On 14 April, representatives of CERN and the Republic of Latvia gathered in a virtual ceremony to sign an agreement admitting Latvia as an Associate Member State.
Latvia, which is the third of the Baltic States to join CERN in recent years after Lithuania and Estonia, first became involved with CERN activities in the early 1990s. Latvian researchers have since participated in many CERN projects, including contributions to the CMS hadron calorimeter and, more recently, participation in the Future Circular Collider study.
“As we become CERN’s newest Associate Member State, we look forward to enhancing our contribution to the Organization’s major scientific endeavours, as well as to investing the unparalleled scientific and technological excellence gained by this membership in further building the economy and well-being of our societies,” said Latvian prime minister Krišjānis Kariņš.
As an Associate Member State, Latvia will be entitled to appoint representatives to attend meetings of the CERN Council and Finance Committee. Its nationals will be eligible for staff positions, fellowships and studentships, and its industries will be entitled to bid for CERN contracts, increasing opportunities for collaboration in advanced technologies.
“We are delighted to welcome Latvia as a new Associate Member State,” said CERN Director-General Fabiola Gianotti. “The present agreement contributes to strengthening the ties between CERN and Latvia, thereby offering opportunities for the further growth of particle physics in Latvia through partnership in research, technological development and education.”
COVID-19 put the community on a steep learning curve regarding new forms of online communication and collaboration. Before the pandemic, a typical high-energy physics (HEP) researcher was expected to cross the world several times a year for conferences, collaboration meetings and detector shifts, at the cost of thousands of dollars and a sizeable carbon footprint. Theonline workshop Sustainable HEP — a new initiative this year — attracted more than 300 participants from 45 countries from 28 to 30 June to discuss how the lessons learned in the past two years might help HEP transition to a more sustainable future.
The first day of the workshop focused on how new forms of online interaction could change our professional travel culture. Shaun Hotchkiss (University of Auckland) stressed in a session dedicated to best-practice examples that the purpose of online meetings should not simply be to emulate traditional 20th-century in-person conferences and collaboration meetings. Instead, the community needs to rethink what virtual scientific exchange could look like in the 21st century. This might, for instance, include replacing traditional live presentations by pre-recorded talks that are pre-watched by the audience at their own convenience, leaving more precious conference time for in-depth discussions and interactions among the participants.
Social justice
The second day highlighted social-justice issues, and the potential for greater inclusivity using online formats. Alice Gathoni (British Institute in Eastern Africa) powerfully described the true meaning of online meetings to her: everyone wants to belong. It was only during the first online meetings during the pandemic that she truly felt a real sense of belonging to the global scientific community.
The third day was dedicated to existing sustainability initiatives and new technologies. Mike Seidel (PSI) presented studies on energy-recovery linacs and discussed energy-management concepts for future colliders, including daily “standby modes”. Other options include beam dynamics explicitly designed to maximise the ratio of luminosity to power, more efficient radio-frequency cavities, the use of permanent magnets, and high-temperature superconductor cables and cavities. He concluded his talk by asking thought-provoking questions such as whether the HEP community should engage with its international networks to help establish sustainable energy-supply solutions.
The workshop ended by drafting a closing statement that calls upon the HEP community to align its activities with the Paris Climate Agreement and the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees. This statement can be signed by members of the HEP community until 20 August.
The first truly resistive gaseous detector was invented by Rinaldo Santonico and Roberto Cardarelli in 1981. A kind of parallel-plate detector with electrodes made of resistive materials such as Bakelite and thin-float glass, the design is sometimes also known as a resistive-plate chamber (RPC). Resistive gaseous detectors use electronegative gases and electric fields that typically exceed 10 kV/cm. When a charged particle is incident in the gas gap, the working operational gas is ionised, and primary electrons cause an avalanche as a result of the high electric field. The induced charge is then obtained on the readout pad as a signal. RPCs have several unique and important practical features, combining good spatial resolution with a time resolution comparable to that of scintillators. They are therefore well suited for fast spacetime particle tracking, as a cost-effective way to instrument large volumes of a detector, for example in muon systems at collider experiments.
Resistive gaseous detectors use electronegative gases and electric fields which typically exceed 10 kV/cm
Resistive Gaseous Detectors: Designs, Performance, and Perspectives, a new book by Marcello Abbrescia, Vladimir Peskov and Paulo Fonte, covers the basic principles of their operation, historical development, the latest achievements and their growing applications in various fields from hadron colliders to astrophysics. This book is not only a summary of numerous scientific publications on many different examples of RPCs, but also a detailed description of their design, operation and performance.
