Jobs – Page 233 of 521

A lifetime in biophysics

Eleanor Blakely, talking at CERN on 60 years of particle therapy.
Image credit: Henry Barnard/CERN.

Shake hands with Eleanor Blakely and you are only one handshake away from John Lawrence – a pioneer of nuclear medicine and brother of Ernest Lawrence, the Nobel-prize-winning inventor of the cyclotron, the first circular particle accelerator. In 1954 – the year that CERN was founded – John Lawrence began the first use of proton beams from a cyclotron to treat patients with cancer. Twenty years later, as a newly fledged biophysicist, Blakely arrived at the medical laboratory that John had set up at what is now the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. There she came to know John personally and was to become established as a leading expert in the use of ion beams for cancer therapy.

With ideas of becoming a biology teacher, Blakely went to the University of San Diego in 1965 to study biology and chemistry. While there, she spent a summer as an intern at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and developed an interest in radiation biology. Excelling in her studies, she was encouraged to move towards medicine after obtaining her BA in 1969. However, armed with a fellowship from the Atomic Energy Commission that allowed her to choose where to go next, she decided to join the group of Howard Ducoff, a leading expert in radiation biology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Because she was fascinated by basic biological mechanisms, Ducoff encouraged her to take up biophysics, a field so new that he told her that it was “whatever you want to make it”. A requirement of the fellowship was to spend time at a national laboratory, so Blakely was assigned a summer at Berkeley Laboratory, where she worked on NASA-funded studies of proton radiation on murine skin and subsequent changes in blood electrolytes, which led to a Masters’ degree in biophysics.

After gaining her PhD studying the natural radioresistance of cultured insect cells, Blakely joined the staff at Berkeley Lab in 1975, arriving soon after the Bevatron – the accelerator where the antiproton was discovered – had been linked up to the heavy-ion linear accelerator, the SuperHILAC. The combination, known as the Bevalac, could accelerate ions as heavy as uranium to high energies. Blakely joined the group led by Cornelius Tobias. His research included studies related to the effects of cosmic rays on the retina, for which he exposed his own eye to ion beams to confirm his explanation of why astronauts saw light flashes during space flight. “It was a spectacular beginning, seeing my boss getting his eye irradiated,” Blakely recalls. For her own work, Tobias showed her a theoretical plot of the stopping power versus range for the different ion beams available at Berkeley. Her task was to work out which would be the best beam for cancer therapy. “I had no idea how much work that was going to be,” she says, “and it is still not settled!”

Thirty years before Blakely arrived at Berkeley, Robert Wilson, later founding director of Fermilab, had been working there with Ernest Lawrence when he realized that because protons and heavier ions deposit most of their energy near the end of their range in matter – the famous “Bragg peak” – they offered the opportunity of treating deep-seated tumours while minimizing damage to surrounding tissue (CERN Courier December 2006 p17). Assigned the task of studying the biological effectiveness of a variety of particles and energies available from Berkeley’s accelerators, Blakely irradiated dishes of human cell cultures, working along increasing depths of the Bragg peak for the various beams under different conditions. In particular, by spreading the energy of the incident particles the team could broaden the Bragg peak from a few millimetres to several centimetres.

The studies revealed that for carbon and neon ions, in the region before the Bragg peak there was a clear difference in cell survival under aerobic (oxygen) or hypoxic (nitrogen) conditions, while in the Bragg peak the relative biological effectiveness, as measured by cell survival, was more independent of oxygen than for X-rays or γ rays (Blakely et al. 1979). This boded well for the use of these ions in treating tumours, because many tumour cells are resistant to radiation damage under hypoxic conditions. For argon and silicon, however, the survival curves in oxygen and nitrogen already indicated high cell killing and a reduced oxygen effect in the entrance region of the Bragg curve before the peak, indicating that at higher atomic number, these ions were already too damaging and did not afford the radioprotection of the particles with lower atomic number in the beam entrance. The work had important ramifications for the development of hadron therapy today: while Berkeley went on to use neon ions for treatments, therapy with carbon ions was to become of major importance, first in Japan and then in Europe (CERN Courier December 2011 p37).

At Berkeley, she was plunged into a world of physics. “I had to learn to talk to physicists,” she recalls. “I had only basic physics from school – I learnt a lot of particle physics.” And in common with many physicists, it is a desire to understand how things work that has driven Blakely’s research, with the added attraction of being able to help people. Her interest lies deep in the cell cycle and what happens to the DNA, for example, as a function of radiation exposure. While her work has been of great value in helping oncologists, it is the fundamental processes that fascinate her as “a bench-top scientist”, to use her own words. “I’m interested in the body’s feedback mechanisms,” she explains.

That does not reduce her humanity. Some of the treatments at Berkeley used a beam of helium ions directed through the lens to destroy tumours of the retina. Blakely was devastated to learn that although the tumour was destroyed, the patients developed cataracts – a late radiation effect of exposure to the lens adjacent to some retinal tumours, which required lens-replacement surgery. As a result, she not only helped to propose a more complex technique to irradiate the tumours by directing the beam though the sclera (the tough, white outer layer of the eye) instead of the lens, but also became interested in the effects of radiation on the lens of the eye – a field in which she is a leading expert.

