By Gerard M Crawley and Eoin O’Sullivan
Imperial College Press
This book is designed as a “how to” guide to writing grant proposals for competitive peer review. Nowadays researchers are often required to apply to funding agencies to secure a budget for their work, but being a good researcher does not necessarily imply being able to write a successful grant proposal. Typically, the additional skills and insights needed are learnt through experience.
This timely book aims to guide researchers through the whole process, from conceiving the initial research idea, defining a project and drafting a proposal, through to the review process and responding to reviewers’ comments. Drawing on their own experience as reviewers in a number of different countries, the authors provide many important tips to help researchers communicate both the quality of their research and their ability to carry it out and manage a grant. The authors illustrate their guidelines with the help of many examples of both successful and unsuccessful grant applications, and emphasise key messages with quotes from reviewers.
The book also contains valuable advice for primary investigators on how to set up their research budget, manage people and lead their project. Two appendices at the end of the volume provide website addresses and references, as well as an outline of how to organise a grant competition.
Aimed primarily at early career researchers applying for their first grant, the book will also be beneficial to more experienced scientists, to the administrators of universities and institutions that support their researchers during the submission process, and to the staff of recently established funding organisations, who may have little experience in organising peer-review competitions.
This 235 page book is dedicated to the ITER tokamak, the deuterium–tritium fusion reactor under construction in France, which aims to investigate the feasibility of fusion power. The book provides a concise overview of the state-of-the-art plasma physics involved in nuclear-fusion processes. Definitely not an introductory book – not even for a plasma-physics graduate student – it would be useful as a reference text for experts. Across 10 chapters, the authors describe the physics learned from previous tokamak projects around the world and the application of that experience to ITER.
After an introduction to the ITER project, the conventional magneto-hydrodynamic description of plasma physics is discussed, with strong emphasis on the geometry of the divertor (located at the bottom of the vacuum vessel to extract heat and reduce contamination of the plasma from impurities). Chapter 3 deals with the problem of alpha-particle distribution, which is a source of Alfven and cyclotron instabilities. Edge localised mode (ELM) instabilities associated with the divertor’s magnetic separatrix are also discussed. Conditions of turbulent transport are assumed throughout, so chapter 4 provides a general review of our (mainly experimental) knowledge of the topic. Chapters 5 and 6 are specific to the ITER design because they describe the ELM instabilities in the ITER tokamak and the solutions adopted for their control. Concluding the part dedicated to the fusion-reactor transient phase, steady-state operations and plasma diagnostics techniques are described in chapters 7 and 8, respectively.
The tokamak’s complex magnetic field is able to confine charged particles in the fusion plasma but not neutral particles. Neutron bombardment of surfaces can be viewed as an inconvenience, making it necessary to ensure the walls are radiation hard, or an advantage, turning the surfaces into a breeding blanket to generate further tritium fuel. Radiation hardness of the tokamak walls is discussed in chapter 9, while chapter 10 explains how ITER will transmute a lithium blanket into tritium via bombardment with fusion neutrons. The IFMIF (International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility) project, conceived for fusion-material tests and still in its final design phase, is also briefly presented. The book closes with some predictions about the expectations to be fulfilled by ITER, before proceeding to the design of DEMO – a future tokamak for electrical-energy production.
In summary, ITER Physics is a book for expert scientists who are looking for a compact overview of the latest advances in tokamak physics. I appreciated the exhaustive set of references at the end of each chapter, since it provides a way to go deeper into concepts not exhaustively explained in the book. Plasma-fusion physics is complex, not only because it is a many-body problem but also because our knowledge in this field is limited, as the authors stress. I would have appreciated more graphic material in some parts: in order to fully understand how a fusion reactor works, one has to think in 3D, so schematics are always helpful.
By Gregory V Vereshchagin and Alexey G Aksenov
Cambridge University Press
This book provides an overview of relativistic kinetic theory, from its theoretical foundations to its applications, passing through the various numerical methods used when analytical solutions of complex equations cannot be obtained.
Kinematic theory (KT) was born in the 19th century and aims to derive the properties of macroscopic matter from the properties of its constituent microscopic particles. The formulation of KT within special relativity was completed in the 1960s.
Relativistic KT has traditional applications in astrophysics and cosmology, two fields that tend to rely on observations rather than experiments. But it is now becoming more accessible to direct tests due to recent progress in ultra-intense lasers and inertial fusion, generating growing interest in KT in recent years.
