Read article 'Close encounters with clusters of computers'
To satisfy their ever-increasing demand for more and affordable computing power, particle physics experiments are using clusters of off-the-shelf PCs. A recent workshop at Fermilab looked at the imp...
Read article 'Weighing the antiproton'
The ASACUSA collaboration has just published a determination of the antiproton charge and mass to an incredible six parts in a hundred million. How was this impressive precision achieved and why is ...
Read article 'LHC insertions: the key to CERN’s new accelerator'
In October 2001, production of the specialised magnets that perform specific tasks, such as final focus, and injection and extraction of beams, was in full swing.
Read article 'The international jigsaw puzzle'
As well as the 20 nations of the CERN family, several other nations further afield are making major contributions to the laboratory's flagship Large Hadron Collider.
Read article 'Fifty years of the renormalization group'
Renormalization was the breakthrough that made quantum field theory respectable in the late 1940s. Since then, renormalization procedures, particularly the renormalization group method, have remained ...
Read article 'Astronomers benefit from particle physics detectors'
A new kind of X-ray polarimeter giving greatly improved sensitivity and based on methods developed for particle physics gives astronomers a new handle on X-ray measurement.
Read article 'Enrico Fermi: genius and giant of science'
This year marks the centenary of the birth of Enrico Fermi, one of the giants of 20th-century science, and one of the last physicists to be both an accomplished experimentalist and an influential theo...
Read article 'Gamma-ray telescopes take shape'
Turning to unusual wavelengths, astronomers reveal new pictures of the universe. This article describes a major new gamma-ray window opening up soon in Southern Africa.
Read article 'Fermilab launches Run II of Tevatron'
After detecting hints of the long-awaited Higgs particle, CERN's LEP electron-positron collider closed at the end of 2000 and is now being dismantled. The search for the Higgs - the missing link in ...
Read article 'A major SHIFT in outlook'
I don’t remember exactly who first proposed running physics batch jobs on a UNIX workstation, rather than on the big IBM or Cray mainframes that were doing that kind of production work in 1989 a...
