Praxis Archives – Page 146 of 181

Weep for ISABELLE – a rhapsody in a minor key

by Mel Month, Avant Garde Press. ISBN 1410732533, $28.95.

This book attempts to unravel a complicated politico-scientific tapestry, but in trying to unpick some tricky knots it creates a few new tangles of its own. In 1982 the US high-energy physics community organized a meeting at Snowmass to look at the future of national high-energy physics. After riding the crest of a wave for 30 years, the community felt in danger of falling into deep water. Across the Atlantic, CERN’s proton-antiproton collider had not yet discovered the W and Z carriers of the weak nuclear force, but the writing on the wall was clear (the crucial discovery came in 1983).

The US community was pushing for an ultra-high-energy proton collider to probe a distant energy frontier and search for the “Higgs mechanism” – which drives the subtle electroweak symmetry breaking and ensures that the weak W and Z carriers are much heavier than the massless photon that mediates electromagnetism. Thus Snowmass helped paint the wagon for the US Superconducting Supercollider (SSC), which was to emerge as the nation’s bid to regain particle-physics superiority. But by 1993 the global financial climate had cooled and the SSC was sacrificed, leaving the field clear for CERN’s LHC to become the world focus for high-energy physics.

Among those at Snowmass in 1982 was Mel Month of the Brookhaven National Laboratory and founder of the US Particle Accelerator School. One lunchtime, Month blurted out his views on the current US physics scene. These innocent remarks were not meant for general consumption, but bosses have long ears and there was an abrasive run-in. Month’s career then became slow-tracked. A heavy chip on the shoulder can be difficult to offload. To help, Month compiled this 600-page book, in which he portrays himself as “Mickey”, a highly motivated but politically naive young Brookhaven researcher.

The first half of the book depicts the evolution of particle physics in the second half of the 20th century as seen through Brookhaven eyes. Brookhaven was the site of major postwar US high-energy machines, which from 1960 to 1975 made many discoveries and reaped an impressive Nobel harvest. But as the US continued to disperse its high-energy physics effort, Brookhaven began to lag behind in this research sector. Its contender, the ISABELLE proton collider, was overshadowed by other US plans and hampered by difficult technology for superconducting magnets to guide its high-energy protons. Eventually ISABELLE had to make way for the new SSC, and Brookhaven looked to have missed the boat. (Ironically, when the SSC was finally cancelled, ISABELLE was reincarnated as the RHIC high-energy nuclear collider now in full swing at Brookhaven.) The laboratory’s stock tumbled further in the 1990s with unwarranted scaremongering of a tritium leak from its nuclear reactor.

The evolution of particle physics as seen from Brookhaven is a little like the British view of Europeanism – interesting but distorted because of evolved isolation. Month attributes blame, while his skewed overview brings some fresh insight and provides some vivid quotes: “Always the bridesmaid and never the bride”, referring to CERN’s early history; and for the SSC, “Like Lady ISABELLE a decade earlier, this dressed-to-kill damsel turned out to be a flash in the pan”.

The survey would be more valuable with a detailed index to help track through the intricate history. However, as the book calls itself a “historical novel”, none is supplied. The “novel” content is mainly confined to the second half of the book, where Month imagines Mickey interviewing the “Players”, the major characters in the book, most of whom are ex-Brookhaven management.

The book is difficult to read without an insider’s knowledge of particle physics. In the very first paragraph, BNL (for Brookhaven National Laboratory) appears without explanation, the first of much in-your-face shorthand, not all of which gets sorted out in the glossary. There are also some inaccuracies, such as: “1993 – Rubbia forced to resign as CERN director-general”.

In the push and shove of ruthless competition, most people experience at some time the bitterness of career injustice. These unpleasant episodes can be sublimated into fresh motivation, or simply filed. This book looks to have been a catharsis for Month, but does so much subjective detail need to be displayed?

From the Preshower to the New Technologies for Supercolliders

Edited by Björn H Wiik, Albrecht Wagner and Horst Wenninger, World Scientific. Hardback ISBN 9812381996, £53 ($78).

In 2000, the city of Bologna was the European Capital for Culture. To mark the occasion the University of Bologna and its Academy of Sciences published the achievements of their most distinguished members in the field of science and technology. This collection acknowledges the contributions of Antonino Zichichi and his colleagues in the development of experimental techniques that have contributed to the discovery of new particles and phenomena in the field of high-energy physics.

The collection was originally prepared by Björn Wiik, who at the time was director of DESY. After Wiik’s untimely death in 1999, Albrecht Wagner, Wiik’s successor, continued and completed his work, with the help of Horst Wenninger of CERN.

cernboo1_11-03 — The ALICE experiment at the LHC will use multigap resistive plate chambers (MRPCs) like this in its time-of-flight (TOF) system. The MRPC is a stack of resistive plates that define a number of independent gas gaps (10 in the case of the ALICE TOF), allowing full detection efficiency and excellent time resolution (< 50 ps). This device was developed by Crispin Williams et al. within the framework of the LAA project detector R&D initiated by Antonino Zichichi.

In his introduction Wiik recalls how in the early 1960s, when the dominant detector was the bubble chamber and the dominating field of interest was the physics of hadrons and neutrinos, Zichichi started to study the unfashionable topic of lepton-pair production in hadronic interactions. During the 1960s and early 1970s, Zichichi and colleagues, mainly working at CERN, developed a number of techniques to help in the problem of particle identification. This foresight was vindicated with the discovery in 1974 of the J/Ψ particle. The “pre shower” technology was essential to this discovery. In fact, this early emphasis on the development of innovative detection techniques continued to be one of Zichichi’s main scientific motivations.

The first section of this collection contains the major contributions from Zichichi and his co-workers on the development of three techniques that have come to be widely used in high-energy physics experiments: the “early shower development” method (universally used and now called the “pre shower” method), the study of range curves for high-energy muons in order to discriminate against pion penetration (“muon punch-through method”), and the “lead scintillator sandwich telescope” – the precursor of today’s calorimeters.

In the second section there are original papers by Zichichi and colleagues on high-precision time-of-flight (TOF) counters and the neutron missing-mass spectrometer technique. This section also includes an extract of a paper by Federico Palmonari on the AMS experiment. This experiment uses a TOF system that relies heavily on the early work of Zichichi and his colleagues at Bologna and CERN.