The book has nine chapters. The operational principle of gaseous detectors and some of their limitations, most notably the efficiency drop in a high-particle-rate environment, are described. This is followed by a history of parallel-plate detectors, the first classical Bakelite RPC, double-gap RPCs and glass-electrode multi-gap timing RPCs. A modern design of double-gap RPCs and examples for the muon systems like those at ATLAS and CMS at the LHC, the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider at Brookhaven and the multi-gap timing RPC for the time-of-flight system of the HADES experiment at GSI are detailed. Advanced designs with new materials for electrodes for high-rate detectors are then introduced, and ageing and longevity are elaborated upon. A new generation of gaseous detectors with resistive electrodes that can be made with microelectronic technology is then introduced: these large-area electrodes can easily be manufactured while still achieving high spatial resolutions up to 12 microns.
Homeland security
The final chapter covers applications outside particle physics such as those in medicine exploiting positron-emission tomography. For homeland security, RPCs can be used in muon-scattering tomography with cosmic-ray muons to scan spent nuclear fuel containers without opening them, or to quickly scan incoming cargo trucks without disrupting the traffic of logistics. A key subject not covered in detail, however, is the need to search for environmentally friendly alternatives to gases with high global-warming potential, which are often needed in resistive gaseous detectors at present to achieve stable and sustained operation (CERN Courier July/August 2021 p20).
Abbrescia, Peskov and Fonte’s book will be useful to graduates specialising in high-energy physics, astronomy, astrophysics, medical physics and radiation measurements in general for undergraduate students and teachers.
A chemistry professor invents a novel way to produce chemical compounds, albeit with a small chance of toxicity. A paper is published. A quick chat with a science communicator leads to a hasty press release. But when the media picks up on it, the story is twisted.
“What if scientists ruled the world?” — a somewhat sensational but thought-provoking title for a play — is an interactive theatre production by the Australian Academy of Science in partnership with Falling Walls Engage. Staged on 8 May at the Shine Dome in Canberra, Australia, a hybrid performance explored the ramifications of an ill-considered press release, and provided a welcome opportunity for scientists to reflect on how best to communicate their research. The dynamic exchange of ideas between science experts and laypeople in the audience highlighted the power of words, and how they are used to inform, persuade, deceive or confuse.
After setting the scene, director Ali Clinch invited people participating remotely on Zoom and via a YouTube livestream to guide the actors’ actions, helping to advance and reframe the storyline with their ideas, questions and comments. Looking at the same story from different points of view invited the audience to think about the different stakeholders and their responsibility in communicating science. In the first part of the performance, for example, the science communicator talks excitedly about her job with students, but later has to face a crisis that the busy professor is unable or unwilling to deal with. At a critical point in the story, when a town-hall meeting is held to debate the future of a company that employs most of the people in the town, but which probably produced the same toxic chemical, everybody felt part of the performance. The audience could even take the place of an actor, or act in a new role.
The play highlighted the pleasures and tribulations of work at the interface between research and public engagement
The play highlighted the pleasures and tribulations of work at the interface between research and public engagement during euphoric discoveries and crisis moments alike, and has parallels both with the confusion encountered during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and misguided early fears that the LHC could generate a black hole. In an age of fake news, sensationalism and misinformation, the performance adeptly highlighted the complexities and vested interests inherent in science communication today.
It is often said that “nobody understands quantum mechanics” – a phrase usually attributed to Richard Feynman. This statement may, however, be misleading to the uninitiated. There is certainly a high level of understanding of quantum mechanics. The point, moreover, is that there is more than one way to understand the theory, and each of these ways requires us to make some disturbing concessions.
Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland is therefore a welcome popular book – a well-written and easy-to-follow exploration of quantum mechanics and its interpretation. Rovelli is a theorist working mainly on quantum gravity and foundational aspects of physics. He is also a very successful popular author, distinguished by his erudition and his ability to illuminate the bigger picture. His latest book is no exception.
Helgoland is a barren German island of the North Sea where Heisenberg co-invented quantum mechanics in 1925 while on vacation. The extraordinary sequence of events between 1925 and 1926, when Heisenberg, Jordan, Born, Pauli, Dirac and Schrödinger formulated quantum mechanics, is the topic of the opening chapter of the book.