In 1993, the Bevalac was shut down, leaving Blakely and her colleagues at Berkeley without an accelerator with energies high enough for hadron therapy. “It was such an old machine,” she says. “Everyone had worked their hearts out to treat the patients.” The Bevalac had produced the heavier ion beams, while the 184-inch accelerator had produced beams of helium ions, and together almost 2500 cancer patients had been treated.

With her interest in irradiation of the eye, Blakely followed her first group leader “into space” – at least as a “bench-top” scientist – with studies of the effects of low radiation doses for the US space agency, NASA. “In space, people are exposed to chronic low doses of radiation,” she explains. In particular, she has been studying heavy-ion-induced tumourigenesis in mice with a broad gene pool similar to humans, to evaluate any risks in space travel.

Given that hadron therapy began 60 years ago at Berkeley, it is striking that nowadays there are no treatment centres in the US that use nuclei any heavier than the single protons of hydrogen. Japan was the first country to have a heavy-ion accelerator built for medical purposes – the Heavy Ion Medical Accelerator in Chiba (HIMAC) that started in 1994 (CERN Courier July/August 2007 p17 and June 2010 p22). During the last 10 years, Europe has followed suit, with the Heidelberg Ion-Beam Therapy Centre in Germany, and the Centro Nazionale di Adroterapia Oncologica in Italy using carbon-ion beams on an increasing number of patients (CERN Courier December 2011 p37). Another new centre, MedAustron in Austria, is now reaching the commissioning phase (CERN Courier October 2011 p33). Blakely describes the situation in her homeland as “a tragedy – the technology emerged from the US but we don’t have the machines”. Part of the problem lies with the country’s health-care plan, she says. “The treatments are not yet reimbursable, and the government won’t support building machines.”

Nevertheless, there is a glimmer of hope, following a workshop on ion-beam therapy organized by the US Department of Energy and the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda in January 2013, with participants from medicine, physics, engineering and biology. P20 Exploratory Planning Grants for a National Center for Particle Beam Radiation Therapy Research in the US are now pending. “Sadly this doesn’t give us money to build a machine – legally the government isn’t allowed to do that – but the P20 can provide for infrastructure, research and networking once you have a machine,” Blakely explains. However, there is support for patients from the US to take part in randomized clinical trials – the “gold standard” for determining the best modality for treating a patient. At the same time, she envies the networking and other achievements of the European Network for Light Ion Hadron Therapy (ENLIGHT), co-ordinated at CERN, which promotes international R&D, networking and training (CERN Courier December 2012 p19). “Networking is really import but it wasn’t something they taught us at school,” she says, “and training for students and staff is essential for the use of hadron therapy to have a future….The many programmes that have been developed [by ENLIGHT] are extremely important and valuable, and I wish we had them in the US.”

Looking back on a career that spans 40 years, Blakely says: “It has been fulfilling, but a lot of work.” And what aspect is she most proud of? “Probably the paper from 1979,” she answers, “the result of many nights working at the accelerator.” When the focal point of hadron therapy moved to Japan, researchers there repeated her work. “They found the data were exactly reproducible,” she says with clear pleasure. Would she recommend the same work to a young person today? “With the current funding situation in the US,” she says, “I tell people that you have to love it more than eating – you need to be really committed.” Perhaps, one day, hadron therapy will return home, and the line of research begun by pioneers such as John Lawrence and Cornelius Tobias will inspire a new generation of people like Blakely.

CERN and UNESCO celebrate signing the CERN Convention

A round-table discussion on “Science for Peace”, moderated by journalist Katya Adler, centre, included, left to right, Zehra Sayers, co-chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the SESAME facility, Fernando Quevedo, director of ICTP, Jan van den Biesen, vice-president of Philips Research Public R&D Programs, and Alexei Grinbaum, researcher and philosopher, Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives.
Image credit: CERN-PHOTO-201407-133 – 87.

The convention that led to the establishment of the European Organization for Nuclear Research – CERN – was signed by 12 founding member states in Paris on 1 July 1953, under the auspices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The convention entered into force a little more than a year later, on 29 September 1954 – the official date of the laboratory’s foundation.

The convention establishing CERN was signed by 12 states, subject to ratification, at the sixth session of Council, which took place in Paris on 29 June–1 July 1953.
Image credit: CERN-HI-5307006.

CERN was created with a view to relaunching fundamental research in Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. Sixty years on, it has become one of the world’s most successful examples of scientific collaboration. After initial discussions between scientists in the late 1940s and the first official declarations encouraging scientific co-operation in Europe at the start of the 1950s, UNESCO was to play a vital role in establishing the new laboratory. Because one of the UN organization’s mandates was “to encourage the creation of regional scientific laboratories”, it was only fitting that CERN be created under its auspices. The eminent physicist Pierre Auger, who was then director of natural sciences at UNESCO, was a driving force in the negotiations that led to the laboratory’s foundation.

Starting in 1950, UNESCO organized several major conferences, during which the creation of a large nuclear-physics laboratory was discussed. In December 1951, the first resolution to found a European Nuclear Research Council – Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire in French, hence the acronym CERN – was adopted. The provisional council that was set up a few weeks later drew up the convention that would establish the future laboratory. After lengthy negotiations on the details, this was approved finally on 1 July 1953.

