EPS honours quark mixing with 2007 prize
The European Physical Society High Energy and Particle Physics Prize for 2007 has been awarded to Makoto Kobayashi of KEK and Toshihide Maskawa of the University of Tokyo for "the proposal of a successful mechanism for CP violation in the Standard Model, predicting the existence of a third family of quarks". Experimental evidence for CP violation first emerged in 1964 (see Looking Back) but it was not until 1973 that Kobayashi and Maskawa pointed to a possible solution to the unexpected phenomenon. They noted that mixing between different quarks (as first proposed by Nicola Cabibbo in 1963) could explain the CP violation so far observed – but only if there were six types of quark, rather than the three known at the time. This bold suggestion was subsequently verified with the discovery in experiments of three new types of quark and by the recent observations by the Belle and BaBar experiments of CP violation in the decays of B mesons at precisely the level predicted by the theory of Kobayashi and Maskawa. Kobayashi received the prize on behalf of the two physicists on 23 July at the EPS conference on High Energy Particle Physics in Manchester. The award ceremony also saw the presentation of further EPS prizes.
For physics that is intimately connected with the third generation of quarks required by Kobayashi and Maskawa, the 2007 EPS Young Physicist Prize was awarded to Ivan Furić of the University of Chicago, Guillelmo Gómez-Ceballos of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stephanie Menzemer of Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. They were rewarded for "their outstanding contributions displaying individual creativity and collaborative effort to the complex analysis that provided the first measurement of the frequency of Bs oscillations".
The 2007 Gribov Medal for outstanding work by a young physicist in theoretical particle physics and/or field theory was awarded to Niklas Beisert of the MPI für Gravitationsphysik for his "contributions to the exploration of integrability properties of a 4D quantum field theory, N = 4 supersymmetric Yang–Mills theory".
The 2007 EPS Outreach Prize was awarded to CERN's Richard Jacobsson and Charles Timmermans of NIKHEF and Radboud University for their "outstanding contributions in promoting high-energy physics to the public and in high schools in Europe". Jacobsson has been involved in outreach at CERN for many years, most recently with the LHCb experiment for the LHC. Timmermans is the principal initiator of the HISPARC project through which Dutch high-schools are participating in the study of cosmic rays (CERN Courier July/August 2004 p12). In addition, the Outreach Prize Selection Committee made special mention of Anne Gaud McKee, who lost her life in a walking accident in 2006. She created the company Miméscope and, in particular, the spectacle The DELPHI Oracle, performed at CERN at the closure of LEP in 2000 and later in Lausanne, Paris, London and Edinburgh (CERN Courier June 2000 p31.).
ATLAS rewards two pixel suppliers
The Fraunhofer Institut für Zuverlässigkeit und Mikrointegration (IZM) in Berlin and the company SELEX Sistemi Integrati have received supplier awards from the ATLAS collaboration, presented in a ceremony held on 13 June. The prizes were for the manufacture of modules for the ATLAS pixel detector. SELEX supplied 1500 of the modules for the tracker, while IZM produced a further 1300. The modules, each made up of 46,080 channels, form the active part of the ATLAS pixel detector. IZM and SELEX received the awards for the excellent quality of their work – the average number of faulty channels per module was less than 2 × 10–3. They also stayed within budget and on schedule. The two suppliers demonstrated great flexibility in designing modules based on electronic components and sensors that were imposed by the experiment.
In responding to the challenge, IZM and SELEX used two different methods. SELEX used a process involving indium deposits followed by thermocompression, while IZM opted for the electrolytic deposition of Pb/Sn. Both techniques allowed the strict characteristics required by ATLAS to be met. SELEX worked in close collaboration with the Genoa and Milan INFN groups, while IZM collaborated with the University of Bonn.