munich and the Max-Planck Institute for Physics, the conference will cover topics including heavy-quark decays, CP violation and mixing, D and B rare decays and neutrino oscillations. For further information and details on registration see http://hql06.physik.tu-muenchen.de/.
• In the April issue of the CERN Courier, a mistake was made in the first name of the Russian Federation's plenipotentiary at JINR, Andrey Fursenko (p36). Many apologies.
• In the May issue, the news about the CMS tracker should have said that the first sector has demonstrated "a channel inefficiency of less than 1%" (p7). Apologies to all concerned.
• In the article in May "High schools focus on the extreme universe", the area for the EEE project is 106 km2 (p21).
• In the article in May "Closed-loop technology speeds up beam control", the citation given on page 28 at the end of the paragraph about the coupling problem should have been to Jones et al. 2005 and Luo et al. 2005, the first of which refers to the paper: R Jones et al. 2005 "Towards a Robust Phase Locked Loop Tune Measurement System", DIPAC 2005, Lyon.