Within the framework of the CERN-Asia Fellows and Associates programme, CERN offers three grants every year to East, Southeast and South Asia postgraduates under the age of 33, enabling them to participate in its scientific programme in the areas of experimental and theoretical physics and accelerator technologies. The appointment will be for one year, which might, exceptionally, be extended to two years.
Applications will be considered by the CERN Fellowship Selection Committee at its meeting on 28 January 2003. An application must consist of a completed application form, on which “CERN-Asia Programme” should be written; three separate reference letters; and a curriculum vitae that includes a list of scientific publications and any other information regarding the quality of the candidate. Applications, references and any other information must be provided in English only.
Application forms can be obtained from: Recruitment Service, CERN, Human Resources Division, 1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland. Email Recruitment.Service@cern.ch, or fax +41 22 767 2750. The closing date for applications is 20 November 2002.
The CERN-Asia Fellows and Associates Programme also offers a few short-term Associateship positions to scientists under 40 years of age who are on a leave of absence from their institute. These are open either to scientists who are nationals of the East, Southeast and South Asian countries who wish to spend a fraction of the year at CERN, or to researchers at CERN who are nationals of a CERN member state and wish to spend a fraction of the year at a Japanese laboratory.
* Candidates are accepted from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, the Laos Republic, Malaysia, the Maldives, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.
On 1 July, the UK officially became a member of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). ESO runs the four 8.2 m and smaller telescopes making up the Very Large Telescope array in the Atacama desert, and also the La Silla observatory, Chile. Future projects include the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA) and the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (OWL). The UK is the 10th member of ESO. The others are Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland.
The Journal of High Energy Physics (JHEP) archive, 1997-2001, plus current 2002 material has been made available free of charge by Institute of Physics Publishing (publishers of CERN Courier) until the end of the year. Institute of Physics Publishing took responsibility for the electronic-only publication of the journal in January, while submission and peer review remain the responsibility of the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy.
Up to now JHEP has been financed by SISSA with contributions from Italy’s Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, CERN and, more recently, other laboratories and universities. With the journal’s growing size and importance, however, this is no longer viable and from January 2003 JHEP will be available to institutions for an annual subscription of £600/$900. The 1997-2002 archive will remain free. See http://www.iop.org/journals/jhep.
The year 2002 is the centennial year for Paul Dirac, who was born in Bristol on 8 August 1902. His Swiss father, Charles, was born in Monthey near Geneva in 1866 and migrated to Bristol, England, to become the French teacher at the Merchant Venturers Technical College. His mother was Florence Holten, a Cornish woman who was born in Liskeard in 1878 and became a librarian in Bristol. They married in Bristol in 1899 and had three children: two sons (of which Paul was the younger) and then a daughter. After his primary and secondary education at the technical college, Paul Dirac joined the electrical engineering department of Bristol University in 1918 to train as an electrical engineer. This choice was due to prompting from his father who was concerned about his son’s job prospects.
Dirac did well at university, but he did not find a suitable job due to post-war conditions. His desire was to go to Cambridge University to study mathematics and physics. He was accepted by St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1921, but was offered only a minor scholarship, insufficient to support him there. Fortunately, he was able to study Applied Mathematics at Bristol University for two years, paying no fees and living at home. After this, in 1923, he was awarded a major scholarship at St John’s College and a Department of Scientific and Industrial Research training grant, but even these did not cover the amount he needed to study at Cambridge. In the end he was able to go to St John’s College because extraordinary action was taken by the college. He did all his life’s work there, from postgraduate studies in 1923 to retirement from his Lucasian professorship in 1969 (excluding sabbatical leaves). Thus, it turned out that the college made a profitable investment when they gave him a modest increase to the major scholarship they had awarded him.
Paul Dirac died, aged 82, on 20 October 1984 as a Nobel Prize winner (1933) and a member of the British Order of Merit (1973). He was the outstanding theoretical physicist in Britain in the 20th century. In 1995 there was a great celebration of Dirac and his work in London. A plaque was placed in Westminster Abbey as a memorial to him and his achievements, joining similar plaques to Newton, Maxwell, Thomson, Green and other outstanding theoretical physicists. It included Dirac’s equation in a compact relativistic form (as Dirac’s full equation would not have fitted on the plaque). This was not a form that Dirac would ever have used, although later students of Dirac often used it. As part of the celebration, addresses were given on four topics related to Dirac’s work (see P Goddard 1998 in Further reading).