Rovelli only devotes a short chapter to discuss interpretations in general. This is certainly understandable, since the author’s main target is to discuss his own brainchild: relational quantum mechanics. This approach, however, does not do justice to popular ideas among experts, such as the many-worlds interpretation. The reader may be surprised not to find anything about the Copenhagen (or, more appropriately, Bohr’s) interpretation. This is for very good reason, however, since it is not generally considered to be a coherent interpretation. Having mostly historical significance, it has served as inspiration to approaches that keep the spirit of Bohr’s ideas, like consistent histories (not mentioned in the book at all), or Rovelli’s relational quantum mechanics.
Relational quantum mechanics was introduced by Rovelli in an original technical article in 1996 (Int. J. Theor. Phys.35 1637). Helgoland presents a simplified version of these ideas, explained in more detail in Rovelli’s article, and in a way suitable for a more general audience. The original article, however, can serve as very nice complementary reading for those with some physics background. Relational quantum mechanics claims to be compatible with several of Bohr’s ideas. In some ways it goes back to the original ideas of Heisenberg by formulating the theory without a reference to a wavefunction. The properties of a system are defined only when the system interacts with another system. There is no distinction between observer and observed system. Rovelli meticulously embeds these ideas in a more general historical and philosophical context, which he presents in a captivating manner. He even speculates whether this way of thinking can help us understand topics that, in his opinion, are unrelated to quantum mechanics, such as consciousness.
Helgoland’s potential audience is very diverse and manages to transcend the fact that it is written for the general public. Professionals from both the sciences and the humanities will certainly learn something, especially if they are not acquainted with the nuances of the interpretations of modern physics. The book, however, as is explicitly stated by Rovelli, takes a partisan stance, aiming to promote relational quantum mechanics. As such, it may give a somewhat skewed view of the topic. In that respect, it would be a good idea to read it alongside books with different perspectives, such as Sean Carroll’s Something Deeply Hidden (2019) and Adam Becker’s What is Real? (2018).
Throughout the history of nuclear, particle and astroparticle physics, novel detector concepts have paved the way to new insights and new particles, and will continue to do so in the future. To help train the next generation of innovators, noted experimental particle physicists Hermann Kolanoski (Humboldt University Berlin and DESY) and Norbert Wermes (University of Bonn) have written a comprehensive textbook on particle detectors. The authors use their broad experience in collider and underground particle-physics experiments, astroparticle physics experiments and medical-imaging applications to confidently cover the spectrum of experimental methods in impressive detail.
Particle Detectors – Fundamentals and Applications combines in a single volume the syllabus also found in two well-known textbooks covering slightly different aspects of detectors: Techniques for Nuclear and Particle Physics Experiments by W R Leo and Detectors for Particle Radiation by Konrad Kleinknecht. Kolanoski and Wermes’ book supersedes them both by being more up-to-date and comprehensive. It is more detailed than Particle Detectors by Claus Grupen and Boris Shwartz – another excellent and recently published textbook with a similar scope – and will probably attract a slightly more advanced population of physics students and researchers. This new text promises to become a particle-physics analogue of the legendary experimental-nuclear-physics textbook Radiation Detection and Measurement by Glenn Knoll.
The book begins with a comprehensive warm-up chapter on the interaction of charged particles and photons with matter, going well beyond a typical textbook level. This is followed by a very interesting discussion of the transport of charge carriers in media in magnetic and electric fields, and – a welcome novelty – signal formation, using the method of “weighting fields”. The main body of the book is devoted first to gaseous, semiconductor, Cherenkov and transition-radiation detectors, and then to detector systems for tracking, particle identification and calorimetry, and the detection of cosmic rays, neutrinos and exotic matter. Final chapters on electronics readout, triggering and data acquisition complete the picture.
Particle Detectors – Fundamentals and Applications is best considered a reference for lectures on experimental methods in particle and nuclear physics for postgraduate-level students. The book is easy to read, and conceptual discussions are well supported by numerous examples, plots and illustrations of excellent quality. Kolanoski and Wermes have undoubtedly written a gem of a book, with value for any experimental particle physicist, be they a master’s student, PhD student or accomplished researcher looking for detector details outside of their expertise.
