JINR honours Zichichi with the 2007 Bruno Pontecorvo prize
During the 103rd session of the JINR Scientific Council, Alexei Sissakian, director of JINR, announced that Antonino Zichichi of INFN/Bologna and CERN is to be awarded the 2007 Bruno Pontecorvo prize. The official ceremony for the prize – one of the most prestigious Russian physics awards – will take place in September in Dubna.
Zichichi has been selected by the international prize committee for his role in the creation of the Gran Sasso National Laboratory and his work on the collider programme and lepton physics at CERN. Committee member, Academician Semen Gershtein said: "Zichichi proposed a very interesting method for searching for a third heavy lepton in uncorrelated electron–muon pairs, which ultimately led to the discovery of the tau lepton. His work is closely related to problems that were interesting to Pontecorvo and undoubtedly made a huge contribution to the field."
The Gran Sasso National Laboratory is currently the prime location for the study of cosmic and manufactured neutrinos. From the start, the concept for the laboratory took into consideration the possible study at Gran Sasso of neutrinos produced at CERN, so the big laboratory galleries are oriented towards CERN. The CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso project is now under way, having delivered the first neutrino beam in 2006. A prime goal is the investigation of neutrino oscillations, proposed initially by Pontecorvo.
The search for a third lepton has origins in Zichichi's PAPLEP experiment at CERN in the 1960s, which looked for electron–muon final states from proton–antiproton annihilation. This is how a large electromagnetic time-like form factor was discovered but this suppressed the proton–antiproton cross-section by as much as 500, so Zichichi moved to Frascati where, in 1967, he presented a proposal to search for a third lepton (now called the tau) using the electron–positron collider, ADONE.
Pontecorvo was a strong supporter of these activities. When Zichichi reported the PAPLEP results at the international conference in Dubna in August 1964, he received an enthusiastic response from Pontecorvo, who encouraged him to continue the line of research. At the time the bubble chamber was the dominant technology. When Pontecorvo visited Italy in 1978, he expressed his strong support for the Gran Sasso project, which Zichichi had just presented in Rome.
Haguenauer is honoured for technology transfer
Maurice Haguenauer, from the Laboratoire Leprince-Ringuet (LLR) at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, has received the Prix de la valorisation et du transfert de technologie (Evaluation and technology transfer prize) of CNRS/IN2P3 for developing instruments with medical applications. The prize is in recognition of his work on developing scintillation fibre hodoscopes for use in hadron therapy, more specifically for imaging the beam profile.
Hadron therapy is gaining ground in the treatment of certain cancers, with new European facilities coming into operation this year at the Centro Nazionale di Adronica Oncologica (CNAO) in Pavia and at the Heidelberg Ion Therapy Centre (CERN Courier December 2006 p17). CNAO asked Haguenauer's team at LLR to build a beam profile camera based on scintillation fibre technology. The fibres are arranged in horizontal and vertical layers and are read by a CCD camera.
Haguenauer has participated in important experiments at CERN, in particular the Gargamelle neutrino experiment, which discovered weak neutral currents and first indicated that gluons comprise about 50% of the nucleon. He is also well known for his work on UA4, measuring the real part of the proton–antiproton scattering amplitude – a result that consolidates extrapolations to derive the proton–proton total cross-section at the LHC. Now, within the ATLAS collaboration, he is involved in preparing a measurement of the luminosity and cross-section at the LHC using the Coulomb peak, and at the same time will measure the real part. This has the potential to provide evidence for extra dimensions.