Monumental discoveries
Dirac established the most general theory of quantum mechanics and discovered the relativistic equation for the electron, which now bears his name. The remarkable notion of an antiparticle to each particle – i.e. the positron as antiparticle to the electron – stems from his equation. He was the first to develop quantum field theory, which underlies all theoretical work on sub-atomic or “elementary” particles today, work that is fundamental to our understanding of the forces of nature. He proposed and investigated the concept of a magnetic monopole, an object not yet known empirically, as a means of bringing even greater symmetry to Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism. He quantized the gravitational field, and developed a general theory of quantum field theories with dynamical constraints, which forms the basis of the gauge theories and superstring theories of today. The influence and importance of his work has increased with the decades, and physicists daily use the concepts and equations that he developed.
Dirac’s first step into a new quantum theory was taken late in September 1925. R H Fowler, his research supervisor, had received a proof copy of an exploratory paper by Werner Heisenberg in the framework of the old quantum theory of Bohr and Sommerfeld, which leaned heavily on Bohr’s correspondence principle but changed the equations so that they involved directly observable quantities. Fowler sent Heisenberg’s paper on to Dirac, who was on vacation in Bristol, asking him to look into this paper carefully. Dirac’s attention was drawn to a mysterious mathematical relationship, at first sight unintelligible, that Heisenberg had reached. Several weeks later, back in Cambridge, Dirac suddenly recognized that this mathematical form had the same structure as the Poisson Brackets that occur in the classical dynamics of particle motion. From this thought he quickly developed a quantum theory that was based on non-commuting dynamical variables. This led him to a more profound and significant general formulation of quantum mechanics than was achieved by any other worker in this field (see P Dirac 1925 in Further reading).
This was a major achievement that marked him out from others in the field. As a young, 25-year-old physicist he was quickly accepted by outstanding physicists. He was invited to speak at their most exclusive conferences, such as the Solvay Congress of 1927 (see Further reading), and joined in their deliberations as an equal.
However, this general formulation allowed him to go much further. With it, he was able to develop his transformation theory, which showed explicitly (see P Dirac 1927 in Further reading) how it was possible to relate a range of different formulations of quantum mechanics, all of them equivalent in their physical consequences, such as Schrödinger’s wave equation and Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics. This was an astonishing achievement, which led to a deeper understanding of quantum mechanics and its use. This transformation theory was the pinnacle of Dirac’s development of quantum mechanics since it unified all proposed versions of quantum mechanics, as well as giving rise to a continuum of other possible versions. In later life Dirac considered this transformation theory to be his own as no other quantum mechanician had found any hint of it. Altogether, Dirac’s quantum mechanics takes a simple and beautiful form, with a structure showing elegance and economy of concept, and linked directly with the classical theory. It showed us a new aspect of our universe, both profound and perplexing in its new concepts, and certainly unexpected.
Even as an undergraduate Dirac had been deeply conscious of the importance of special relativity in physics, the theory that Einstein had put forward in 1905 and that Dirac had learned about from lectures by C D Broad, the philosophy professor at Bristol University. Most of his early papers as a postgraduate student were devoted to modifying calculations already in the literature to make them compatible with special relativity. In 1927 Dirac sought to develop a theory of the electron that satisfied this requirement and he published his relativistically invariant equation for the electron early in 1928 (see P Dirac 1928 in Further reading).
Although this goal had been in the minds of many other physicists, none had been able to find a satisfactory equation. He gave an argument, simple and of the utmost elegance, that was based on the requirement that his transformation theory should also hold for relativistic quantum mechanics – an argument that specified the general form this relativistic equation should have, an argument that all physicists have found compelling. His transformation theory requires the equation to be no more than linear in time-derivative, while relativity arguments indicate that the equation can be only linear in the space derivatives also. Dirac’s equation is certainly one of the most beautiful physics equations. Professor Sir Nevill Mott, former director of the Cavendish Laboratory, wrote recently: “This [equation] seemed, and still seems to me, the most beautiful and exciting piece of pure theoretical physics that I have seen in my lifetime – comparable with Maxwell’s deduction that the displacement current, and therefore electromagnetism, must exist.” (See B Kursunoglu and E P Wigner 1988 in Further reading.) Also, the Dirac equation for the electron implied that it should have spin 1/2, and a magnetic moment of eh/(4pm), where h is the Planck constant and m is the electron mass, correct to the accuracy of 0.1%.