The book has three parts. The first deals with the fundamental equations and methods of the theory, starting with the evolution of the basic concept of KT from nonrelativistic to special and general relativistic frameworks. The second part gives an introduction to computational physics and describes the main numerical methods used in relativistic KT. In the third part, a range of applications of relativistic KT are presented, including wave dispersion and thermalisation of relativistic plasma, kinetics of self-gravitating systems, cosmological structure formation, and neutrino emission during gravitational collapse.
Written by two experts in the field, the book is intended for students who are already familiar with both special and general relativity and with quantum electrodynamics.
Have you ever thought that batteries capable of providing energy over very long periods could be made with radioisotopes? Did you know that the bacterium deinococcus radiodurans can survive enormous radiation doses and, thanks to its ability to chemically alter highly radioactive waste, it could be potentially employed to clean up radioactively contaminated areas? And do you believe that cockroaches have an extremely high radiation tolerance? Apparently, the latter is a myth. These are a few of the curiosities contained in this “all that you always wanted to know about radioactivity” book from Grupen and Rodgers. It gives a comprehensive overview of the world of radioactivity and radiation, from its history to its risks for humans.
The book begins by laying the groundwork with essential, but quite detailed (similar to a school textbook), information about the structure of matter, how radiation is generated, how it interacts with matter and how it can be measured. In the following chapters, the book explores the substantial benefits of radioactivity through its many applications (not only positive, but also negative and sometimes questionable) and the possible risks associated with its use. The authors deal mainly with ionising radiation; however, in view of the public debate about other kinds of radiation (such as mobile-phone and microwave signals), they include a brief chapter on non-ionising radiation. Also interesting are the final sections, provided as appendices, which summarise the main technologies of radiation detectors as well as the fundamental principles of radiation protection. In the latter, the rationale behind current international rules and regulations, put in place to avoid excessive radiation exposure for radiation workers and the general public, is clearly explained.
This extensive topic is covered using easily understood terms and only elementary mathematics is employed to describe the essentials of complex nuclear-physics phenomena. This makes for pleasant reading intended for the general public interested in radioactivity and radiation, but also for science enthusiasts and inquisitive minds. As a bonus, the book is illustrated with eye-catching cartoons, most of them drawn by one of the authors.
The book emphasises that radiation is everywhere and that almost everything around us is radioactive to some degree: there is natural radioactivity in our homes, in the food that we eat and the air that we breathe. Radiation from the natural environment does not present a hazard; however, radiation levels higher than the naturally occurring background can be harmful to both people and the environment. These artificially increased radiation levels are mainly due to the nuclear industry and have therefore risen substantially since the beginning of the civil-nuclear age in the 1950s. This approach helps readers to put things in perspective and allows them to compare the numbers and specific measurement quantities that are used in the radiation-protection arena. These quantities are the same used by the media, for instance, to address the general public when a radiation incident occurs.
Not only will this book enrich the reader’s knowledge about radioactivity and radiation, it will also provide them with tools to better understand many of the related scientific issues. Such comprehension is crucial for anyone who is willing to develop their own point of view and be active in public debates on the topic.
Maryam Mirzakhani, mathematics professor at Stanford University and Fields Medalist in 2014, passed away on 14 July aged just 40. She was the first woman and first Iranian citizen to win a Fields Medal.
Born in Teheran, at high-school age Maryam participated in two International Mathematics Olympiads, winning gold medals both times – once with a perfect score. After undergraduate studies at Sharif University, she moved to the US to enroll in a PhD course at Harvard University, under the supervision of Fields Medalist Curtis McMullen. Before joining Stanford in 2008 she was a fellow of the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge (MA) and a professor at Princeton University.
Since her early career as a mathematician, Maryam obtained fundamental results on moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces and inhomogeneous space dynamics – topics at the intersections between mathematics and physics. One of her first major results was a counting theorem on closed geodesics that unexpectedly led to a new proof of Witten’s conjecture, related to the partition function of two-dimensional quantum gravity.
As Harvard string theorist Cumrun Vafa recalled in his speech at a memorial event held in August, results of Maryam’s work and the techniques she applied in her proofs might be applied to solve problems in string theory. Riemann surfaces are natural ingredients in string theory, where they appear both as 2D world-sheets of strings dynamically evolving in space–time, as well as 2D internal manifolds on which the theory is compactified to reduce its original 10 or 11 dimensions to a more familiar 4D scenario.
Both applications of Riemann surfaces are of great interest to theoretical physicists. Ongoing research in CERN’s theory department directly investigates string world-sheet and scattering amplitudes, as well as supersymmetric field theories, which are constructed through geometric engineering of branes wrapping Riemann surfaces. Maryam’s approach to moduli spaces provided powerful tools that, in the future, could lead to major advances in theoretical physics.