The third part of the collection describes the achievements of the LAA project. This was initiated by Zichichi, funded by the Italian government and implemented at CERN in 1986. The goal of the project was to prove the feasibility of a series of detector technologies that could be used in a future multi-TeV hadron collider. Zichichi had long promoted the construction in his native Sicily of a very high-energy hadron collider, the “Eloisatron”, with a collision energy of 200-1000 TeV and luminosities of up to 10³⁶ cm^-2 s^-1. The machine parameters that served as a basis of the LAA project were those of a 10% model of the Eloisatron, surprisingly close to those of the LHC. The book reproduces the CERN report by Zichichi on the main achievements of the LAA project. All aspects of detector layout were considered in the project and, in view of the demands of the machine, special attention was paid to radiation hardness, rate capability, hermeticity and momentum resolution of the detector assemblies.

From 1990 to 1996 the LAA was transformed into the CERN Detector R&D. The fourth section is a review by Wenninger of the impact of the results from these two programmes on the design of the LHC detectors. Although the solutions adopted for the LHC may differ from those studied at the LAA, Wenninger argues convincingly that the initial work had a great influence and measurable impact on the design of the present LHC detectors.

Through this collection of papers, which touch only on one aspect of his work, Zichichi emerges as a person highly motivated by the development of experimental techniques to meet the challenges of future high-energy particle-physics experiments. The early work carried out directly by Zichichi and colleagues and the later LAA work that he inspired have certainly had a significant and continuing influence on particle detector design.

Evolution of Networks: From Biological Nets to the Internet and WWW

By S N Dorogovstsev and J F F Mendes, Oxford University Press. Hardback ISBN 0198515901, £49.95 ($95).

cernboo2_11-03 — Evolution of Networks: From Biological Nets to the Internet and WWW

Imagine some collections of diverse objects: autonomous systems on the Internet, pages on the World Wide Web, neurons, genes, proteins, citations of scientific publications, the words in a human language, etc. Is it not fascinating that the graph-based abstractions of these different systems reveal that certain qualitative relationships among the objects remain invariant from one system to another? For instance, it was found that in a graph of the protein interactions of the yeast S.cerevisiae, the number of nearest neighbours follows a power-law distribution just as in a graph of the pages on the World Wide Web.

This book is an introduction to the exciting area of networks modelled as random graphs. The authors describe some fundamental structural properties of these graphs, and give a tour through a variety of real-world examples. They explain the underlying mechanisms that drive the evolution of graphs over time, and discuss the impact that a structural property of a graph may have on performance issues such as virus spreading and network connectivity.

As Dorogovstev and Mendes put it, this book was written by physicists but is aimed at a broader audience. The technical developments are kept at a low level, so no particular prerequisites are needed to follow them, and the authors present timely examples that cover the broad scope of the book.

The first chapter gives definitions of basic metrics that characterize a graph. The next chapter is devoted to exposing the preferential linking, a principle that, for instance, explains the emergence of the power-law distribution of the number of nearest neighbours of a vertex in a graph. The book proceeds with a discussion of a broad set of network examples, including scientific literature, communication systems and biological systems. In the subsequent two chapters, the authors separately cover equilibrium and non-equilibrium networks. The chapter on equilibrium networks analyses the stochastic recursive evolutions that drive a random graph to its steady state (equilibrium). A standard example in this context is the construction of a random graph by Erdos and Renyi. The chapter on non-equilibrium networks focuses on temporal aspects, especially the evolution of some probability measures of a graph over time. The book continues with a chapter on the global properties of graphs and their effect on performance. The authors end with appendices including some mathematical content and a detailed bibliography on the graph literature.

The exposition of the book is very pedagogical. Instead of rushing to examples, the authors first introduce readers to important elementary notions. After motivating the problems through well-chosen examples, they delve into specific subjects in detail, and the fundamental principles are unveiled in a suitable manner. There is, however, a certain imbalance in the lengths of different chapters.

This book should benefit readers who seek to gain an insight into the fundamental principles that underlie the random graphs found in diverse scientific disciplines.

CEBAF celebrates seven years of physics

cernceb1_11-03 — An aerial photograph of the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at Jefferson Lab. The dashed line indicates the location of the accelerator, and the circles indicate the location of the three experimental halls.

Jefferson Lab in Newport News, Virginia, recently celebrated the first seven years of physics with the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility, CEBAF. The unique design of this electron accelerator allows three experimental halls to be operated simultaneously, with a total beam current of 200 µA and a beam polarization of up to 80%. With this facility, a user community of more than 1000 scientists from 187 institutions in 20 countries has completed 81 nuclear-physics experiments, with substantial data taken on 23 more. From the data obtained in these experiments, more than 250 refereed journal articles have been published and 146 doctoral degrees have been awarded. In the near future more than 60 experiments are planned, and there are currently 128 PhD theses in progress.

To celebrate and review these accomplishments, while also looking toward the future, the Jefferson Lab user group board of directors organized a symposium, which was held on 11-13 June and dedicated to the memory of Nathan Isgur, Jefferson Lab’s first chief scientist. The meeting was divided into eight physics topics: nucleon form factors, few-body physics, reactions involving nuclei, strangeness production, structure functions, parity violation, deep exclusive reactions and hadron spectroscopy. Each topic was presented by one experimentalist and one theorist.

The symposium began with presentations by Donal Day of Virginia and John Ralston of Kansas on nucleon form factors, which probe the electromagnetic structure of the proton and neutron. The presentations included a discussion of the most referenced and surprising result from Jefferson Lab, that the proton’s form factors do not follow an expected simple relation. While theorists have proposed different models to explain this result, the basic ingredient in almost all new models is the addition of relativistic effects.

The talks continued with presentations focusing on few-body systems, such as the deuteron and ³He, by Paul Ulmer of Old Dominion University and Franz Gross from the College of William and Mary. In these experiments, the Jefferson Lab electron beam is used to knock out a proton from the few-body system or to probe it with elastic scattering. The expected yield can be calculated exactly, assuming nucleons and mesons are the underlying particles. The presentations showed that even with beam energies of up to 5.7 GeV, the electron scattering results are surprisingly well explained by the nucleon-meson models to distance scales of the order of 0.5 fm. In contrast, experiments on deuteron photodisintegration, which probe even smaller distance scales, have revealed clear evidence of the limitations of the nucleon-meson models and of the onset of quark-gluon degrees of freedom.

For reactions involving nuclei, i.e. many-body systems such as oxygen and carbon, statistical methods in the context of the nucleon-meson picture are used to calculate the expected yields of the quasi-elastic reaction. Larry Weinstein of Old Dominion University presented a talk entitled “So where are the quarks?”, in which he showed that the nucleon-meson model describes even the highest momentum transfer Jefferson Lab data, while Misak Sargsian of Florida International presented a talk looking mostly to the future, when the quark-gluon nature of matter should become evident from experiments with a 12 GeV electron beam.