Dirac’s equation and his theory of the electron have remained firm up to the present day. Its predictions have been thoroughly verified for all atomic and molecular systems. It has been demonstrated to hold for all other particles that have the same spin as the electron, such as the protons, the hyperons and all other baryons, when their induced magnetic moments are taken into account; and all known leptons, to say nothing of the fundamental building blocks of all hadrons, the quarks themselves. It is universally applicable and well known by all physicists and chemists, something nobody could deny. Indeed, in 1929 Dirac felt able to state: “The general theory of quantum mechanics is now complete… The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known.” (See P Dirac 1929 in Further reading.)
Dirac soon showed that his equation had other, unexpected, implications for these particles. The equation predicted the existence of antiparticles, such as the positron and the negatively charged antiproton, objects now well known in high-energy physics laboratories. Indeed, all particles have corresponding antiparticles and almost all of them are now known empirically. The positron and antiproton are particularly well known, both being stable in a vacuum, and are now widely used in collider accelerators, with which physicists study physical phenomena at very high energies.
It is important to emphasize here the outstanding beauty of Dirac’s equation. It may be difficult to convey this quality to non-scientists, but we can be confident that no physicist would disagree with this statement. The Dirac equation is one of the most outstanding discoveries. Through this work, Dirac uncovered for us all a fundamental and satisfying principle governing our universe, which demonstrates to an unsurpassed degree the elegance of its structure. For this discovery, Dirac’s name will be known forever. It is an outstanding monument to his ability and ingenuity, leading us to comprehend at least one aspect of the fundamental forces in this remarkable universe in which we live.
Dirac’s name would be high in physics records even if quantum mechanics and transformation theory were his only contributions to knowledge. His discovery of the Dirac equation puts him far above all others – an outstanding genius in the history of physics.
In June, two New Zealand universities formally applied to join the CMS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This marked the launch of an initiative to establish a New Zealand high-energy particle physics and instrumentation programme called NZ_CMS. The basis of this programme is the formation of an experimental particle physics and instrumentation research group within New Zealand that not only contributes directly to the CMS experimental programme, but does so in a way that also optimizes the benefits for New Zealand, its industry and its young researchers. The application was made on behalf of six staff from the universities of Auckland and Canterbury, and also includes several graduate students. In addition, NZ_CMS is receiving support from staff and university groups within the two universities in the fields of electrical engineering, computer science, medical imaging, nanotechnology and optics.
The CMS pixel system was identified as the area where NZ_CMS should contribute, as it provides the best match in terms of personnel, resources, and the focus on instrumentation development sought by Auckland, Canterbury, and the New Zealand government. Over the last year members of NZ_CMS have been working within the CMS pixel community, ensuring a smooth integration into CMS as well as establishing the connections and the technology transfer necessary for the continued development of the programme.
Pixel systems
NZ_CMS has benefited greatly from input from New Zealand, the CMS management and the CMS pixel group at the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI) in Villigen, Switzerland. Realistic goals have been outlined for long-term benefits and contributions to CMS, whist enabling NZ_CMS to establish itself within the New Zealand academic climate, as well as allowing the shorter-term goals attractive to funding agencies to be achieved. Roland Horisberger, the CMS pixel detector project leader, and the PSI group have strongly supported NZ_CMS, facilitating pixel technology transfer to New Zealand and helping to define the scope of the NZ_CMS deliverables. At present, members of NZ_CMS are working within the PSI pixel group on the pixel control systems and services. As the NZ_CMS collaboration develops, it is expected that the New Zealand-PSI connection will be strengthened, and a training-exchange programme for students, engineers and researchers will be established.
As a sign of the enthusiasm and support for NZ_CMS, the development from initial idea to application for CMS membership has taken only a year and a half, and it has already secured preliminary funding for pixel instrumentation research. The initiative was first presented at the New Zealand Institute of Physics conference in July last year, which was followed by a visit from a CMS-CERN delegation to New Zealand in January.
The week-long itinerary of the delegation, led by John Ellis (representing CERN) and Diether Blechschmidt (representing CMS), included formal meetings with the minister of research, science and technology, the Royal Society of New Zealand and the Universities of Auckland and Canterbury. The delegates also visited Industrial research Ltd (a Crown Research Institute of some 400 staff) and participated in the 18th International Workshop on Weak Interactions and Neutrinos (WIN 2002) held at Canterbury. There was also time for a public lecture by Ellis entitled “From Rutherford to Higgs” in which he described particle interactions using vocabulary from the sport of rugby.