Amalia Ballarino of CERN has received the 2021 James Wong Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for her significant and continuing contributions in the field of superconducting materials. The IEEE citation recognises her for: “leading successful R&D programs that establish a winning role for high temperature and MgB2 superconductors in accelerator applications; piloting the development of MgB2 wire suitable for cabling and its incorporation into a multi-kA power transmission system operating at 25 K, and directing the project to industrialise eight such systems for which over 1000 km of wire have been produced; promoting fruitful cooperation between research and industry; and launching R&D activity based on the use of superconductors (Nb-Ti, Nb3Sn, MgB2 and high-temperature superconductors) for future particle accelerators.
Ballarino was responsible for the several-thousand current leads that power the superconducting magnets of the LHC, including those based on the high-temperature superconductor BSCCO-2223, which have been the first large-scale commercial application of high-temperature superconductors. She was awarded Superconducting Week’s “Superconductor Industry Person of the Year 2006” for the development. Following work on the commissioning of the LHC, Ballarino proposed cold-powering systems that use high-current MgB2 transfer lines for feeding the new superconducting magnets of the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC). She started a collaboration with industry to develop the conductor in the form of wire suitable for cabling. The wire has been successfully delivered to CERN in large quantities, while the cold-powering systems have been developed and qualified and they are now being industrialised.
CERN is home to more winners than any other institution
Ballarino joined CERN as PhD student. She is section leader in CERN’s magnets, superconductors and cryostats group and, as from January 2021, deputy group leader. The IEEE cited her service to the community as lecturer, member of program committees for international conferences, and technical editor and reviewer of papers for scientific journals. “In my opinion, this recognition has been a long time in coming,” says Bruce Strauss, past president and treasurer of the IEEE council on superconductivity.
The IEEE James Wong Award (formally named “Award for Continuing and Significant Contributions in the Field of Applied Superconductivity” until 2013) comes with a $5000 honorarium and a pure-niobium medal. It has been granted annually by the IEEE council on superconductivity since 2000, and CERN is home to more winners than any other institution, with Daniel Leroy, Lucio Rossi, Herman ten Kate, Robert Aymar, Arnaud Devred and Luca Bottura recognised in previous years.
In the early 1950s, particle accelerators were national-level activities. It soon became obvious that to advance the field further demanded machines beyond the capabilities of single countries. CERN marked a phase transition in this respect, enabling physicists to cooperate around the development of one big facility. Climate science stands to similarly benefit from a change in its topology.
Modern climate models were developed in the 1960s, but there weren’t any clear applications or policy objectives at that time. Today we need hard numbers about how the climate is changing, and an ability to seamlessly link these changes to applications – a planetary information system for assessing hazards, planning food security, aiding global commerce, guiding infrastructural investments, and much more. National centres for climate modelling exist in many countries. But we need a centre “on steroids”: a dedicated exascale computing facility organised on a similar basis to CERN that would allow the necessary leap in realism.
Quantifying climate
To be computationally manageable, existing climate models solve equations for quantities that are first aggregated over large spatial and temporal scales. This blurs their relationship to physical laws, to phenomena we can measure, and to the impacts of a changing climate on infrastructure. Clouds, for example, are creatures of circulation, particularly vertical air currents. Existing models attempt to infer what these air currents would be given information about much larger scale 2D motion fields. There is a necessary degree of abstraction, which leads to less useful results. We don’t know if air is going up or down an individual mountain, for instance, because we don’t have individual mountains in the model, at best mountain ranges.
In addition to more physical models, we also need a much better quantification of model uncertainty. At present this is estimated by comparing solutions across many low-resolution models, or by perturbing parameters of a given low-resolution model. The particle-physics analogy might be that everyone runs their own low-energy accelerators hoping that coordinated experiments will provide high-energy insights. Concentrating efforts on a few high-resolution climate models, where uncertainty is encoded through stochastic mathematics, is a high-energy effort. It would result in better and more useful models, and open the door to cooperative efforts to systematically explore the structural stability of the climate system and its implications for future climate projections.
Working out climate-science’s version of the Standard Model thus provides the intellectual underpinnings for a “CERN for climate change”. One can and should argue about the exact form such a centre should take, whether it be a single facility or a federation of campuses, and on the relative weight it gives to particular questions. What is important is that it creates a framework for European climate, computer and computational scientists to cooperate, also with application communities, in ways that deliver the maximum benefit for society.
