ALICE: from LS1 to readiness for Run 2
It is nearly two years since the beams in the LHC were switched off and Long Shutdown 1 (LS1) began. Since then, a myriad of scientists and engineers have been repairing and consolidating the ...
Detection techniques for future neutrino observatories
The discovery of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos initially announced by IceCube in 2013 provided an added boost to the planning for new, larger facilities that could study the signal in detail and...
OECD report praises innovation at CERN
In early June, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published their Global Science Forum (GSF) report, “The Impacts of Large Research Infrastructures on Economic Inn...
Advanced radiation detectors in industry
The European Physical Society’s Technology and Innovation Group (EPS-TIG) was set up in 2011 to work at the boundary between basic and applied sciences, with annual workshops organized in col...
A new focus on forward muons for the ALICE upgrade programme
The ALICE experiment, with its state-of-the-art detection systems, produced a wealth of results during Run 1 of the LHC (2009–2013) – driving a new impetus in the field of heavy-ion collisions. W...
ALICE through a gamma-ray looking glass
The ALICE experiment is optimized to perform in the environment of heavy-ion collisions at the LHC, which can produce thousands of particles. Its design combines an excellent vertex resolution with a ...
ALICE looks to the future
After more than three years of highly successful operation, the ALICE detector is about to undergo a major programme of consolidation and upgrade during the Long Shutdown 1 (LS1) of CERN’s ac...
Particle identification in ALICE boosts QGP studies
Under extreme conditions of temperature and/or density, hadronic matter “melts” into a plasma of free quarks and gluons – the so-called quark–gluon plasma (QGP). To create these condit...
Progress in applied superconductivity at KEK
Fig. 1. The interaction-region quadrupole (IRQ) magnet integrated into the BELLE detector and its solenoid magnet at KEKB, top. The Japanese High-Energy Accelerator Research Organization, or KE...
AMS takes off for Kennedy Space Center
The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), an experiment that will search for antimatter and dark matter in space, left Geneva on 26 August on the penultimate leg of its journey to the International Spac...