The premature departure of Maryam Mirzakhani represents a huge loss for the scientific community, not just for her scientific excellence. Winning a Fields Medal not only highlights the academic achievement of the recipient but, as Terrence Tao (Fields Medalist, UCLA) wrote in a note about Maryam Mirzakhani, it also promotes the recipient to a role model. In the case of Maryam Mirzakhani this was definitely true: as a female mathematician and the first woman to win a Fields Medal, she will remain a reference figure for future generations of female scientists.
In addition to an extraordinary scientific career, particularly noticeable were her generosity and humble personality.
Al attended the US Naval Reserve Midshipmenʼs School at the University of Notre Dame in 1945 and served as a commissioned lieutenant in the US Naval Reserve through 1947. By 1950 he had received undergraduate and masters degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1955 he completed his PhD at the Carnegie Institute of Technology.
A career particle physicist at Berkeley Lab, located on the hill above the UC Berkeley campus, Al wrote his first paper for what was then the Radiation Laboratory in 1949. He wrote his final paper in 1991 at what had become the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL).
Al was a brilliant scientist who designed the accelerator lattice for the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), in particular inventing the “diamond bypass” to allow two beams to be injected and aborted from just one straight section. His career also included work on the Tevatron, the asymmetric B-Factory at SLAC’s PEP-II accelerator and SYNCH – a computational tool used extensively at particle-physics labs around the world and for which he held a patent. He contributed to the design and orbit theory of the following machines: the Bevatron, Magnetic Mirror Fusion Reactors, 88-inch Cyclotron, Advanced Light Source (ALS), Fermilab Proton Synchrotron, the Large Proton–Proton Storage Rings LSR (CERN), ISABELLE (BNL), and the High Energy Heavy Ion Facility SUMATRAN (Japan).
Al was a sweet, kind, generous man who made friends easily and kept them for life. He loved to travel and was especially drawn to the culture and people of Asia. He loved the performing arts and was a patron of the San Francisco Opera, the San Francisco Symphony and the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. He was a dedicated philanthropist, supporting some 200 environmental, human-rights and performing-arts organisations in his later years.
Physicist, teacher, mentor, world traveller, sailor, philanthropist and above all a dear friend, Al enriched many lives during his 92 years.
On 14 September, CERN injected a beam of partially ionised xenon atoms into the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) and kept it circulating for a short period. The successful demonstration, carried out by the SPS operations and radio-frequency teams, is the first of a series of experimental steps to explore the feasibility of a gamma-ray source with an intensity several orders of magnitude higher that those currently in operation.
Earlier this year, CERN’s accelerator complex demonstrated its flexibility by producing a beam of fully ionised xenon atoms for the fixed-target experiment NA61, which studies the physics of strong interactions. Profiting from this achievement, the gamma-factory study group – which is part of CERN’s Physics Beyond Colliders study – requested dedicated beam tests with partially ionised xenon atoms in the SPS. The beam was composed of xenon nuclei carrying 15 out of the 54 electrons present in the neutral atom, the missing 39 electrons having been stripped off before reaching the SPS.
The xenon beams injected into the SPS are the most fragile of any beam so far accelerated to, and stored at, ultra-relativistic energies at CERN. A loss of even a single electron changes the magnetic rigidity of the stored particles and leads to beam loss. The losses for the xenon-39 beam due to interactions of the beam with the residual gas in the SPS vacuum pipe were expected to be severe, and the tests confirmed that the beam lifetime is indeed short (of the order of one second). However, the lifetime is expected to be significantly higher for lead beams with only one or two attached electrons, which are the principal candidates to drive the high-energy gamma factory. Tests with lead atoms will be carried out next year in parasitic mode during the LHC’s heavy-ion programme, when the CERN accelerator teams aim not only to inject partially ionised lead atoms into the SPS but also into the LHC.
Light source
An eventual gamma factory would use beams of highly ionised atoms to drive a novel type of light source. The idea is to insert the ion beams into a storage ring and illuminate them with a laser that excites the electrons to a higher energy state, leading to spontaneous emission of secondary photons. In this scheme, the initial laser-photon frequency is boosted by a factor of up to 4γ2L, where γL is the Lorentz factor of the ion beam. With the LHC as a storage ring, photons in the energy range 1–400 MeV would therefore be possible. Such a source of gamma rays would open many scientific opportunities, such as precision atomic electroweak physics with high-Z hydrogen-like atoms, dark-matter searches using photon beams, and neutron dipole moment and neutron–antineutron oscillations. It would also act as a test bed for a future neutrino factory or a TeV-scale muon collider, says the team.
