ATLAS recognizes pixel suppliers with award
At a ceremony at CERN on 28 November, the ATLAS collaboration presented awards to two companies that had produced sensor wafers for the pixel detector. The CiS Institut für Mikrosensorik of Erfurt, Germany, supplied 655 sensor wafers containing a total of 1652 sensor tiles, while ON Semiconductor provided 515 sensor wafers (1177 sensor tiles) from its foundry at Roznov in the Czech Republic. Production of the tiles has seen yields of 94% – an exceptional achievement given the required characteristics.
The large pixel detector for ATLAS required expertise in highly specialised integrated microelectronics and precision mechanics. Each 10 cm2 tile contains 46,000 active channels. These extremely sensitive, high-quality sensors are installed closest to the collisions and will be among the parts most exposed to radiation. They were designed to withstand a radiation dose 10 times higher than was possible at the time the work began.
Young ALICE man scoops top award
Artem Harutyunyan, 23, of the Yerevan Physics Institute and a member of the software team for the ALICE experiment at CERN, has been recognized in 2007 as the best Master Student of Armenia in the field of information technology. He receives the award for excellence in academic studies and for a series of developments for AliEn, the Grid environment at ALICE. The work, which started in 2003, includes porting of the client part to Windows, updating the security system and introducing the banking service. He received the award from the Armenian president.
IOP honours Webber, Green, Pendlebury and Singh
The UK's Institute of Physics (IOP) has awarded Bryan Webber of Cambridge University with the 2008 Dirac medal for outstanding contributions to theoretical, mathematical and computational physics. Webber receives the award "for his pioneering work in understanding and applying quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the strong force."
The IOP awarded the 2008 Chadwick medal for distinguished research in particle physics to Keith Green of Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and Michael Pendlebury of Sussex University. They are honoured "for their outstanding contributions to the measurement of the neutron electric dipole moment, and of other fundamental properties of the neutron".
A third award related to particle physics went to writer and broadcaster Simon Singh, who received the Kelvin medal for outstanding contributions to the public understanding of physics. Singh began his career with a PhD in particle physics from the University of Cambridge, where he worked on the UA2 experiment at CERN.