Participants in the event at the French Academy of Sciences in a scene reminiscent of 61 years ago, except for the smartphones.
Image credit: CERN-PHOTO-201407-140 – 2.

CERN and UNESCO have maintained close ties – a relationship that has allowed them to co-operate on many projects, mainly in the field of education. Today, the two organizations are working together on projects to establish digital libraries in Africa and to train science teachers in developing countries.

Speeches at the ceremony at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris included that of Agnieszka Zalewska, president of CERN Council.
Image credit: CERN-PHOTO-201407-133 – 49.

The commemoration ceremony, held in UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris, was opened by Maciej Nalecz, director of the UNESCO Division of Science Policy and Capacity Building, the division responsible for collaboration with CERN. This was followed by speeches from Irina Bokova, director-general of UNESCO, Rolf Heuer, director-general of CERN, and Agnieszka Zalewska, the president of CERN Council.

A hommage to François de Rose, a founding father of CERN who passed away earlier this year (*CERN Courier* May 2014 p24), was given by his daughter Laurence Rousselot.
Image credit: CERN-PHOTO-201407-133 – 58.

A round-table discussion on “Science for Peace” – the theme of CERN’s 60th anniversary – looked not only to the past, but also to how science can work to forge peace both now and in the future. One panellist – Fernando Quevedo from Guatemala, now director of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) – was particularly honoured to be part of the celebrations because his first postdoctoral work had been at CERN at a time when the laboratory had only just opened up to postdoctoral scientists from non-member states. The closing remarks came from Frédérick Bordry, CERN’s director of accelerators and technology.

ATLAS physicist Claire Lee, from South Africa, gave a passionate speech on how CERN is seen by a young person.
Image credit: CERN-PHOTO-201407-133 – 71.

Following the ceremony at UNESCO, a complementary event took place at the French Academy of Sciences in Paris. In 1949, the Nobel laureate Louis de Broglie, then perpetual secretary for the academy, launched the idea for a nuclear-physics laboratory on a European scale. It was therefore appropriate that the event on 1 July was opened by Catherine Bréchignac, current perpetual secretary, followed by Catherine Cesarky, who is vice-president of CERN Council.

• For a recording of the CERN–UNESCO event, visit http://cds.cern.ch/record/1713023.

Accelerators come into focus in Dresden

Résumé

Les accélérateurs à l’honneur à Dresde

La Conférence internationale sur les accélérateurs de particules (IPAC), associant sessions plénières, sessions parallèles et affichages, est la grande rencontre annuelle sur l’actualité des accélérateurs de particules. Il y est question aussi bien de l’expérience observée avec des machines opérationnelles que des études portant sur des concepts innovants. Cette année, IPAC’14 a eu lieu à Dresde, en juin, et a rassemblé plus de 1200 participants. Il y a été question de très petits et de très grands accélérateurs, à des énergies très faibles ou très élevées ; des idées ont été échangées sur les projets futurs visant à explorer les frontières de l’énergie, de l’intensité et de la brillance dans les décennies à venir. Les applications des accélérateurs et les interactions avec l’industrie ont également figuré en bonne place au programme.

Dresden’s International Congress Centre provided plenty of space for industrial exhibitors and poster sessions at IPAC’14.
Image credit: T Pritchard.

Research in the field of accelerators ranges from investigations into the underlying physics, to R&D into new materials and methods – a span that is matched by the breadth of interest in institutes and laboratories around the world. The International Particle Accelerator Conference (IPAC) provides an annual showcase for worldwide developments in particle accelerators, from recent experience with operational machines to studies for new and innovative concepts. This year the conference, which rotates between Europe, America and Asia, took place in Dresden – the Florence of the Elbe – on 15–20 June, attracting more than 1200 participants (see box).

Topics at IPAC’14 ranged from the smallest to the largest accelerators, from the lowest to the highest energies and encompassed ideas for future projects to explore frontiers in energy, intensity and brightness in the decades to come. This report selects a few highlights, with a slant towards the use of accelerators in particle physics.

Three years ago, when IPAC was last in Europe, CERN’s LHC had a starring role as the world’s high-energy accelerator (CERN Courier December 2011 p15). Now, as the teams begin to reawaken the LHC after its first long shutdown, interest is shifting towards pushing the high-energy frontier even further. The opening talk of the conference set the bar high, with a review of the challenges for big circular colliders, in particular the Future Circular Collider (FCC) design study (CERN Courier April 2014 p16). A tunnel with a circumference of 100 km equipped with 16-T magnets – about twice the field strength of the current LHC dipoles – would allow proton–proton collisions at 100 TeV in the centre of mass. An intermediate step could be a high-luminosity circular electron–positron collider operating at a centre-of-mass energy of up to 350 GeV or higher. A high-luminosity lepton–hadron collider using the same infrastructure would be another possibility (CERN Courier June 2014 p33). A tentative timeline for such a project would see physics starting around 2035, taking the field comfortably into the second half of the century. A study for a similar but smaller electron–positron collider – the CepC – is under way in China. With a circumference of 54 km and a beam energy of up to 120 GeV, it would be associated with a 30–50 TeV proton collider – the SppC.