Following the delegation’s visit, Steve Thompson, chief executive officer of the Royal Society of New Zealand, made an official information visit to CERN. Soon afterwards initial funding was obtained from the New Zealand government and it was decided to proceed with the NZ_CMS application to join CMS. It is now hoped that concurrent with the NZ_CMS application New Zealand and CERN can negotiate and sign an agreement on co-operation. This would facilitate the development of the country’s participation in the LHC.
Current programmes
In an effort to build on its strengths and resources, NZ_CMS is endeavouring to work in conjunction with the country’s existing particle physics programmes. Current areas of research in New Zealand include heavy-ion physics at Auckland, ultra-high-energy neutrino physics at Canterbury and theoretical physics at Massey University.
In addition to the University of Auckland’s taking a leading role in the NZ_CMS pixel programme with the establishment of a pixel laboratory at its Tamaki campus, Auckland’s David Krofcheck is augmenting NZ_CMS’s contribution to CMS through reaction-plane studies for the CMS Heavy Ions programme. This follows on from work done with gold-gold collisions at the E895 experiment at Brookhaven in the US. E895 used the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) to deliver gold beams of 2, 4, 6 and 8 GeV per nucleon to measure the excitation functions of collective nuclear matter “flow”. The NZ_CMS Heavy Ions group currently consists of three researchers and is based entirely at the University of Auckland.
As far as Canterbury is concerned, its particle physics group is participating in the Radio Ice Cherenkov Experiment (RICE) in Antarctica. RICE is a neutrino telescope at the south pole using radio antennas to detect the coherent emission of radio-wavelength Cherenkov radiation from the electromagnetic shower of particles produced when an ultra-high-energy electron neutrino interacts in the ice. The Canterbury group is involved in the Monte-Carlo simulation of the shower and the subsequent detection of the Cherenkov pulse, and the investigation into other possible physics sources such as the transition radiation from air showers. The absence of any neutrino events in the data analysed to date implies upper limits for the neutrino flux comparable to the air shower experiments AGASA and Fly’s Eye over the neutrino energy range of around 107-1012 GeV.
With research into medical imaging instrumentation, digital-signal processing and nanotechnology, Canterbury is also looking to establish instrumentation applications associated with pixel systems and pixel data visualization. These would tie in with its new HITLab NZ, the annex of the Human Interface Technology Laboratory (HITLab) at the University of Washington in Seattle. The HITLab consortium is a world leader in virtual-reality technology such as remote surgery and virtual retinal display, which scans images directly into the retina of the eye.
An additional aspect to be developed is online and offline computing, with a contribution from New Zealand now being possible thanks to the installation of the high-bandwidth transpacific Southern Cross Cable, which started operation in late 2000. The cable removes the bandwidth bottleneck between Australasia and the United States, and delivers 120 Gbit/s of fully protected capacity (the equivalent of eight full-length motion pictures every second). An upgrade in early 2003 will double capacity to 240 Gbit/s. At present, the currently available bandwidth to the US from within the universities is around 100 Mbit/s. This removal of bandwidth constraints, coupled with a developing interest in GRID research within New Zealand’s IT community, has prompted discussion of possible contributions to online and offline computing within the context of NZ_CMS.
The third component of New Zealand’s existing particle physics programme is the theoretical physics group at Massey University, which focuses on nucleon-structure functions and deep inelastic scattering calculations. Their interest in NZ_CMS is ongoing, as experiments at the LHC are an excellent opportunity for studying quark and gluon distribution functions. Detailed knowledge of these distribution functions is needed for much of the physics that will be performed at the LHC, and the NZ_CMS programme will enable the Massey group to participate directly in a facility that should contribute significantly to this area of research.
Finally, the NZ_CMS initiative should be seen as part of the resurgence in New Zealand particle physics that looks to work in close collaboration with both the country’s established research groups and our international collaborators (PSI and CMS/CERN). This is a significant step towards New Zealand’s participation in the truly global “big science” projects associated with modern high-energy particle physics laboratories, and is based on access to research at the frontier of particle physics.
The NZ_CMS initiative is also a way to combat New Zealand’s perceived geographical isolation and the continued “brain drain” of young researchers who venture overseas for graduate and career opportunities – often never to return.