Reinhard Schumacher of Carnegie Mellon and Steve Cotanch of North Carolina State presented reactions involving strangeness production, which includes the production of particles such as kaons. They showed new Jefferson Lab data confirming the θ⁺ particle as discovered by SPring-8 in Japan. This new particle is comprised of five quarks and has been dubbed the pentaquark. This had been described as the first observed nucleon resonance comprised of more than three valence quarks and has sparked international excitement. A new Jefferson Lab experiment to further study this new particle has already been approved.

cernceb2_11-03 — Jefferson Lab’s director Christoph Leemann, shown above speaking at the opening of the symposium on “The first seven years of physics with CEBAF”, which was dedicated to the memory of Nathan Isgur (inset), the laboratory’s first chief scientist who passed away in 2001.

Structure-function experiments, which provide information on the quark and gluon structure of the nucleon, were presented by Keith Griffioen of the College of William and Mary, and Wally Melnitchouk of Jefferson Lab. While Jefferson Lab’s beam energy is relatively low for this type of experiment, the high luminosity available has allowed many high-precision structure-function results to be produced. An interesting feature of the Jefferson Lab data is that if one scales the smooth deep-inelastic cross-section results from high-energy physics to the laboratory’s kinematics, the scaled results will pass through the average of the resonant peaks of the laboratory’s data. This effect, known as duality, may lead to a better understanding of how the underlying quarks and gluons link to the nucleon-meson models.

Krishna Kumar of Massachusetts and Michael Ramsey-Musolf from the California Institute of Technology presented the parity-violation experiments, where the strange quark distributions in the proton can be extracted by measuring the extremely small asymmetry in the elastic scattering of polarized electrons from an unpolarized proton target. One series of these experiments has already been completed at Jefferson Lab and several more are planned, including the G0 and HAPPEX-II experiments scheduled for next year.

Deep exclusive reactions – experiments done in deep-inelastic kinematics but where the detection of multiple particles allows the final state of the system to be determined – were presented by Michel Garcon of SPhN/Saclay and Andrei Belitsky of Maryland. Generalized parton distribution models, which should enable a complete description of the nucleon’s quark and gluon distributions to be extracted from this type of data, were presented along with the results of the deeply virtual Compton scattering experiments at HERMES, DESY, and at Jefferson Lab. The results indicate that generalized parton distributions can indeed be extracted from this type of data. Several high-precision experiments are also planned for the coming years.

cernceb3_11-03 — During the symposium, user-group president Paul Stoler, right, of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, presented the 2003 Jefferson Lab thesis prize to Xiaochao Zheng, who recently received a PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is now at Argonne National Laboratory.

Steve Dytman of Pittsburgh and Simon Capstick of Florida State presented the wealth of hadron spectroscopy data that is coming from Jefferson Lab. The analysis of the vast set of data produced by the laboratory on the nucleon resonances has been only partially completed, but hints of new states are already emerging and work on a full partial-wave analysis of the data is now getting underway.

Following the physics presentations, Larry Cardman, the Jefferson Lab associate director for physics, presented the long-term outlook for the laboratory. This talk focused primarily on upgrading the CEBAF to a 12 GeV electron machine and building a fourth experimental hall. The higher energy will allow Jefferson Lab to continue its mission of mapping out the transition from the low-energy region where matter can be thought of as made of nucleons and mesons, to the high-energy region that reveals the fundamental quark and gluon nature of matter.

DESY looks to the future

The DESY laboratory in the western part of Hamburg, with the river Elbe shown in the background. (DESY Hamburg.)

In February 2003 Edelgard Bulmahn, the German federal minister of education and research, decided to support several large-scale facilities for basic scientific research. These included the 4 km long X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL), which was originally conceived as part of the project proposed by the international TESLA collaboration for a 33 km electron-positron linear collider to be built near DESY, Hamburg, together with an integrated X-ray laser laboratory. At the same time, the German government decided not to proceed nationally with the linear collider part of the TESLA project and not to propose a German site for such a machine at this moment, but to wait for international developments. These decisions will have important implications for DESY in the coming years.

The German government is thus proposing Hamburg as the site for a European XFEL facility, and is prepared to carry half of the investment costs of €673 million. A decision on construction should be possible within two years, and would be followed by a construction period of about six years. Since the announcement in February, the German government has entered into bilateral discussions with other European governments. The first goal is to set up two European working groups, one on scientific and technical issues, and one on organizational and administrative matters. In parallel, the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructure (ESFRI) recently organized a workshop at DESY, on 30-31 October, on the technological challenges of X-ray lasers. So far discussions have led to the conclusion that only one major facility for research with hard X-ray radiation should be developed in Europe. The XFEL is the only project proposal in Europe in this field.

In addition, the ministry foresees €120 million for the conversion of the PETRA storage ring – which currently serves as a pre-accelerator for HERA – into a high-performance third-generation synchrotron radiation source. This upgrade is scheduled to start in 2007, after the conclusion of the HERA physics programme, and is intended to strengthen further the research with synchrotron radiation.

Regarding the linear collider part of TESLA, the German government decided that DESY will continue work on the project as part of the international research and development effort. At the EPS conference on High Energy Physics held in Aachen in July, Hermann Schunck, director-general of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, said: “We have to wait for international developments. But we will continue our efforts so that we can participate in a global linear collider project. Let me underline this – my government is the first one to have announced that it is in principle committed to participating in this project.”

Testing acceleration structures

For the past 10 years the TESLA collaboration has made decisive progress with the superconducting accelerator technology that forms the basis of the TESLA linear collider and the XFEL. A test accelerator of 250 MeV – the TESLA Test Facility (TTF) – has been built and has operated at DESY since 1997. The international partners in the project provided about 35% of the investment and personnel funding. At the TTF the collaboration successfully tested the superconducting acceleration structures and made groundbreaking progress on the SASE (Self-Amplified Spontaneous Emission) principle for a free-electron laser at short wavelengths around 100 nm. The first experiments with this new type of laser provided an impressive demonstration of the high scientific potential of free-electron lasers in the UV and X-ray region. The TTF is currently being extended to reach an energy of 1 GeV, that is, a length of 260 m. Starting in 2004, it will be available as a user facility for experiments with soft X-ray laser radiation above 6 nm wavelength. As such it will allow researchers to gain important experience in experimentation with free-electron lasers in the X-ray region, and it will provide valuable operating experience for the linear collider.

