Vacation students arrive for the summer months
Once again this year some 100 students have chosen to spend their summer vacation working at CERN. For periods varying from two to four months they will mingle with the CERN personnel, studying physics problems, take part in an experiment and follow a series of lectures, instead of sun-bathing on a beach at the seaside.
The students come from the 13 member states of CERN and were carefully chosen from over 350 who applied. They have all spent at least three years at University specializing in physics, electrical engineering, electronics or mathematics. During their stay they join one or other of the Divisions: proton synchrotron, synchrocyclotron, track chambers, nuclear physics apparatus, storage rings, data handling and health physics, where they will be involved in the everyday work. They can, in particular, take part in the development and make use of the experimental equipment, become familiar with the use of electronic computers and work on the new accelerator projects.
This annual invasion is not designed to step up the output of work from CERN but rather to give the young university students the opportunity to gain experience in the field of their studies, to learn to work in a team, to have some foretaste of their future careers in research laboratories and in industry.
In addition, the students have the chance to attend a series of lectures and special courses given by CERN specialists, including some of the Directors of Departments and Division Heads, on subjects such as computer programming, accelerator technology, theoretical physics, experiments in sub-nuclear physics, etc.
In this way, the 100 vacation students will take part in the life of a big laboratory such as CERN, and will be able to improve their theoretical grounding through the lectures and their practical experience though their work in the different Divisions which receive them.
• From the article on p128.
International physics school in Sicily
The fifth Course of the International School of Physics "Ettore Majorana" took place between 1 and 14 July at Erice (Trapani) Sicily. Some 127 participants came from 62 laboratories in 30 countries. There were 34 hours of lectures, 15 seminars and 30 discussion sessions.
The lectures covered: weak and electromagnetic currents (N Cabibbo, CERN); the theory of soft pions (S Coleman, Harvard University, US); the relativistic quark model of baryons and mesons (M Gell-Mann, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, US); chiral symmetry and strong interactions (S Glashow, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, US); meson resonances (I Hughes, University of Glasgow, UK); the administration of radiative corrections (B Touschek, Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati, ltaly); the method of the algebra of fields and that of phenomenological Lagrangians (B Zumino, New York University, US).
Fifteen seminars followed the lectures and gave B Gregory, CERN, W Jentschke, DESY, RFA, and G H Stafford, of Rutherford High Energy Laboratory, UK, the opportunity of reporting various experiments carried out in their respective laboratories.
The "Provincia di Catania" where Ettore Majorana was born [a renowned theorist who in 1938, at the age of 31, mysteriously disappeared for ever], has established an annual prize called Premio lnternazionale di Fisica "Ettore Majorana" to honour his memory. This prize was given, on this first occasion, to Murray Gell-Mann for his "extraordinary contribution of original and fundamental ideas which have remarkably extended our understanding of the fundamental properties of matter … the following deserve special mention: 1) the law of strangeness conservation; 2) the theoretical prediction of the existence of the K02 meson; 3) the eight-fold way theory of approximate symmetry; 4) the algebra of currents; 5) the notion of quarks. All of these ideas concern the symmetry properties of elementary particles, a subject which Ettore Majorana investigated with such brilliancy and enthusiasm."
• From the article on pp148–150.
Compiler's Note
Summertime and the living is… crowded. Each year vacation students – now called summer students – arrive at CERN along with those migratory visitors who regularly appear about now. This summer, with so many people already on-site for LHC data-taking and the transformation of the Restaurant 1 area in full swing, the premium for ever-popular al fresco dining is at an all-time high.
Although better known for its research programme than for its advanced educational courses, CERN will this year welcome 149 students from the 20 member states and 49 from non-member states. There must be some 5000 ex-CERN summer students spread around the world by now. What are they all doing? Finding out could highlight important socioeconomic spin-offs from pure research. The new CERN Global Network is making use of the most notable example – the World Wide Web – to enable contact with the community of former "CERNois/es". So, past students, make yourselves known.