Building momentum
A number of us have been arguing for such a facility for more than a decade. The idea seems to be catching on, less for the eloquence of our arguments, more for the promise of exascale computing. A facility to accelerate climate research in developing and developed countries alike has emerged as a core element of one of 12 briefing documents prepared by the Royal Society in advance of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP26, in November. This briefing flanks the European Union’s “Destination Earth” project, which is part of its Green Deal programme – a €1 billion effort over 10 years that envisions the development of improved high-resolution models with better quantified uncertainty. If not anchored in a sustainable organisational concept, however, this risks throwing money to the wind.
Giving a concrete form to such a facility still faces internal hurdles, possibly similar to those faced by CERN in its early days. For example, there are concerns that it will take away funding from existing centres. We believe, and CERN’s own experience shows, that the opposite is more likely true. A “CERN for climate change” would advance the frontiers of the science, freeing researchers to turn their attention to new questions, rather than maintaining old models, and provide an engine for European innovation that extends far beyond climate change.
Gerd Beyer, who passed away on 20 January aged 81, played a major role in the development of biomedical research, both at CERN’s ISOLDE facility and at many other laboratories. He will be remembered as a tireless worker in the field of nuclear and applied nuclear physics combined with new radiochemical methods.
Gerd was born in Berlin in 1940 and studied radiochemistry at the Technical University of Dresden (TUD). He then joined the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, where he developed advanced production methods of rare short-lived radioisotopes for use in nuclear spectroscopy. At the Central Institute for Nuclear Research in Rossendorf, he became proficient in the use of the U-120 cyclotron and the RFR research reactor to produce medical radioisotopes, and in the development of the associated radiopharmaceuticals. He completed his Dr. habil. at TUD on the production of radionuclides by means of rapid radiochemical methods in combination with mass separation.
In 1971 Gerd was invited to ISOLDE, joining Helge Ravn to prepare extremely pure samples of rare long-lived nuclei for studies of their electron-capture decay, in view of their potential for determining neutrino masses. Back in Rossendorf, he continued to develop radiopharmaceuticals and to introduce them into nuclear medicine in the former East Germany and the Eastern Bloc countries. He developed a number of new methods for labelling and synthesising radiopharmaceuticals, in particular the rather difficult problem of efficiently separating fission-produced 99Mo from large samples of low-enriched uranium. This brought him into many collaborations all over the world, with a view to transferring his know-how to other laboratories. As head of cyclotron radiopharmaceuticals, he took the initiative to introduce a PET scanner programme in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), based on the Rossendorf positron camera, using gas detectors derived from pioneering work at CERN.
During his visits to CERN, Gerd spotted the potential of the ISOLDE mass-separation technique to allow the introduction and use of better-suited but hitherto unavailable nuclides.
In 1985, in close collaboration with ISOLDE, he began to prepare for the future use of large facilities to produce such radionuclides. He reactivated ISOLDE’s contacts with the University Hospital of Geneva (HUG), starting a collaboration on the use of exotic positron-emitting nuclides for PET imaging, which resulted in the development of new radiopharmaceuticals based on radionuclides of the rare earths and actinides.
Shortly after the fall of the GDR, Gerd lost his job at Rossendorf and had to start a new career elsewhere. Via a CERN scientific associateship, he became a guest professor at HUG and, later, head of its radiochemistry group, with responsibility for setting up and operating a new cyclotron. This allowed him to continue his work on developing new approaches to labelling monoclonal antibodies and peptides with exotic lanthanide positron emitters produced at ISOLDE, determining their in vivo stability and demonstrating their promising imaging properties. Gerd was also the first to demonstrate the promising therapeutic properties of the alpha emitter 149Tb.
When he retired from HUG, Gerd co-proposed that CERN build a new radiochemical laboratory in connection with ISOLDE. Here, the large knowledge base on target and mass-separator techniques for the production and handling of radionuclides could be used to make samples of these high-purity nuclides available for use in a broader biomedical research programme. Years later, Gerd’s initial idea was eventually realised with the creation of the CERN-MEDICIS facility.
Gerd was a first-rate experimental scientist, highly skilled in the laboratory, and he stayed professionally active to the very end. As a guest professor, a member of numerous professional societies and a holder of many consultancy positions, he spared no effort in sharing and transferring his know-how, recently to the young generation of scientists at MEDICIS.