In co-operation with European partners, DESY is actively preparing for the construction of the 20 GeV superconducting linear accelerator for the XFEL laboratory, and is focusing on issues related to the industrialization, mass production, quality assurance and reliability of all the linear accelerator components. A first step in the concrete planning of the XFEL will be the commissioning of the free-electron laser for soft X-ray radiation at the expanded TTF. Since the XFEL is to be realized as a European project, discussions are being held with scientists and politicians in countries that are interested in participating in the effort. In these discussions a number of issues must be examined and clarified, such as the exact operational parameters of the laser and the organizational models for the laser laboratory. The inclusion of international partners from a very early stage in the planning and development of the superconducting accelerator within the TESLA project has proved very helpful in this respect.

At the same time, the TESLA collaboration continues to pursue the high-gradient programme to demonstrate the accelerating field of 35 MV/m that is required to reach 800 GeV for a 33 km TESLA collider. Substantial progress has been made in this area. In a test at low RF power, four nine-cell cavities have shown the required performance of 35 MV/m after electro-polishing. Two of these cavities were then fully assembled with all their ancillaries and have reached gradients above 35 MV/m in long-term testing under typical collider operating conditions (at Q > 5 x 10⁹ with an RF loading as required for linear collider operation), but without beam. Each of these cavities corresponds to one-eighth of a TESLA cryo-module. This represents a significant step towards the milestones set by the International Linear Collider Technical Review Committee for “Phase II” of TESLA. A full test of one module – eight cavities – at 35 MV/m with beam will, however, take more time due to constraints on the resources available at DESY.

Towards a linear collider

The next major step towards a global collider project concerns the choice of technology. The International Linear Collider Steering Committee is currently setting up an advisory group (“wise persons”), which will be charged with performing an analysis of the status of the two competing technologies (“warm” and “cold”) and with making a technology recommendation before the end of 2004.

If the chosen linear collider technology is “cold”, a major synergy will exist between the work on the XFEL and the linear collider. In this case the contribution of DESY and the partners in the TESLA collaboration will most likely be in the area of the main accelerator of the collider. A recent analysis of the work needed to be done on the basic accelerator unit for the XFEL, the cryo-module, has shown that more than 90% of the issues to be tackled are the same for the XFEL and the linear collider. The synergy is therefore achieved by the fact that the work done now for the XFEL will be largely of direct use for the linear collider. In addition, the R&D funds now spent on the XFEL will not need to be spent again for a collider built using the cold technology.

In 2004 the TESLA test facility, which has been extended to reach an energy of 1 GeV, will become available as a user facility for soft X-ray experiments. (DESY Hamburg.)

If the chosen technology is “warm”, a major reassessment of the contributions will be necessary. In this case DESY will probably participate in other subsystems and its contribution will probably be less pronounced than for a “cold” machine due to the commitment to the XFEL.

DESY will continue to participate in the linear collider working groups of ICFA and ECFA and once the technology choice has been made, the laboratory will be a partner in a European team within an international linear collider design team. DESY will also play a major role in the design, construction and future operation of the collider detector(s).

The international efforts for the coming years aim at reaching an agreement, in principle, to start the construction of a linear collider in time for commissioning in 2014/15, in accordance with the recommendations of ACFA, ECFA, HEPAP and the OECD Global Science Forum. Taking into account a construction time of seven to eight years, this requires a decision to go ahead to be made in 2007. Such a schedule also requires the first funds to become available in 2007, although the major investment spending for the linear collider will typically begin three years after the project starts, i.e. around 2010, as has been the case for other major accelerators.

The future for DESY

The strength of DESY is the result of an in-house synergy in three key areas: accelerator development, particle physics and research with synchrotron radiation. Particle physics has been the driving force behind accelerator development, and this also applies to the TESLA project. The decisions of the research ministry have secured DESY’s long-term future as one of the world’s leading centres for research at accelerators.

In particle physics DESY’s research and its contributions to both the linear collider itself and the detector, will ensure that the laboratory remains a major contributor to the realization of the project, regardless of whether or not the facility is built in Germany.

Forty years of high-energy physics in Protvino

In March 1958 the government of the USSR took the decision to create a new scientific centre for high-energy physics, which included the construction of an accelerator and experimental facilities. The design and geological search for a site were soon started, and after considering some 40 places, a site on the left bank of the Protva river 15 km from Serpukhov in Moscow Region, Russia, was chosen. The project concept was developed under the leadership of Vassily Vladimirsky, and in 1960 the construction of the 70 GeV proton synchrotron (U-70) began. At the time, it was the biggest proton accelerator under construction.

cernihep1_11-03 — The Institute for High Energy Physics as it is today, with a clear view of U-70, the 70 GeV proton accelerator.

On 15 November 1963 the Institute for High Energy Physics (IHEP) received separate institute status, with Anatoli Logunov appointed its director a month earlier. The creation of an efficient team of scientists and specialists from Dubna, Moscow and Kharkov became a decisive factor in pushing forward the construction of the machine, the experimental area and the infrastructure of the new centre.

The research programme was determined by the Scientific Coordinating Committee that was created at IHEP in 1964. It was composed of leading scientists from IHEP and other institutes in the USSR: the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP), the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), the Institute for Nuclear Research (INR), the Lebedev Physical Institute (LPI), Moscow State University (MSU), Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (MEPhI), the Kurchatov Institute (KIAE) and the Budker Institute for Nuclear Physics (BINP). The timely formation of the first priority research programme and the construction of the experimental facilities allowed experiments to begin at U-70 immediately after the machine’s commissioning, and new results in particle physics were soon obtained.

cernihep2_11-03 — These milestones and signatures of the people who took part in tuning the accelerator, or who were in the control room at the time, were left on a schematic layout of the machine. Among them are the signatures of Bernard Gregory and Anatoli Logunov.

Another mission to be accomplished was the establishment of wide-ranging international collaboration. The construction of the biggest proton accelerator in the world opened up new possibilities in studying the microcosm, and many foreign physicists expressed an interest in taking part in the future research programme. However, it was not a simple task to organize international collaboration under the conditions of the time. Physicists from IHEP held talks with scientists from CERN and Saclay in France, and CERN director-generals Victor Weisskopf and Bernard Gregory played a significant role in helping to establish IHEP’s international collaboration with CERN.

IHEP signed the following agreements as early as 1966/7:

• The agreement concerning scientific and technical co-operation between CERN and the State Committee of the USSR on the Utilization of Atomic Energy (4 July 1967).

• The agreement between the State Committee of the USSR on the Utilization of Atomic Energy and the Commissariat on Atomic Energy of France concerning joint scientific research in high-energy physics at the 70 GeV accelerator (11 October 1966).

• The agreement concerning scientific collaboration between IHEP, Serpukhov and JINR, Dubna (16 April 1966).

