Accelerator conferences go international
In 2007 the European Particle Accelerator Conference (EPAC) and its older sister the North American Particle Accelerator Conference (PAC), both on a two-year cycle, agreed to join the Asian Particle Accelerator Conference (APAC), on a three-year cycle (CERN Courier November 2007 p29). The International Particle Accelerator Conference series (IPAC) will in future move between Asia, Europe and North America, intermeshed with a North American PAC in odd years.
Preparations for the first conference in the new series are now in full swing. IPAC '10 will take place in Kyoto, Japan, on 23–28 May 2011. It will be followed by IPAC '11 in San Sebastian, Spain, on 5–9 September 2011, and IPAC '12 in New Orleans, US, on 20–26 May 2012.
While the scientific programme of IPAC '10 will resemble earlier APAC and EPAC events – with three half-day plenary sessions, a maximum of two sessions in parallel the rest of the time, and poster sessions completely de-coupled from the oral sessions – the organization is taking on a far more international flavour. The organizing committee of IPAC '10 and also that of IPAC '11, which has just started work, are composed 50% from the region and 50% from the rest of the world. Particular care is being taken to ensure that the scientific programme covers accelerator developments worldwide, catering for participants from all geographic and scientific horizons.
This move to a truly international event, as much in the style of organization as in the scientific programme, means the new series is eligible for sponsorship by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, an international governmental organization founded in 1922 to stimulate and facilitate international co-operation in physics and the worldwide development of science. The world is growing smaller and accelerator projects are increasingly more diversified and global. Cheaper international travel will most likely result in a larger proportion of international participants at future conferences and IPAC is gearing up to meet the challenge of making future events even more productive and exciting than the former regional ones.
• For more about IPAC '10, see www.ipac10.org, and for news on related events, see www.jacow.org/.
Alexei Onuchin reaches milestone 75th birthday
One of the pioneers of colliding-beam experiments, Alexei Onuchin, celebrated his 75th birthday on 3 October.
Onuchin has spent his scientific career at the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics (BINP), which he joined in 1959. He was one of the leaders of the experiment at the VEPP-2 e+e– collider – working at an energy 1.18–1.34 GeV in 1970 – that discovered multihadron production (simul-taneously with Frascati), one of the first indications of the existence of light quarks. He later became leader of the MD–1 experiment at the VEPP–4 e+e– collider operating in the γ resonance energy range in the years 1980–1985. One of its well known results is the measurement of the cutoff of large impact parameters in bremsstrahlung (the MD effect).
A founding father of the KEDR detector at the upgraded VEPP–4M collider, Onuchin suggested, tested and constructed a 30 tonne liquid-krypton calorimeter, together with younger colleagues. His group also constructed a drift chamber using "cold" dimethyl-ether gas providing 100 μm resolution. Onuchin is also one of the leaders of the Novosibirsk group in the BaBar experiment at SLAC.
His long-standing love for Cherenkov counters is well known. Starting with pioneering water threshold counters in the experiment at VEPP–2, Onuchin later developed the MD–1 Cherenkov counters filled with ethylene pressurized to 25 bars and suggested the aerogel counters with wavelength shifters (ASHIPH) that are now operating in KEDR.
He is currently working on the development of a novel focusing aerogel-ring imaging Cherenkov detector. For his many years of work in this field, Onuchin received the Cherenkov prize of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2008.