This brain drain is, of course, not a new phenomenon. One of the best documented cases is a young Kiwi (New Zealander) called Ernest Rutherford, who left the country in 1895 to work with J J Thompson at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory. NZ_CMS intends to reunite quarks and Kiwis in New Zealand!
These are just some of the more than 60 languages spoken by collaborators on Fermilab’s CDF and D0 experiments, as determined by a quick and utterly unscientific survey in mid-July. A poll of collaborations at CERN, DESY, KEK or any of the world’s particle physics laboratories would reveal a comparable population of polyglots – men and women from every corner of the world who have come together to explore the nature of matter and energy, space and time. Particle physics is truly one community, without borders.
Moreover, when it comes to advances in research at the world’s handful of particle physics laboratories, we are all in this together, for better or worse. When CERN gets a cold, Fermilab sneezes, and vice versa. At the moment, the particle physics world is watching as Fermilab struggles to fulfil the promise of Run II at the Tevatron; and CERN’s current LHC budget and schedule challenges have strong implications for the future of every physics laboratory. On a brighter note, a physics discovery at laboratory A inevitably builds upon work at laboratories B and C. It all comes together in one worldwide particle physics enterprise.
Yet while particle physics collaborations are international, particle physics communication is not. For the most part, each region and each laboratory communicates for itself, with little coordination on issues, strategies, resources and messages. Does a press release from one laboratory (my own, for example) trumpeting a new experimental result give more than a nod to the work at other laboratories that made the result possible? It’s doubtful. With difficult news to break, does one laboratory seek support from the others? Provide a clue that it’s coming? Not likely. In planning communication strategies, do communicators coordinate their efforts? Probably not. Global Communication Network? Forget it. When it comes to communication, every laboratory is an island.
Standard model of communication
It is high time particle physics communication caught up with the reality of particle physics collaboration. To achieve the kind of future that particle physicists everywhere would like for their field, the Standard Model of Physics Communication will have to change.
In December 2001, communicators from six of the world’s physics laboratories met at DESY in Hamburg to form a worldwide collaboration for physics communication. The immediate stimulus for the meeting was a message from Petra Folkerts, communication director at DESY, to Fermilab on 12 September 2001:
“I want to say that we are all with you in these days. I myself can’t find the right words to express my feelings after this terrible 11 September. From my point of view now it’s absolutely important that we outreach people around the world will meet as soon as possible, not only to figure out how to help international particle physics stay alive, but how we, in our field of activity, can set visible footprints for the significance of peaceful collaboration across all borders.”
The message gave impetus to a project that communicators at particle physics laboratories had pondered for some time, and led to the formation of an international laboratory communication council. Membership has grown to 10 laboratories from five countries.
Initial actions of the council include the development of a particle physics image bank comprising the best photographs and graphic resources from the world’s laboratories, appropriately captioned and credited – one-stop shopping for reporters, physicists, students, teachers and policy makers who need outstanding graphics to tell the particle physics story. The image bank will live on a new website – interactions.org – devoted not to the support of any one laboratory or region, but to all. Advance coordination of press releases among member laboratories has already begun, not only to enhance the recognition of discoveries wherever they occur, but also to foster the recognition of the interconnected nature of advances in particle physics throughout the world. The collaboration plans staff exchanges, workshops and panels at international physics conferences.
The time has passed when one laboratory or one sector of the particle physics field could profit at the expense of another. Progress at every laboratory and in every region depends on the success of particle physics everywhere. As the early American experimental physicist Benjamin Franklin told his colonial colleagues in 1776: “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall hang separately.” The Quark Wars are over. The laboratory communication council represents a recognition of this reality by the world’s particle physics communicators. As Folkerts stressed in her message of September 2001, it is a collaborative endeavour.
Whether they speak Gujarati or Georgian, Swedish or Romanian, Tagalog or the Queen’s English, I hope that particle physicists everywhere will support this worldwide venture in physics communication.
edited by C T H Davies and S M Playfer, Institute of Physics Publishing, ISBN 0750308672, £40.00 (€ 63).
A graduate text based on lectures originally presented at the 55th Scottish Universities Summer School in Physics, held at St Andrews in 2001. The school was a NATO Advanced Study Institute.