The agreement with CERN assumed the fulfilment of a joint programme, which included the design and construction of a fast extraction system and RF separator, as well as the preparation and execution of joint experiments. The CERN-USSR Joint Scientific Committee was formed to coordinate and review this programme.

Commissioning and first experiments

The injector – a 100 MeV linac (L-100) – was put into operation in July 1967, and tuning the proton beam in U-70 began on 29 August. A circulating beam was achieved on 17 September and on 12 October a proton beam was accelerated up to the critical energy (8 GeV). The CERN delegation at IHEP, headed by Bernard Gregory, congratulated IHEP on this success, but expressed the opinion that more work and more time would be needed to pass the critical energy and reach the design energy of 70 GeV. However, on the night of 14 October, a record proton energy of 76 GeV was achieved in U-70.

cernihep3_11-03 — Bernard Gregory opens the champagne in the “Orbita” cafe in Protvino at 4.00 a.m., just after commissioning U-70 in 1967.

One of the first experiments on the U-70 accelerator, which was carried out by a joint IHEP-CERN team of physicists, was the measurement of the yield of secondary particles produced by 70 GeV protons on internal targets. This work involved high-resolution gas-differential Cerenkov counters with very low background (~10^-6), and it allowed the study of pion, kaon and anti-proton yields up to momenta of 65 GeV/c. As a result, the new phenomenon of scale invariance was discovered in hadronic interactions at IHEP.

Immediately after the measurements of secondary particle yields, the IHEP-CERN team began to study the energy dependence of total cross-sections in hadron interactions. The results of studies of total cross-sections in the energy range below 30 GeV confirmed the well known data obtained at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US and at CERN. However, at energies higher than 30 GeV, while the total cross-sections for π⁺/^–, K^– mesons and protons remained constant, cross-sections for K⁺ mesons began to rise. The rise of the total cross-sections for K⁺p interactions in the range 15-55 GeV/c was equal to a few per cent. A number of international conferences in high-energy physics focused on this new phenomenon and the discovery became known as the “Serpukhov effect”. The measurements of total cross-sections at higher energies at CERN and at Fermilab confirmed the results that the IHEP-CERN team had obtained at U-70, and the rise in total cross-section was found to be a universal phenomenon for all hadrons.

cernihep4_11-03 — French president Georges Pompidou visiting Protvino in 1967.

The agreement with France assumed the production and delivery to IHEP of a large hydrogen bubble chamber for experiments with separated hadron beams. Installed at the 70 GeV accelerator in 1970/1, the chamber, which was called Mirabelle, took more than three million pictures and produced a number of excellent physics results.

Continuing collaboration

The joint research programme at U-70 with physicists from JINR, CERN, the US and Japan has continued to the present day. The most well known physics results concern high spin mesons, glueballs and hybrids, while in detector and accelerator techniques important work has been done on polarization effects at high energies, GAMS-type spectrometers, liquid-argon spectrometers, lead-tungstate crystals for electromagnetic calorimetry and beam extraction by bent crystals. Of particular note are the invention of RFQ focusing and the construction of the first RFQ linac, URAL-30, at IHEP.

After the commissioning of the larger accelerators at Fermilab and at CERN, the physicists at IHEP began to take an active part in the experiments at higher energies. These included the neutrino experiments with the 15 ft bubble chamber; polarization experiments and experiments with D0 at Fermilab; experiments with GAMS-4000, EHS and BEBC at CERN’s Super Proton Synchrotron; and experiments with DELPHI at LEP and with PHENIX at RHIC, Brookhaven.

cernihep5_11-03 — The official opening of the Mirabelle bubble chamber in 1971.

Nowadays, physicists from IHEP, together with those from JINR, CERN, INR, ITEP, MSU, MEPhI, LPI, KEK and the University of Michigan, are continuing their research programmes at U-70 in the fields of meson spectroscopy, K-meson rare decays, polarization effects and neutrino interactions. A unique channel of separated K-mesons is under construction at IHEP, the basic elements of which are two superconducting deflectors received from CERN. Among the latest results that have been obtained at U-70 are high-precision measurements of charged kaon decays, spin asymmetries in inclusive reactions and new data on the search for exotic mesons.

Collaboration between IHEP and CERN remains strong to this day, with physicists from IHEP participating in the ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHC-B experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), as well as in the design and production of equipment for the LHC. The most notable contributions made by the physicists from IHEP are septum magnets for beam injection and extraction systems, DC circuit breakers, dump resistors and components for the CMS forward hadron calorimeter and the ATLAS muon system.

World crises cast a long shadow on science

cernvie1_11-03 — Vera Lüth, chair of the Commission on Particles and Fields of IUPAP.

The free circulation of scientists, the freedom to pursue science, to communicate among scientists and to disseminate scientific information, are generally taken for granted in the regions we commonly refer to as the free world. The guarantee of those freedoms is the most important goal of IUPAP, the International Union of Physics and Applied Physics. Unfortunately, the events of the past few years have led to the curtailment of those freedoms. Visa problems have restricted travel to the US and have had a severe impact on the ability of scientists from many countries to continue their collaboration with scientists in the US.

While there have been difficulties in obtaining US visas in the past, these problems have become much more severe due to new rules and procedures. These procedures were introduced as part of the security measures to prevent illegal immigration, the infiltration of terrorists and the transfer of information that might lead to the design of weapons or their illegal import. Consular officers now have to interview all applicants and are held responsible for the consequences of their decisions. This has led to long delays in approvals and some denials of visas to bona fide scientists from many countries, primarily Russia and China. For them the visa application process has been drawn out from a few days to many months. On average, applicants wait for more than four months without any indication of when a decision may be made. Also, while the application is pending, the applicant’s passport is held at the consulate, thus preventing him or her from travelling to any other country.

A recent consequence has been that the attendance at the IUPAP-sponsored International Lepton Photon Symposium held at Fermilab was significantly affected. Realizing that the chances of obtaining approval in time were slim, many of the invitees withdrew their application; others did not want to subject themselves to the application process. This was apparently true not only for scientists from countries that have visa restrictions, but also from some Western European countries. While four years ago 46% of the invitees from countries with visa restrictions attended the Lepton Photon Symposium at Stanford, this was down to 27% at this year’s meeting. Almost all the Russian scientists travelled on multi-entry visas or were already in the US. The Chinese delegation was reduced to a single scientist, compared with 12 at Stanford in 1999. Their invited speaker, Lioyuan Dong, was denied a visa. Hesheng Chen, the director of IHEP in Beijing and a member of ICFA, received approval for a visa, but too late to allow him to travel. He wrote a letter of protest to the chair of IUPAP’s Commission on Particles and Fields, pointing out that he and his senior colleagues had repeatedly been prevented from travelling to the US. Indeed, IUPAP will discuss the overall situation at a forthcoming meeting.