Such schemes present many challenges, not least in the design of high-field magnets. The High Luminosity LHC project is already driving R&D on magnets based on a niobium-tin (Nb₃Sn) superconductor, which can sustain higher maximum fields than the standard niobium-titanium (Nb-Ti) compound. Collaborative work between laboratories in the US and CERN has made good progress on models and prototypes, both for interaction-region quadrupoles with a field gradient of 140 T/m and for dipoles with a nominal field of around 11 T. High-temperature superconducting materials offer the promise of reaching higher magnetic fields, but the challenge is to produce suitable cables for the magnetic-coil windings. In the case of Nb-Ti, the solution was the Rutherford cable structure. The cuprate superconductors BSCCO 2223 and REBCO are commercially available now as tape in lengths of up to a kilometre, and fields above 30 T have been achieved in solenoids. There has also been recent progress in the development of BSCCO 2212 round wire, which has been used to make Rutherford cables. By combining inserts of a high-temperature superconductor within outer windings of Nb₃Sn and Nb-Ti, magnets with fields of 25–30 T could be possible.

Catarina Biscari, second left, chaired the awards session and presented prizes to, left to right, Juan Esteban Müller, Agostino Marinelli, Mikael Eriksson and Tsumoru Shintake.
Image credit: IPAC’14.

At the opposite extreme from projects such as the FCC, the Extra Low Energy Antiproton ring (ELENA) at CERN will turn the concept behind accelerators on its head by decelerating antiprotons. The 30-m-circumference synchrotron will reduce the energy of beam from the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) from 5.3 MeV to 100 keV. The challenge here is to reduce the emittance in all three planes to allow a substantial increase in the antiproton capture efficiencies in the experiments. Design and construction are well under way, with a view to the first operation for physics in 2017.

The highest-energy accelerators for particle physics are few in number, but projects at the high-intensity frontier are increasingly required for many types of science. Here the figure of merit concerns beam power rather than energy. For neutron sources, beam power is already reaching 1 MW, while for heavy ions the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams under construction at Michigan State University aims to achieve 400 kW – two orders of magnitude greater than existing comparable facilities. The key technology in all cases is the use of superconducting radiofrequency (SRF) cavities. High powers also imply fast protection systems to prevent damage from beam loss, as well as innovative ideas for the particle sources, and there are also space-charge effects to overcome.

In particle physics, Fermilab aims to double the beam power of the Main Injector by using the Recycler to slip-stack protons during the ramp to reach 700 kW at 120 GeV. With 460 kW expected by the end of summer, the programme is on course to reach its target once RF upgrades to the Booster are complete in 2015 (CERN Courier December 2013 p24). At the Japan Proton Accelerator Complex, the plan is to reach a record intensity for a proton accelerator in the Rapid Cycling Synchrotron (RCS). Last year, the linac was upgraded from 181 MeV to the design value of 400 MeV. This allowed the RCS to demonstrate operation with beam power up to 550 kW, with low beam losses (< 0.5%) earlier this year. Operation at 1 MW is planned after the front end of the linac is replaced this summer.

High intensities, as with high energies, come at a price, and the design options have to balance the cost against technical risk. The European Spallation Source is designed as an intense source of neutrons provided by 5 MW of average proton beam power on the spallation target, with a peak of 125 MW for the study of rare processes (CERN Courier June 2014 p21). The cost, as for any high-intensity hadron linac, is driven by the RF system mainly. Based on long pulses, the ESS does not require a compressor ring and can deliver a given peak current at any beam energy. A review in 2013 led to an elegant solution centred on a reduction in energy and a corresponding increase in the gradient and peak current to keep costs down, while increasing the technical risk to some extent. However, the risk has been mitigated by reserving space to allow the installation of additional cryo-modules.

The Livingston plot for various types of RF-based particle accelerator, with the recent impressive increase in plasma acceleration shown to the right.
Image credit: R Assmann.

While the ESS will provide an intense source of neutrons for a variety of science, other facilities – the light sources – generate beams of X-rays or ultraviolet light. Synchrotron-radiation light sources, which began to emerge in the 1970s, are now being joined increasingly by linac-based free-electron lasers (FELs) to provide beams for studies ranging from materials science to biology. A large number of facilities have emerged during the past couple of decades in countries that are often quite small, forming an impressive worldwide community. The potential of existing facilities continues to be maximized through upgrades based on new technical innovations, while new facilities are being designed to push the limits even further.

Fourth-generation light sources aim at short time structures and ultra-high brightness by reducing the beam emittance down to the so-called diffraction limit. For storage rings this presents challenges in the design of ultra-low-emittance lattices. Machines are already being built with emittances of the order of 100 pm-rad – for example, MAX-IV in Lund, which is the first to use a highly technical multi-bend achromat lattice. Studies are also looking towards sub-10-pm-rad emittances for the future, although the solutions are likely to be costly.

The Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at SLAC – a FEL making use of SLAC’s famous linac – was the first hard X-ray FEL with a peak X-ray brightness 10 orders of magnitude higher than that of the best synchrotron radiation source (CERN Courier December 2010 p17). Following the recommendation of a subcommittee of the US Department of Energy for “a new light source with revolutionary capabilities”, the project for the upgrade to LCLS-II saw a radical change in August 2013. The new plan is to build a 4-GeV continuous-wave superconducting linac in the first kilometre of the existing tunnel, based on superconducting RF cavities with a nitrogen-doping surface layer to enable the required, unprecedented performance. A new undulator will receive electrons from either the new linac (to provide 1–5 keV photons) or the existing copper linac (to provide 1–25 keV X-rays). LCLS-II is expected to deliver its first light in September 2019.

A more specialized area for the application of accelerator technology is in cancer therapy, where the requirements for the beam – in terms of emittance, intensity and stability, for example – are different from those in a nuclear-physics laboratory. Size, weight and price are also important, stimulating the application of new developments in superconductivity and novel accelerator types. In addition, the movement of the body as a result of breathing, motion of the gut and changes in the patient’s position provide challenges in beam delivery and control. Coupling the latest imaging technologies with advanced computer-modelling methods can provide a way to tell a therapist where precisely to aim the radiation beams in the treatment of a range of common cancers.

Participants were offered a choice of technical tours, which included the ELBE high-power radiation source at HZDR.
Image credit: C Sutton.

Accelerator-based therapy with carbon ions is coming of age, since the first clinical trials began 20 years ago at the Heavy-Ion Medical Accelerator in Chiba, Japan (CERN Courier June 2010 p22). The experience gained there led to the construction of a pilot for a standard carbon-ion radiotherapy facility at Gunma University, and its successful operation in turn led to projects for two more facilities. In addition, the National Institute of Radiological Sciences is developing a new treatment procedure based on pencil-beam 3D scanning for both static and moving targets. This has been working successfully since May 2011 and will now be used in the Ion-beam Radiation Oncology Centre in Kanagawa.

Accelerators could also be applied in future to address the ongoing shortages in reactor-based supplies of molybdenum-99, which is used in hospitals to produce technetium-99m, a gamma emitter that is important in imaging. Alternative production methods could use conventional or laser-based particle accelerators.

Medical applications are one aspect of a wider industrial and commercial involvement in the field of accelerators that formed the topic of a special session entitled “Engagement with Industry”. Large-scale science projects require collaboration with industry for the “mass production” of large numbers of highly specialized components – 100 superconducting RF modules in the case of the European XFEL project – which presents challenges for both sides. On the other hand, applications such as particle therapy require the industrial development of commercially available accelerators. Another future market could be for electron linacs to provide radiation with photon energy up to 10 MeV for cargo and vehicle inspection. In addition, the traditional industrial exhibition, which took place during the first three days of the conference, attracted exhibitors from 93 companies who occupied 100 booths – the highest number for IPAC to date – to present their high-technology products and services to the delegates.

For many years, the measure of progress for accelerators has been the Livingston curve, but the straight line of the first 50 years has flattened out since the 1980s. One hope, following its proposal in 1979, has been to harness the high electric-field gradients that can be created in plasmas, and here a parallel almost-straight line is emerging on the Livingston plot (see figure above). The technique relies on high-power pulsed lasers or short electron bunches to excite ultra-strong wakefields in plasmas (CERN Courier November 2013 p17). Experiments have produced accelerating gradients from 10 GV/m up to 100 GV/m, and an absolute energy gain for electron beams of up to more than 40 GeV. However, the challenge remains to achieve a beam of useful quality, whether for science or for other applications, and initiatives are under way in various countries to investigate the underlying physics further.

Using the interaction of intense laser beams with a solid target as a means to accelerate protons and ions has a shorter history, following the discovery of such an effect in 2000. For some years the proton energy produced seemed limited to 70 MeV, but recent experiments have shown that the “laser break-out afterburner” mechanism can produce protons with energies up to 130 MeV. Other effort has gone into testing methods for producing useful intense, mono-energetic beams. These systems offer potential for opening up ion-beam physics and neutron science based on short-pulse lasers in universities, and could become ideal compact sources of ion beams for medical applications.

The programme at IPAC’14 highlighted the diverse demands that exist today on accelerator R&D, coming from a variety of fields – neutron sources, synchrotron radiation, medical applications, etc. Accelerator physics and technology is maturing into a research field in its own right and needs well-planned R&D programmes to provide long-term solutions to these requests. In this respect, the field has outgrown its origins in high-energy physics, but the conference ended back at the high-energy frontier, where recent results from the LHC and other facilities have had a significant impact on particle physics. However, outstanding questions remain, and these will continue the drive to higher energies. Projects such as the FCC with which the conference started are among the important options for the future – a future that seems set to see the breadth of accelerator research continue to grow.

• IPAC’14 was organized under the auspices of the European Physical Society Accelerator Group (EPS-AG), the Asian Committee for Future Accelerators (ACFA), the American Physical Society Division of Physics of Beams (APS-DPB) and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). For the programme and all of the contributions, see http://accelconf.web.cern.ch/AccelConf/IPAC2014/. In 2015, IPAC will return to North America and take place in Richmond, Virginia.

Participants, prizes and proceedings

IPAC’14 attracted more than 1200 full-time delegates from 36 different countries from all of the inhabited continents. The attendance of more than 90 young scientists from across the world was made possible through the sponsorship of societies, institutes and laboratories worldwide. Hosted by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), the conference was supported by the GSI Helmholtz-Zentrum für Schwerionenforschung, the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) and DESY.