These 23 essays written by Steven Weinberg from 1985 to 1999 make a nice collection around the theme of reductionism. Each is preceded by a page or so describing the context, which is often a valuable addition to the main texts of the essays. Professor Weinberg’s introduction to the set led me to believe that the book would be about facing up to the reality of a neutral universe: Tycho Brahe’s statue looking up to the sky is on the cover. The secondary title is more apt: the majority of the essays are in defence of the scientific approach to understanding our surroundings. Flaws in other approaches, especially constructionist, are pointed out.
Weinberg makes a strong case for reductionism. Phenomena can be explained in terms of others, but these explanations come in a hierarchy, which clearly points back to a theory of everything, as yet to be discovered. Physics is closest to this origin and physicists are closing in.
Not being a physicist myself, I found that many of the essays are brilliant formulations of our understanding of physics, better than anything I have read before. Apart from two more or less political statements, which I felt were out of place, the collection is very homogeneous. However, this is also its weak side: points are necessarily repeated and I will now certainly remember that the Standard Model has 18 parameters that we cannot yet calculate. From 1985 to 1999 many things happened to high-energy physics, such as the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider. Unless one knows the dates of these events, it is somewhat confusing to the non-physicist to follow the arguments as there is neither a synoptic nor a statement of the current state of affairs.
One thing I am not so sure of is the “emergence” argument. According to Weinberg, apart from historical accidents (initial conditions), what we observe can be understood exclusively in terms of the hierarchy of explanations, with physics at the root. However, computer simulations (for example of neuronal systems) seem to indicate that more than one underlying “physics” can indistinguishably lead to the same behaviour, by construction. Does that not mean that the mathematics governing this behaviour is independent of those physics? Then there may be independent sciences after all.
My favourite essays are the one in which Weinberg takes the humorous view that non-physicists are somewhat odd, and the 19-page overview of the history of physics in the 20th century. The latter is by far the clearest article on the fundamental ideas behind relativity and quantum mechanics that I have encountered.
The argument that science advances and that it does so independently of the cultural background is certainly in agreement with my own limited experience. Wherever in the world you walk into a university you suddenly feel this, whether lunch is eaten with chopsticks or a totalitarian regime has just been shed.
I greatly enjoyed this collection – it makes me want an entire book in which Weinberg expands on the individual views rather than repeating them in the condensed form of the essays. We need more of this eminently clear exposure of how science works.
European astroparticle physics received a boost last year with the formation of the Astroparticle Physics European Coordination (APPEC), established in an agreement signed by funding agencies from France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK. Astroparticle physics – which covers topics as diverse as cosmic rays, dark matter and gravitational radiation – falls between more traditional areas such as particle physics, nuclear physics and astronomy, and so can lose funding opportunities. Also, different countries have different ways of defining astroparticle physics. APPEC has been set up to promote co-operation within Europe’s growing astroparticle physics community, and to develop long-term strategies at the European level, in particular for funding.
APPEC’s activities are organized through two main committees: a steering committee, currently led by Jean-Jacques Aubert of the French CNRS; and a peer-review committee, chaired by Ricardo Barbieri of the Scuola Normale Superior in Pisa. The steering committee, which meets twice a year and includes representatives from the initial partners, has already met in Berlin and London. One important action has been to begin work on a bid to the EU 6th Framework for up to 720 million for an Integrated Initiative Infrastructure (I3). The committee also seeks to widen APPEC’s membership – Spain, for example, is joining, and other countries have been approached.
The peer-review committee, which also meets twice a year, aims to assess existing programmes in different areas of astroparticle physics, and to encourage future collaboration. The committee has already met twice, to review experiments in double beta decay and in dark matter. Its next meeting, in January 2003, will consider high-energy neutrino experiments.
David Wark from Sussex and RAL, who is one of the members of the steering committee, said: “I believe this is a positive step for astroparticle physics, as it can help bring some of the rigour, co-operation and international clout to astroparticle physics that organizations like CERN and DESY bring to accelerator physics. It will also help to get astroparticle physics projects judged using similar criteria in all the countries from which they require support.”
Aside from its committee meetings, APPEC will keep in touch with European astroparticle physicists throughout the year with an electronic newsletter and a website, to be launched later this year. In the meantime, to register interest in receiving the newsletter, please email sacquin@dapnia.cea.fr.
At a ceremony marking the beginning of spin physics at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the US laboratory renewed its collaboration agreement with Japan’s Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) for a further 5 years. Initially established in 1995, the RIKEN-BNL agreement has been instrumental in establishing the spin-physics programme at RHIC, and led to the establishment of the RIKEN-BNL Research Center (RBRC) in 1997.
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