Probably a wider impact than restricted attendance at an annual conference is the irrevocable harm caused to the US science community’s international collaborative efforts. For many decades particle physicists have been working at large laboratories, travelling frequently from country to country and sharing equipment and funds. An example is the D0 experiment at the Tevatron. To a very large degree, the D0 muon tracking system was designed and built by Russian groups. The visa denials and delays are threatening the full realization of the enormous investments by these scientists and their home institutions, and as a result the funds committed by the Russian government to support this project are likely to be redirected. The fact that this and many other activities involving our Russian and Chinese colleagues are performed under the auspices of government-to-government agreements stresses the irony and seriousness of the current situation.

The American Physical Society, the organizers of the Lepton Photon Symposium, several prominent scientists, and I as chair of the Commission of Particles and Fields of IUPAP, have tried through the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to intervene at the State Department, at the Department of Energy and at other government agencies. The NAS, which is recognized by the US government as the adhering body for international science unions, has increased its efforts to report on these impediments to the Bureau for Consular Affairs, to develop procedures to account for reported delays and refusals, and to coordinate the reporting with other professional societies. But despite recent pronouncements by the State Department, the situation has worsened.

While I understand the need for tighter security and controls of the borders in these troubling times, I am convinced that the visa restrictions for scientists do not serve that purpose. To the contrary, collaborations among scientists have in the past been highly beneficial in times of crisis – they have helped to reduce international tensions rather than impeded security. I personally fear that unless there is clear evidence that the imposed measures have a truly damaging impact on the US, it will be difficult to attract the attention of the US Congress or government. Thus, it is my hope that the international community in Europe and Asia may be able to raise these issues at the highest levels and delineate the current procedures as deleterious not just to science, but to international relations in general.

CERN and Pakistan: a personal perspective

cernpak1_10-03 — The Role of Science in the Information Society, CERN, Geneva, 8-9 December 2003.

From its inception, CERN was international in character. The construction of its first 600 MeV accelerator was a fine example of international co-operation. After the Second World War, a group of European scientists realized that the brain drain during the war was a serious problem, which was continuing even after the war had ended. This realization gave birth to the idea of a European laboratory funded by several European nations. These scientists had a strong will, considerable political influence in their own countries and a commitment to do basic research, while recognizing that no single country had sufficient resources to build a large accelerator. CERN owes its creation to the dynamism and indomitable will of scientists such as Isidor Rabi, Eduardo Amaldi, Pierre Auger, John Cockroft and others. Thanks to their efforts, CERN, when it became operational, was gradually able to reverse the brain drain.

cernpak2_10-03 — Ishfaq Ahmad (left), as chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, shakes hands with Chris Llewellyn Smith, director-general of CERN in 1997, after signing an agreement between Pakistan and CERN for a contribution to the CMS experiment.

The informal scientific co-operation between CERN and Pakistan dates back to the 1960s, when Pakistan was introduced to CERN through Abdus Salam, the country’s only Nobel Laureate. Salam had a desire that a group of Pakistani scientists commit themselves to both theoretical and experimental high-energy physics. On the suggestion of Salam, stacks of nuclear emulsion exposed at CERN were provided to Pakistan for the study of pions, kaons and antiprotons. In this informal co-operation, Owen Lock from CERN and the newly created Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) played an important role. Nuclear emulsions were later superseded by newer particle-detection techniques, and gradually this activity faded away. Meanwhile, some theoretical physicists from Pakistan had the opportunity to work at CERN through short visits. During the 1980s, some of the experimental physicists from Pakistan, specializing in the technique of Solid State Nuclear Track Detectors (SSNTD), also benefited from CERN by exposing the stacks in the beam at the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS).

In 1994 I visited CERN as chairman of PAEC. The visit took place on the initiative of Pakistani physicist Ahmed Ali, who works at DESY. It brought back good memories of my earlier visits, which date back to 1962 when I came to CERN as a young post-doctoral fellow working at the University Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen (now the Niels Bohr Institute) to perform a nuclear emulsion experiment. During my visit in 1994, I was fascinated to see the exciting developments in physics that were taking place at CERN, and I had only one wish – that my own country, Pakistan, should somehow become involved in scientific collaboration with CERN, and that our physicists and engineers could also become part of the most advanced, challenging and rewarding scientific endeavour: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

On my return to Pakistan, I kept my contacts with CERN, and a few months later a co-operation agreement was approved by the government of Pakistan, which was signed by me, as chairman of PAEC, and the then director-general of CERN, Chris Llewellyn Smith, who has now been appointed as director of the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s fusion programme. In 1997, PAEC signed an agreement for an in-kind contribution worth one million Swiss francs for the construction of eight magnet supports for the CMS detector. The signing of the agreement was followed by the visit of Llewellyn Smith to Pakistan in 1998. The agreement provided an entry point for Pakistani scientists and engineers into the CMS collaboration.

cernpak3_10-03 — The arrival of the first four support feet, which were manufactured in Pakistan for the CMS experiment.

In 2000, CERN’s new director-general, Luciano Maiani, visited Pakistan, and during this visit another agreement was signed, which doubled the Pakistani contribution from one to two million Swiss francs. This new agreement covered the construction of the resistive plate chambers required for the CMS muon system. Recently, a protocol has been signed enhancing Pakistan’s total contribution to the LHC programme to $10 million. I very much hope and wish that these developments may eventually lead to Pakistan becoming an observer state at CERN.

A source of inspiration

One of the inspirations for scientific co-operation with CERN was Salam’s theories, which were always at the forefront of CERN’s scientific programme. Salam, Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg formulated the theory that unified the electromagnetic and weak interaction and predicted the existence of weak neutral currents. In 1973, neutral currents were observed at CERN, verifying the theory. The discovery created quite a lot of excitement in Pakistan because of Salam. A later important breakthrough was the discovery of the intermediate vector bosons, W and Z, at CERN’s SPS in 1983. This provided yet another verification of the theory of Glashow, Salam and Weinberg.

The Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider was built at CERN to study electroweak theory and the Standard Model in more detail. It started up in 1989 and operated for 11 years, making precision tests of different aspects of the Standard Model. In particular, LEP experiments measured the number of neutrinos, and for the first time the mass of the Z boson was measured to an accuracy better than 2 MeV. However, one important ingredient of the Standard Model that is still missing is the Higgs boson, which is the elusive particle that in the Standard Model is responsible for giving masses to elementary particles.