Altogether there were 46 invited talks and 51 contributed oral presentations, and 1300 posters were scheduled during lively dedicated sessions at the end of each afternoon. A special student poster session took place during registration, the day before the conference opened. Prizes awarded by the European Physical Society’s Accelerator Group (EPS-AG) for the best student posters were presented later in the week during the special awards session. The prizes went to Eléonore Roussel of PhLAM/CERCLA and Marton Ady of CERN. Lieselotte Obst of HZDR received the EPS student poster prize for a Master’s Thesis student.

This year the awards session featured the EPS-AG prizes announced earlier this year (CERN Courier May 2014 p31). Agostino Marinelli of SLAC, Tsumoru Shintake of Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University and Mikael Eriksson of the Max-IV Laboratory were all at the conference to receive their prizes and make short presentations about their work. In addition, Juan Esteban Müller of CERN/EPFL received the EPS-AG prize – awarded to a student registered for a PhD or diploma in accelerator physics or engineering, or to a trainee accelerator physicist or engineer in the educational phase of their professional career, for the quality of their work and promise for the future – for his work on a “High-accuracy Diagnostic Tool for Electron Cloud Observation in the LHC based on Synchronous Phase Measurements”.

The proceedings of IPAC’14 are published on the JACoW website (www.jacow.org). Thanks to the work of the dynamic team and the careful preparations and guidance of Christine Petit-Jean-Genaz (recently retired from CERN), a pre-press version with close to 1300 contributions was published at mid-day on the last day of the conference. The final version, with the invaluable assistance of Volker Schaa of GSI and chair of JACoW, was published on the JACoW website just three weeks after the conference – another impressive record set by the JACoW collaboration.

A shining light in the Middle East

The SESAME building at Allan, 35 km north-west of Amman.
Image: SESAME.

CERN was conceived in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when two ambitions came together – to enable construction of scientific facilities that were beyond the means of individual countries, and to foster collaboration between peoples who had recently been at war. The network of CERN users, which already included scientists from Eastern Europe and the USSR during the Cold War, expanded in the LEP era. Today, scientists from 74 countries around the world work together on LHC experiments, producing good science and also gaining a better appreciation of each other’s cultures and values.

Following in CERN’s footsteps, many other pan-European scientific organizations have been established. However, the organization most closely modelled on CERN is perhaps SESAME, which shares CERN’s original aims and its governance structure. SESAME (Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East) is a third-generation light source under construction in Jordan, which will enable research in subjects ranging from biology and medical sciences through materials science, physics and chemistry to archaeology (much focussed on regional issues, e.g. related to the environment, health and agriculture). SESAME will foster collaboration between its very diverse members (currently Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Pakistan, the Palestinian Authority and Turkey), some of which are in conflict.

Following a suggestion by Gus Voss (DESY) and Herman Winick (SLAC), Sergio Fubini (CERN and University of Turin, who chaired a Middle East Scientific Co-operation group) and Herwig Schopper (director-general of CERN in the years 1981–1987) persuaded the German government to donate the components of the then soon-to-be-dismantled Berlin synchrotron BESSY I for use at SESAME. At a meeting at UNESCO in 1999, an interim council was established with Schopper as president, and a Jordanian (Khaled Toukan, who has served as director since 2005) and a Turk (Dincer Ülkü) as co-vice-presidents. Many others, e.g. Eliezer Rabinovici (Hebrew University), played important roles in SESAME’s history – see http://mag.digitalpc.co.uk/fvx/iop/esrf/sesamebrochure/.

Progress was initially slow due to lack of funding, but has accelerated since the SESAME building came into use in 2008. The (upgraded) BESSY I microtron injector is producing a 22 MeV beam, which has been successfully stored in the (refurbished) booster synchrotron. In 2002 it was decided to build a completely new 2.5 GeV main ring, which will be installed in 2015. Four “day-one” beamlines are being constructed, and SESAME is on track technically for commissioning to begin in early 2016.

The scientific programme has been developed in user meetings that bring together scientists in the region. Regional interest and scientific capacity have been fostered by an extensive training programme, involving schools, workshops and work at operating light sources and other laboratories, which has been supported generously by international agencies (particularly the IAEA), national agencies, professional scientific societies, the world’s synchrotron laboratories, and small charitable foundations.

SESAME was created bottom-up by scientists, who in some cases dragged their governments outside their comfort zones.

SESAME’s major problem is obtaining funding. The members became involved before it was agreed to build a new main ring with no obligation to contribute to the capital cost, which would be beyond the means of the many who have limited science budgets and find it very hard to pay their rapidly increasing contributions to operational costs. The richer countries in the region are currently unwilling to join for political reasons. However, Iran, Israel, Jordan and Turkey have each agreed to make voluntary contributions of $5 million, the EU has contributed €7.5 million (including €5 million for construction of the magnets of the main ring which, very helpfully, is being managed by CERN), Italy has pledged €2 million with more possibly to come, and many of the observers (Brazil, China, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Portugal, the Russian Federation, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the USA) have donated equipment that was surplus to requirements and support the training programme.