During Gerd’s outstanding career, his work on the production of radiopharmaceuticals saved innumerable lives. His R&D towards new radiopharmaceuticals and, in particular, his pioneering work on 149Tb for targeted alpha therapy, is opening up new perspectives for efficient cancer treatment. It is therefore particularly tragic that the development of efficient antiviral drugs came too late to support Gerd in his brave fight against COVID-19.
When CERN was established in the 1950s, with the aim of bringing European countries together to collaborate in scientific research after the Second World War, countries from East and West Europe were invited to join. At the time, the only eastern country to take up the call was Yugoslavia. Poland’s accession to CERN membership in 1991 was therefore a particularly significant moment in the organisation’s history because it was the first country from behind the former Iron Curtain to join CERN. Its example was soon followed by a range of Eastern European countries throughout the 1990s.
At the origin of Polish participation at CERN was a vision of the three world-class physicists: Marian Danysz and Jerzy Pniewski from Warsaw and Marian Mięsowicz from Kraków, who had made first contacts with CERN in the early 1960s. The major domains of Polish expertise around that time encompassed the analysis of bubble-chamber data (especially those related to high-multiplicity interactions), the properties of strange hadrons, charm production, and the construction of gaseous detectors.
In 1963, Poland gained observer status at the CERN Council — the first country from Eastern Europe to do so. During the subsequent 25 years, almost out of nothing, a critical mass of national scientific groups collaborating with CERN on everyday basis was established. By the late 1980s, the CERN community recognised that Poles deserved full access to CERN. With the feedback and support of their numerous brilliant pupils, Danysz, Pniewski and Mięsowicz had accomplished a goal which had seemed impossible. Today, Poland’s red and white flag graces the membership rosters of all four major Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments and beyond.
Entering the fray Poland joined CERN two years after the start-up of the Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP), the forerunner to the LHC. Having already made strong contributions to the
construction of LEP’s DELPHI experiment, in particular its silicon vertex detector, electromagnetic calorimeter and RICH detectors, Polish researchers quickly became involved in DELPHI data analyses, including studies of the properties of beauty baryons and searches for supersymmetric particles.
Poland’s accession to CERN membership 30 years ago was the very first case of the return of our nation to European structures
With the advent of the LHC era, Poles became members of all four major LHC-experiment collaborations. In ALICE we are proud of our broad contribution to the study of the quark gluon plasma using HBT-interferometry and electromagnetic probes, and of our participation in the design of and software development for the ALICE time projection chamber. Polish contributions to the ATLAS collaboration encompass not only numerous software and hardware activities (the latter concerning the inner detector and trigger), but also data analyses, notably searching for new physics in the Higgs sector, studies of soft and elastic hadron interactions and a central role in the heavy-ion programme. Involvement in CMS has revolved around the experiment’s muon-detection system, studies of Higgs-boson production and its decays to tau leptons, W+W– interactions and searches for exotic, in particular long-lived, particles. This activity is also complemented by software development and coordination of physics analysis for the TOTEM experiment. Last but not least, Polish groups in LHCb have taken important hardware responsibilities for various subdetectors (including the VELO, RICH and high-level trigger) together with studies of b->s transitions, measurements of the angle γ of the CKM matrix and searches for CPT violation, to name but a few.
Beyond colliders The scope of our research at CERN was never limited to LEP and the LHC. In particular, Polish researchers comprise almost one third of collaborators on the fixed-target experiment NA61/SHINE, where they are involved across the experiment’s strong-interactions programme. Indeed, since the late 1970s, Poles have actively participated in the whole series of deep-inelastic scattering experiments at CERN: EMC, NMC, SMC, COMPASS and recently AMBER. Devoted to studies of different aspects of the partonic structure of the nucleon, these experiments have resulted in spectacular discoveries, including the EMC effect, nuclear shadowing, the proton “spin puzzle”, and 3D imaging of the nucleon.
Polish researchers have also contributed with great success to studies at CERN’s ISOLDE facility. One of the most important achievements was to establish the coexistence of various nuclear shapes, including octupoles, at low excitation energy in radon, radium and mercury nuclei, using the Coulomb-excitation technique. Polish involvement in CERN neutrino experiments started with the BEBC bubble chamber, followed by the CERN Dortmund Heidelberg Saclay Warsaw (CDHSW) experiment and, more recently, participation in the ICARUS experiment and the T2K near-detector as part of the CERN Neutrino Platform. In parallel, we take part in preparations for future CERN projects, including the proposed Future Circular Collider and Compact Linear Collider. In terms of theoretical research, Polish researchers are renowned for the phenomenological description of strong interactions and also play a crucial role in the elaboration of Monte Carlo software packages. In computing generally, Poland was the regional leader in implementing the grid computing platform.