It is hoped that the LHC, now under construction at CERN, will discover the Higgs boson, not withstanding the bet of famous physicist Stephen Hawking, and possibly physics beyond the Standard Model. The LHC will be able to explore physics at the TeV scale, where it is certain that some new physics will be found, most probably supersymmetry. Supersymmetry may explain a number of unsolved problems in the Standard Model, such as why masses differ by an order of magnitude as one moves from one quark family to another; why there are three families of quarks and three families of leptons; and how to explain the dark matter predicted by astrophysical models.

The importance of the Grid

The amount and size of experimental data generated at the LHC will pose the greatest challenge to the physicists. The collection, storage, retrieval and analysis of LHC data will require novel techniques in the field of information technology. The physicists working in different institutions around the globe will access LHC data; this implies a need for distributed computing. In recent years, a new approach in computing is emerging, called the Grid. The Grid is a natural evolution of the World Wide Web, which was invented at CERN in 1991. While the Web made information retrieval via the Internet extremely easy and simple, the proper implementation of the Grid will allow information processing and the solving of complex problems that would otherwise require supercomputers, in a very simple manner. Grid computing will be particularly useful for developing countries, where the cost of a supercomputer is prohibitive and there are also political difficulties in their purchase. It is very important for Pakistan to establish the proper infrastructure for Grid computing to acquire the full benefits of its investment in the LHC.

cernpak4_10-03 — Visitors from Pakistan – including Ishfaq Ahmad (second from left) and Muhammad Afzal, minister (technical affairs) (third from left) – pose on the road at CERN that has been named in honour of Abdus Salam, Pakistan’s first Nobel Laureate.

Information technology, on which CERN is to hold an important conference, “The Role of Science in the Information Society (RSIS)”, in December this year, is going to have a tremendous effect on billions of human beings who are being increasingly exposed to pressures due to the unabated instinct of the poor to reproduce and the insatiable desire of the rich to consume. Our planet is, of course, limited in space and resources. The new interactive electronic communications will have a strong impact on society. The hope is that Grid technologies, like the Web, will be widely used in both developed and developing countries alike. In its wake, the Grid will bring many changes to the socio, economic and cultural fabric of society.

Coming back to Pakistan, it is important to note that due to the influence of Salam, a number of high-calibre Pakistani theoretical particle physicists were trained in the latter part of the 20th century. On the other hand, Pakistan has always lagged behind in experimental particle physics due to a lack of resources. It was strongly felt by the scientists of Pakistan that a national centre for physics of very high international standards was needed. In 1994, I led a group of physicists to meet the president of Pakistan to discuss this issue, and the president very kindly approved the concept of such a centre. So in 1998, during the inauguration ceremony of the 23rd International Nathiagali Summer College on Physics and Contemporary Needs, I announced the creation of the National Centre of Physics (NCP) and invited the well-known Pakistani theoretical physicist Riazuddin to head the centre, which he kindly accepted.

The NCP is the cradle and the focal point for all CERN-related activities in Pakistan. At present, the centre is involved in a number of LHC-related activities such as detector construction, detector simulation, physics analysis and Grid computing. Several other Pakistani institutes are also collaborating with CERN indirectly through the NCP. The activities of these institutes cover areas such as software development, manufacturing of mechanical equipment, alignment of the CMS tracker using lasers, and the testing of electronic equipment.

Former CERN director-general Victor Weisskopf wrote in his book The Joy of Insight that anybody who enters CERN should be regarded as European and no longer a citizen of any nation. Now CERN is open to any scientist from anywhere in the world. Moreover, beyond its 20 European member states, CERN currently has co-operation agreements with 30 countries. Had Weisskopf been alive today, he would probably have rephrased his remark by saying that “anybody who enters CERN is a citizen of the world”.

CERN’s teachers’ programme celebrates its sixth year

The idea of the High School Teachers’ (HST) programme originally emerged from discussions within CERN’s Academic Training Committee, and was inspired by similar initiatives in the US. The primary goals of the programme are: to promote the teaching of particle physics to high-school students, to promote the exchange of knowledge between cultures, to expose teachers to the world of research, to help stimulate the popularization of physics in the classroom, to create links between European schools, and to promote co-operation between CERN and existing programmes in the European Union.

The first HST programme was held in 1998, and since then has continued under the direction of Michelangelo Mangano and Mick Storr from CERN. In addition, Gron Jones from the University of Birmingham in the UK lectures on bubble chambers each year and is a workgroup director.

The increasing interest and success of the programme has helped to expand the number of participants from nine teachers in 1998 to 40 this year. Altogether, 170 teachers from 29 countries have participated over the six years. The programme is advertised by word of mouth, through national organizations and via CERN’s teachers’ website (see “Further reading”). During the past year, a total of 110 teachers applied to participate in the 2003 programme, with applications coming from CERN member states and from Algeria, Bahrain, China, India, Japan, Mongolia, Pakistan, Slovenia and the US. Among the non-member states, teachers from China, Mongolia, Slovenia and the US were then invited to attend HST 2003.

All of the applicants are high-school physics teachers who are selected on the basis of their English-language competency, their activity in scientific organizations and publications, and their skills in the use of a PC. They are selected by a committee, which also looks for a diversity of cultures, teaching experience and educational backgrounds in the screening process.

During the past five years of the HST programme, a group from the US has also joined as part of the Research and Education for Teachers (RET) initiative, sponsored by Northeastern University in Boston. The RET initiative was founded in 1999 by Steve Reucroft at Northeastern and is funded by the US National Science Foundation. The teachers participating under the RET initiative spend additional time with a researcher at CERN to learn about a specific project. This year six teachers attended, not only from the Boston area, but also from Texas and Washington State, and they “shadowed” researchers during the week following the programme.

This year’s programme, HST 2003, included attending lectures hosted by CERN’s summer student programme, special lectures specifically for the HST participants, projects created in small working groups, presentations of completed projects, site visits and cultural interchange events, the highlight of which was a final gathering featuring native culinary dishes.

A “hands on” workgroup was introduced for the first time this year, in which participants built demonstration accelerator models for the classroom. A second group helped in the organization of CERN’s “Ask an expert” website, and two other groups worked on organizing the materials produced by former HST groups and on producing formal lesson plans.

An additional feature in this year’s programme was the Alumni working group. Participants from previous years were invited to CERN and were asked to conduct a survey among their HST colleagues on the usefulness of the programme in their teaching and other related work. From the results of this survey, and from information provided by the returning workgroup members, suggestions were then made to the directors for improvements and for the future direction of the programme.