SESAME and CERN exemplify the “Science for Peace” mission of UNESCO, which served as a midwife for both, by fostering better understanding between scientists and engineers, building on the respect they develop for each other’s professional abilities. There are of course political hurdles to be jumped (visa restrictions prevent many of the members hosting SESAME meetings; sanctions are holding up payments by Iran; frequent changes of government have so far prevented Egypt joining the other voluntary donor members; etc). However, provided SESAME is a first-class scientific instrument, leading scientists from across the region will wish to work there and the political mission will look after itself.

SESAME needs funding for a hostel and a small conference centre, which could also be used for international meetings on issues such as water resources, agriculture or the environment. I dream that, as other European organizations followed CERN, this will give birth to other international organizations in the Middle East.

SESAME was created bottom-up by scientists, who in some cases dragged their governments outside their comfort zones, but it now needs external top-down help and encouragement to ensure timely completion. I hope that this article will inspire other countries (without geographical limitations) to join SESAME, and further contributions from governments in other regions, charitable foundations and philanthropists.

Un diplomate dans le siècle ; souvenirs et anecdotes

By François de Rose
Editions Fallois
Paperback: €10
Also available at the CERN bookshop

François de Rose est un grand témoin du XX^e siècle. Né en 1910, il a vécu les deux guerres qui déchirèrent l’Europe, la reconstruction de la paix, et tous les grands événements du monde d’hier. Diplomate, il a évolué dans les cercles des puissants et de leurs conseillers, et s’y fit des amis. Un jour de 1946, il fit la connaissance de Robert Oppenheimer et se lia d’amitié avec le célèbre physicien. Dès lors, il mit ses talents de diplomate au service des scientifiques qui voulaient reconstruire la science fondamentale en Europe. Il devint ainsi l’un des fondateurs du CERN. Il poursuivit ensuite sa carrière diplomatique, comme ambassadeur et spécialiste des questions stratégiques et militaires.

François de Rose n’écrivit jamais ses mémoires, bien que ses amis l’aient pressé de le faire. Mais à l’orée de ses 103 ans, il s’attela à la rédaction d’un recueil de souvenirs. Ce petit livre, intitulé Un diplomate dans le siècle, parut le 13 mars 2014. Dix jours plus tard, son auteur s’éteignait à Paris. Le CERN perdait son dernier fondateur.

François de Rose était un homme plein d’esprit, et un esprit libre. Son élégance et sa liberté de pensée scintillent au travers de ces anecdotes relatées au gré ” des caprices qui (lui) restent de mémoire “. François de Rose raconte ” un temps que les moins de cent ans ne peuvent pas connaître “, il égrène avec humour des histoires qui ont marqué sa vie. Du baisemain à l’impératrice Eugénie en 1920 à la fête d’anniversaire d’Henry Kissinger en 2013, il est tout à fait fascinant de parcourir cette existence longue et riche, celle de l’un de nos contemporains qui fut aussi le contemporain de George VI et d’Albert Einstein. Cet humaniste livre une foule d’anecdotes sur la diplomatie au XX^e siècle, les hasards heureux ou malheureux, les grandes phrases et les petites histoires qui construisent l’histoire avec un grand ” H “.

Le recueil fait une belle place au CERN, ” la plus belle plume à mon bicorne d’ambassadeur “, dit-il. François de Rose raconte ses rencontres avec Niels Bohr, Pierre Auger ou Robert Oppenheimer, de grands noms de la physique aujourd’hui entrés dans la littérature. Il relate comment il embrassa la cause du CERN et sa fierté d’avoir vu ce projet couronné de succès.

Écrit avec élégance, ce recueil s’apprécie comme une boîte de friandises, exquises et légères, aux saveurs d’antan.

Physics and Our World: Reissue of the Proceedings of a Symposium in Honor of Victor F Weisskopf

By Kerson Huang (ed.)
World Scientific
Hardback: £45
E-book: £34

As the proceedings of a symposium that took place in 1974 in honour of Victor Weisskopf — the well-known theoretician, who was CERN’s fifth director-general during the years 1961–1966 — this volume contains papers by leaders of physics at the time, including Max Delbrück, Murray Gell-Mann, Hans Bethe, Tsung-Dao Lee, Ben Roy Mottelson, Wolfgang K H Panofsky, Edward Purcell, Julian Schwinger, Stanisław M Ulam and others.

While some of the papers address problems in the philosophy of physics and in physics and society that are timeless in nature, the symposium has a further significance. It took place at a historic juncture of particle physics – the emergence of the Standard Model as the result of experiments that pointed to the existence of quarks. Some of the papers reflect both the pre-quark and post-quark points of view. For these reasons, these proceedings merit reissue and re-examination.

Microcosmos: The World of Elementary Particles. Fictional Discussions between Einstein, Newton, and Gell-Mann

By Harald Fritzsch
World Scientific
Hardback: £18
Also available at the CERN bookshop

Suitable for non-experts in physics, this book provides a broad introduction to the field of particle physics through fictional discussions between three prominent physicists — Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, and Murray Gell-Mann — together with a modern physicist. Matter is composed of quarks and electrons. By following these discussions, the reader should acquire an overview of the current status of particle physics and come to understand why particle physics is an exciting field.

