IOP honours contributions to particle physics, cosmology and outreach
The UK's Institute of Physics (IOP) has awarded Tejinder "Jim" Virdee of Imperial College London with the 2009 Chadwick medal for distinguished research in particle physics. Virdee, the current spokesperson for the CMS collaboration at CERN, receives the award "for his crucial role in the design and construction of CMS".
The Moseley medal (formerly the Boys medal) is intended to recognize physicists early in their careers. The 2009 award goes to Matthew Wing of University College London, which he receives "for his outstanding contributions to the experimental programme of the HERA collider at DESY … In particular, his work has led to a deeper understanding of the strong force and will have important applications to the LHC and future colliders".
Particle physics also features prominently in the award of the 2009 Bragg medal to Becky Parker, of Simon Langton Grammar School, "for her work to energise generations of pupils to take up the study of physics". Among many achievements, she founded the National Cosmic Ray Grid, which is integral to the CERN@school project to develop simple and robust detectors that are suitable for use in schools. She has also devised methods to use the CERN Medipix chip in the Langton Ultimate Cosmic-ray Intensity Detector.
The IOP has bestowed its international award, the 2009 Isaac Newton medal, on Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This award is made to any physicist, regardless of subject area, background or nationality, for outstanding contributions to physics. Guth receives it "for his invention of the inflationary-universe model, his recognition that inflation would solve major problems confronting then-standard cosmology and his calculation, with others, of the spectrum of density fluctuations that gave rise to structure in the universe".
British cosmologist John Barrow of Cambridge University is honoured with the Kelvin medal for outstanding contributions to the public understanding of physics. He receives the award "for the promotion and explanation of physics and astronomy to young people and the general public through many books, lectures, broadcasts and drama with special reference to their wider cultural and historical importance".
University of Technology Dresden bestows honorary degree on Dorfan
In a ceremony on 6 July, SLAC's former director Jonathan Dorfan was honoured by the University of Technology (TU) Dresden with the degree Doctor rerum naturalium honoris causa. The award recognizes his merits in planning, constructing and operating the electron–positron collider PEP-II and the experiment BaBar, which have led to the discovery of the asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the decays of b quarks.
The particle-physics group of TU Dresden was the first German group to join SLAC's project for a B-meson factory, followed later by university groups from Bochum, Rostock, Dortmund, Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, Berlin and Mainz. The ceremony included a welcome address by Michael Kobel on behalf of the Faculty of Science and the laudation by Klaus Schubert – both of whom are members of the BaBar Collaboration.
NIM A awards go to young scientists
Stefan Rossegger of TU Graz and CERN and Yusuke Uchiyama of the International Center for Elementary Particle Physics, Tokyo University, received Nim A Young Scientist awards for the best presentations at the 11th Pisa Meeting on Advanced Detectors. Rossegger, who works on the ALICE experiment, presented a poster on "An analytical approach to space-charge distortions for time-projection chambers" (TPCs). His solution for the given TPC geometry is faster and more accurate than finite-element analysis.
Uchiyama works on the MEG experiment at PSI, which is searching for lepton-flavour violation in muon decay. His poster was on "Gamma-ray reconstruction with liquid-xenon calorimeter for the MEG Experiment". It described reconstruction methods and techniques for background rejection.