Meanwhile, independent activities during machine-development periods this year will see xenon atoms injected and brought into collision in the LHC. “The beauty of the operation mode of the CERN accelerator complex is not only that the xenon-39 beam tests in the SPS could be done with no influence on the LHC pp operation, but that they could be done concurrently to injecting and accelerating other types of beam in the SPS – e.g. two cycles for the fixed-target programme and one parasitic cycle for xenon-39,” says Witold Krasny of the gamma-factory study group.
CERN’s Physics Beyond Colliders initiative was launched in 2016 to explore the opportunities offered by the CERN accelerator complex and infrastructure “to get new insights into some of today’s outstanding questions in particle physics through projects complementary to high-energy colliders and other initiatives in the world” (CERN Courier November 2016 p28).
A new user facility for accelerator R&D, the CERN Linear Electron Accelerator for Research (CLEAR), started operation in August and is ready to provide beam for experiments. CLEAR evolved from the former CTF3 test facility for the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC), which ended a successful programme in December 2016. Following approval of the CLEAR proposal, the necessary hardware modifications started in January and the facility is now able to host and test a broad range of ideas in the accelerator field.
CLEAR’s primary goal is to enhance and complement the existing accelerator R&D programme at CERN, as well as offering a training infrastructure for future accelerator physicists and engineers. The focus is on general accelerator R&D and component studies for existing and possible future accelerator applications. This includes studies of high-gradient acceleration methods, such as CLIC X-band and plasma technologies, as well as prototyping and validation of accelerator components for the high-luminosity LHC upgrade.
The scientific programme for 2017 includes: a combined test of critical CLIC technologies, continuing previous tests performed at CTF3; measurements of radiation effects on electronic components to be installed on space missions in a Jovian environment and for dosimetry tests aimed at medical applications; beam instrumentation R&D; and the use of plasma for beam focusing. Further experiments, such as those exploring THz radiation for accelerator applications and direct impedance measurements of equipment to be installed in CERN accelerators, are also planned.
The experimental programme for 2018 and beyond is still open to new and challenging proposals. An international scientific committee is currently being formed to prioritise proposals, and a user request form is available at the CLEAR website: cern.ch/clear.
In late August, the China Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS) produced its first neutron beam, representing an important milestone for the $280 million project. The world’s fourth pulsed spallation neutron source, following ISIS in the UK, SNS in the US and J-PARC in Japan, CSNS is located in the city of Dongguan in Guangdong province and is expected to become an important base for research and innovation in China and the surrounding region. CSNS entered construction in 2011 and is being built and operated by the Institute of High Energy Physics in collaboration with the Institute of Physics, both part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
A spallation neutron source uses intense pulses of protons to strike a target, producing a beam of neutrons that have been knocked out of the target nuclei. CSNS is driven by a 80 MeV H– linac and a 1.6 GeV rapid cycling synchrotron, providing a 100 kW proton beam. The protons strike a solid tungsten target and the emerging neutrons are slowed using three moderators, before being delivered to the instrumentation facilities. A second phase of the project, upgrading the linac to 250 MeV and the proton beam power to 500 kW, is planned for the near future.
At 10.56 a.m. on 28 August, a proton beam pulse from the accelerator collided with the tungsten target for the first time. Neutron detectors located at two of the facility’s 20 beamlines measured the neutron spectrum, showing that the neutron beam had been successfully produced. The spectrum was consistent with the prediction from Monte Carlo simulations, with a higher neutron yield than expected.
Construction of the first three neutron spectrometers is also complete. A general-purpose powder diffractometer will be used to study crystal and magnetic structures of materials, while a small-angle neutron-scattering instrument will probe structures such as polymers at the level of 1–100 nm. A third instrument, a multipurpose reflectometer, will analyse neutrons reflected from a sample to study the surface and interface structure of materials.
These and other instruments will soon be available to users from around the world for research in materials science and technology, life sciences, physics, the chemical industry, environment, energy and other fields. Commissioning of the spectrometers is under way, on track for the facility to open to users in the spring of 2018.
On 12 September, 56 servers left CERN bound for the SESAME light-source facility in Jordan. “These servers are a very valuable addition to the SESAME data centre,” said Salman Matalgah, head of IT at SESAME. “They will help ensure that we’re able to provide first-class computing support to our users.” Speaking for CERN, Charlotte Warakaulle, director for international relations, said: “After many other successful donations, it’s great that we can extend the list of beneficiaries to include SESAME: a truly inspiring project showcasing and building on scientific capacity in the Middle East and neighbouring regions.” Pictured are CERN’s head of IT Frédéric Hemmer (left), Charlotte Warakaulle and president of SESAME Council Rolf Heuer, with the servers packed and ready to go.
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