Symmetry and Fundamental Physics: Tom Kibble at 80

By Jerome Gauntlett (ed.)
World Scientific
Hardback: £38
Paperback: £18
E-book: £14

Tom Kibble – recently knighted – is an inspirational theoretical physicist who has made profound contributions to the understanding of the physical world. This book is a compilation of papers based on the presentations given at a symposium held in March 2013 at the Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College London, to celebrate his 80th birthday. The symposium profiled various aspects of his long scientific career, with talks from Neil Turok, Wojciech Zurek and Jim Virdee, and in the evening, Steven Weinberg and Frank Close.

Henri Poincaré: A Biography Through the Daily Papers

By Jean-Marc Ginoux and Christian Gerini
World Scientific
Hardback: £19
E-book: £14

Henri Poincaré: A Biography Through the Daily Papers – where papers clearly include letters, because many are included – has caused some confusion in my mind. Turning the pages, it is hard to know where I am in time, and the events that are described seem to be of sub-relevance to what I was keen to read about. Two towering examples concern Poincaré’s relation to politics and relativity.

I note that despite extensive discussion of his interaction with the daily press, there is only the briefest mention that Henri Poincaré had an influential cousin, Raymond Poincaré, who was president of France during the years 1913–1920 (and so covered the First World War), and before that a member of the French parliament, and on several occasions minister or prime minister. I had been hoping to learn how close Henri was to Raymond and how this impacted on the opinion of the French public on both of them – a genius mathematician and a powerful politician from the same family.

I also hoped for a discussion of the relation of Henri Poincaré to Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Albert Einstein. There is only one phrase, on page 212 at the end of the subsection on an “old quarrel” with Einstein – and in my view this is inaccurate. What I know from having read some of Poincaré’s research papers is that it was Lorentz who was castigated by Poincaré for “needing five pages where five words suffice” (I paraphrase). The situation with Einstein seemed more complex. Here I was seeking clarity. Everybody “knows”, and therefore in accord with diplomatic traditions, this book avoids any explicit mention of what is, in my opinion, the historical-context issue of importance.

A search on the web reveals a recommendation letter from Poincaré regarding the appointment of Einstein at ETH-Zurich written in November 1911. In this letter, Poincaré the mathematician, who died in 1912, characterizes Einstein the young physicist, who became noticed around 1907–1912, as an oddity among scientists, deserving a mention for this reason: “Mr Einstein is one of the most original thinkers I have ever met,” and going on to say, “Since he seeks in all directions one must…expect most of the trails which he pursues to be blind alleys.” This shows that Poincaré died in ignorance of the fact that Einstein had already created several new paradigms of science, of which (special) relativity was directly related to Poincaré’s own work. I wonder if there is any other evidence in the press or in letters about what Poincaré knew and thought about Einstein?

Having seen this letter, I believe that in November 1911 Poincaré had no appreciation of the subtle nature of Einstein’s revolutionary work. Poincaré, who worked on the generalized Lorentz transformations, does not mention E = mc², arguably the most famous equation, published six years previously. By 1911 Poincaré had created the tools that were needed to prove E = mc² in more abstract mathematical terms, and yet he showed no interest in following Einstein’s footsteps. Why?

With the two pivotal issues – Henri Poincare’s relation to the family’s political power and his competition with the young and most-important scientist of the epoch – not addressed, I wonder what priorities led to selection of the material that is presented. There is the “Dreyfus affair”, which is discussed amply and where Poincaré played an honourable role. This was clearly of contemporary importance, but historically, looking at Poincaré the pre-eminent mathematician, this is a footnote at best. On the other hand, the presentation of his involvement in Ernst Mach’s thinking and the Earth’s rotation is the high point of this small book, and might yet justify its presence in the history of science literature.

Cosmic Cartoon Collection: Cartoons on Astronomy, Cosmology, Quarks, and other Physical Matters

By Claus Grupen
Universitätsverlag Siegen
Paperback: €5

Cartoons about science often take on a life of their own, as people copy them to add interest to their presentations, hand them on, add them to their websites, blogs and so on. I once found an excellent one about neutrinos left on a photocopier, which later became a key part of some of my talks. What often happens is that the name of the cartoonist becomes lost as the cartoons become widely spread – especially if the signature is small and becomes blurred with multiple copying. That seems to be the case with some of Claus Grupen’s work. Indeed, I was recently asked to identify the source of a familiar cartoon about the Higgs boson. Only after failing to find the answer via Google, did I remember that Grupen draws cartoons – and, yes, it was one of his.

Probably better known as a physicist and author of a number of textbooks, for example, on astroparticle physics, he also has a talent for sketching, and so could create his own amusing visuals to accompany his lectures. He has now assembled a range of his output in this small book published by Siegen University, where he has been professor of physics for many years.

As advertised in the subtitle, the cartoons cover a variety of topics in physics, but mainly focus on phenomena at the largest and smallest scales. Some are decidedly whimsical, while others are more didactic, and some seem to hark back to an earlier age in terms of the representation of women. This said, there is enough variety to bring a smile to most physicists, and at least now when people use one of Grupen’s cartoons, they might know whom to credit.

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