The past three decades have brought a few-fold increase in the population of Polish engineers and technicians involved in accelerator science. Experts contributed significantly to the LHC construction, followed by the services (e.g. electrical quality assurance of the LHC’s superconducting circuits) during consecutive long shutdowns. Detector R&D is also a strong activity of Polish engineers and technicians, for example via membership of CERN’s RD51 collaboration which exists to advance the development and application of micropattern gas detectors. These activities take place in the closest cooperation with national industry, concentrated around cryogenic applications. Growing local expertise in accelerator science also saw the establishment of Poland’s first hadron-therapy centre, located at the Institute of Nuclear Physics PAN in Kraków.
Poland@CERN 2019 saw over 20 companies and institutions represented by around 60 participants take part in more than 120 networking meetings
Collaborations between CERN and Polish industry was initiated by Maciej Chorowski, and there are numerous examples. One is the purchase of vacuum vessels manufactured by CHEMAR in Kielce and RAFAKO in Racibórz, and parts of cryostats from METALCHEM in Kościan. Industrial supplies for CERN were also provided by KrioSystem in Wrocław and Turbotech in Płock, including elements of cryostats for testing prototype superconducting magnets for the LHC. CERN also operates devices manufactured by the ZPAS company in Wolibórz, while Polish company ZEC Service has been awarded CMS Gold awards for the delivery and assembly of cooling installations. Creotech Instruments – a company established by a physicist and two engineers who met at CERN – is a regular manufacturer of electronics for CERN and enjoys a strong collaboration with CERN’s engineering teams. Polish companies also transfer technology from CERN to industry, such as TECHTRA in Wrocław, which obtained a license from CERN for the production and commercialisation of GEM (Gas Electron Multiplier) foil. Deliveries to CERN are also carried out, inter alia, by FORMAT, Softcom or Zakład Produkcji Doświadczalnej CEBEA from Bochnia. At the most recent exhibition of Polish industry at CERN, Poland@CERN 2019, over 20 companies and institutions represented by around 60 participants took part in more than 120 networking meetings.
Societal impact CERN membership has so far enabled around 550 Polish teachers to visit the lab, each returning to their schools with enhanced knowledge and enthusiasm to pass on to younger generations. Poland ranks sixth in Europe in terms of participation in particle-physics masterclasses participants, and at least 10 PhD theses in Poland based on CERN research are defended annually. Over the past 30 years, CERN has also become a second home for some 560 technical, doctoral or administrative students and 180 summer students, while Polish nationals have taken approximately 150 staff positions and 320 fellowships.
Some have taken important positions at CERN. Agnieszka Zalewska was chair of the CERN Council from 2013 to 2015, Ewa Rondio acted as a member of CERN’s directorate in 2009-2010 and Michał Turała chaired the electronics-and-computing-for-physics division in 1995-1998. Also, several of our colleagues were elected as members of CERN bodies such as the Scientific Policy Committee. Our national community at CERN is well integrated, and likes to pass the time outside working hours in particular during mountain hikes and summer picnics.
Poland’s accession to CERN membership 30 years ago was the very first case of the return of our nation to European structures, preceding the European Union and NATO. Poland joined the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in 2004, the Institut Laue-Langevin in 2006 and the European Space Agency in 2012. It was also a founding member of the European Spallation Source and the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research,and is a partner of the European X-ray Free-Electron Laser.
Today, six research institutes and 11 university departments located in eight major Polish cities are focused on high-energy physics. Among domestic projects that have benefitted from CERN technology-transfer is the Jagiellonian PET detector, which is exploring the use of inexpensive plastic scintillators for whole-body PET imaging, and the development of electron linacs for radiotherapy and cargo scanning at the National Centre for Nuclear Research in Świerk, Warsaw.
During the past few years, thanks to closer alignment between participation in CERN experiments and the national roadmap for research infrastructures, the long-term funding scheme for Poland’s CERN membership has been stabilised. This fact, together with the highlights described here, allow us to expect that in the future CERN will be even more “Polish”.
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