Vladimir Lobashev reaches 75th birthday
Vladimir Lobashev, experimentalist in nuclear and particle physics, celebrated his 75th birthday on 29 July.
The early part of his scientific career, at St Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, was dedicated mainly to fundamental neutron physics. His discoveries of several parity-violating effects in nuclear reactions with polarized thermal neutrons were instrumental in establishing the universality of weak interactions. He also designed novel methods of dealing with ultracold neutrons and obtained a limit on the neutron-dipole moment, which was the best in the world at the time.
In 1972 he moved to the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Troitsk, where he played a major role in designing the complex of intense beams of the Moscow Meson Factory. Lobashev is perhaps the best known for his experiment, Troitsk-NM, on the direct search for the mass of the electron–neutrino in tritium beta-decay, which together with the Mainz experiment produced the best limit on the neutrino mass. A co-inventor of the idea of the method used, he still leads the Troitsk-NM experimental team. The same idea is now being realized in the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino Experiment (KATRIN).
Cyclotron centre bids adieu to Bikash Sinha
Kolkata's Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre (VECC) celebrated its foundation on 16 June – 32 years to the day since the first beam from the room-temperature machine was extracted in June 1977. The occasion was made more special as members of staff, both of the cyclotron centre and the adjoining Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, bid adieu to Bikash Sinha in a fitting farewell. He has contributed significantly to these two institutions over the years. Sinha, who was director of the Saha Institute for 17 years and director of the VECC for the past 25 years, retired from his post at the end of June.
Sinha completes a remarkable quarter century, particularly with the recent sighting of the internal beam of the superconducting cyclotron and, more significantly, the collaboration with CERN at the SPS and now at LHC, as well as with Brookhaven National Laboratory. The success of the Photon Multiplicity Detector (PMD) at the SPS, at RHIC at Brookhaven and in the ALICE experiment at the LHC, has made the PMD and the dimuon spectrometer significant landmarks of Indo–CERN collaboration.
A special workshop, "25 years with professor Bikash Sinha", was organized to commemorate this unique occasion. The meeting consisted of talks on topics that have been the focus of his interest, covering a broad area, including: the quark–gluon plasma, nuclear physics, the anomalous helium abundance from thermal springs, cyclotrons (especially superconducting cyclotrons), the radioactive ion-beam project and radiation medicine.
During the workshop, the governor of the State of West Bengal, Gopal Krishna Gandhi (a grandson of Mahatma Gandhi) delivered a fascinating lecture on climate change. In the fourth Raja Ramanna memorial lecture at the cyclotron centre Anil Kakodkar, chairman of India's Atomic Energy Commission, outlined the need of the appropriate technology for a better tomorrow. Jürgen Schukraft of CERN, Hans Gutbrod of GSI and Tim Hallman of Brookhaven were present alongside an array of distinguished Indian scientists. Rakesh Bhandari, executive director of VECC and project director of the Superconducting Cyclotron, welcomed the guests and staff.