The HST programme has now ended for another year, but the results, like any teaching endeavour, will only be seen in time. This investment in the future by CERN and by the HST participants has the potential not only to sway popular opinion toward scientific endeavour, but also to sow the seeds for the development of some great future scientists.

Shared experiences

“Participating in the HST programme was a great experience. Being the only physics teacher at my school, I normally don’t have the opportunity to exchange all kinds of information concerning physics. Suddenly, I had the chance to share my experiences with more than 35 physics teachers from more than 20 nationalities!”

Vanessa van Engelen (HST 2002 and HST 2003) – seen here working on a demonstration model of a linear accelerator – teaches physics and mathematics at K A Schoten in Belgium. She also worked at the University of Antwerp for two years on a programme called “Brugproject”.

Broadening horizons

“My experience at CERN as a participant in HST 2001 has been, without doubt, one of the most important and memorable of my life! I am still processing the educational, scientific and cultural ramifications of those seven weeks, and probably will for years to come. For my own personal enjoyment and enrichment, the friendships made with people from other countries, and the opportunity to travel during free time, broadened my cultural horizons as much as the work at CERN itself expanded my view of major research enterprises.”

Alan Kaufman (HST 2001 and RET 2001) – seen here on the far right in the 2001 group photo – teaches at Malden Catholic High School in Malden, Massachusetts, US.

A unique opportunity

“Remarkable. That is the best description I can give to the CERN HST programme. I have been exposed to the most advanced physics laboratory in the world. The opportunity of being lectured by outstanding researchers in the field of particle physics is an experience that I will always tell my students in the years to come. I knew that this workshop would be a unique opportunity for me, but it has, in many ways, exceeded my expectations.”

Jesus Hernandez (HST 2003) – seen here during the workshop on building accelerator demonstration models – is a physics teacher at Lawrence High School, Lawrence, Massachusetts, US. Born in Venezuela, he has been living in the US for 12 years, and has a Masters degree in Physical Chemistry of Polymers. He decided to become a teacher when he learned about the Massachusetts Institute for New Teachers programme.

Transferring knowledge

cernhst4_10-03 — Anabela Bastos Tibúrcio Martins (left) and Margarita Lorenzo Cimadevila.

“My feeling about the HST programme is that it must continue to be mainly addressed to young or inexperienced teachers, for three main reasons. It is a powerful way of transferring knowledge as it puts secondary school teachers and scientists in direct contact in real research surroundings; it addresses the most modern areas of physics, which are extremely interesting and challenging for everyone, and above all for youngsters of the 21st century; and it is a clever way of motivating teachers to transmit their knowledge and enthusiasm to their students.”

Anabela Bastos Tibúrcio Martins (HST 2003) from Portugal – seen here, on the left, with Margarita Lorenzo Cimadevila from Spain – has a PhD in Science Education, with In-service Science Teacher Training, at the Royal Danish School of Educational Studies, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Training benefits from basic research

cernvie1_10-03 — CERN’s pure research provides valuable experience for students.

In 1992-1993, the American Physical society, the European Physical Society and the Japanese Physical Society issued common position papers that were published simultaneously in their respective bulletins. One of the papers dealt with education and expressed concern about the trend observed in all industrialized countries, where fewer students are entering university to study physics as their main subject. This is becoming an increasingly serious problem. How can we obtain new physics knowledge if the number of physicists is sharply decreasing? How can we apply it if there are fewer knowledgeable people to do so? How can we avoid a two-tier society with too few people who know enough to judge the pros and cons of new technologies? This is a real challenge for a knowledge-based economy.

It may be argued that not so many people come to physics because they choose computer science or biology instead. These subjects are also very good at providing new practical knowledge. However, it is the whole of science that is suffering from a decrease in interest. We live in a society where there is nothing better than an MBA. Why suffer through difficult physics studies, as they are claimed to be, if the outcome of the effort does not look so promising?

To investigate the decline, surveys have been made of students who do enter university to study physics, asking them: “How come you chose physics?” The usual answer is: the attraction of mysterious and fundamental objects such as black holes, the Big Bang, quarks and so on.

This gives rise to the notion of “beacon science” – new developments in science that attract young people. It is of course to be hoped, and it is in practice the case, that once young students begin to study physics seriously they discover that there are many exciting things besides black holes and quarks, such as nanotubes and high-temperature superconductivity, and they turn to these topics with enthusiasm. However, black holes and quarks still have a special role to play.

This is important because physics studies at university are not only useful for training professional physicists. Learning how to master abstract concepts to apply them to practical problems, and learning how to appreciate orders of magnitudes and the values and limits of specific approximations are very useful for many activities. Having enough people trained that way is a prerequisite for a dynamic knowledge-based economy.

Consider particle physics. About half of the young people who receive PhDs in particle physics are working in industry within two years of acquiring their degree. The value of the wide range of training provided by such basic research should not be undermined – it is one of the obvious short-term economical returns. Our research with large detectors needs more young people than academia can absorb. Many of them come to research for training and leave it with much appreciated skills.

Indeed, industry does not care much about the research topics of new PhDs. What it appreciates is that people trained in particle physics have worked at the limits of knowledge and technology in large international collaborations, under severe time constraints, often becoming computer wizards in the process. The style of the research matters more than its subject. The great physicist Hendrik Casimir, who was for a long time head of research at Philips, said that: “It is so important to be confronted early in life with research of a greater depth, greater difficulty and greater beauty than one will find later during one’s career”. He also said: “I have heard statements that the role of academic research in innovation is slight. This is about the most blatant piece of nonsense it has been my fortune to stumble upon.”

The value of training through research within a large international research organization like CERN is such that some member states have agreed to also try it for young engineers and have found it very valuable. For several years Spain and Portugal have regularly sent young engineers to CERN so they could acquire valuable training. At the same time, CERN also finds this input of young people very valuable, even if they have to be trained. In 2002, for example, 23 Portuguese and 12 Spanish young engineers joined CERN, many to work on the Grid.

Research domains that make young people wonder and dream should be supported if we are to attract more people to physics and science in general. As Victor Weisskopf said: “We need basic science not only for the solution of practical problems, but also to keep alive the spirit of this great human endeavour. If our students are no longer attracted by the sheer interest and excitement of the subject, we have been delinquent in our duty as teachers.” Physics research, and particularly in the case of CERN, basic research, offers wonderful stimulation for innovation but also for the training of highly competent people for many walks of life – prerequisites for a dynamic knowledge-based economy.

• This is the second extract from the closing talk at a special workshop of Marie Curie Fellows on Research and Training in Physics and Technology, held at CERN in 2002. The first extract was in CERN Courier June p42.

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