Experimental physicist Herbert Lengeler, who made great contributions to the development of superconducting radiofrequency (SRF) cavities, passed away peacefully on 26 January, just three weeks short of his 90th birthday.
Herbert was born in 1931 in the German- speaking region of Eastern Belgium. He studied mathematics and engineering at the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, and experimental physics at RWTH Aachen University in Germany. He worked there as a scientific assistant and completed his PhD in 1963 on the construction of a propane bubble chamber, going on to perform experiments with this instrument on electron-shower production at the 200 MeV electron synchrotron of the University of Bonn.
In 1964 Herbert was appointed as a CERN staff member in the track chamber and accelerator research divisions. He was involved in the construction, testing and operation of an RF particle separator for a bubble chamber. In 1967 he then joined a collaboration between CERN and IHEP in Serpukhov, in the Soviet Union, within which he led the construction of an RF particle separator for both IHEP and the French bubble-chamber Mirabelle, which was installed in the same institution.
In 1971 the value of SRF separators for improved continuous-wave particle beams was recognised. This necessitated the use of SRF systems with high fields and low RF losses. Since a development programme for SRF had just been initiated at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, Herbert joined the research centre on behalf of CERN. In the following pioneering period up to 1978, he led the development of full-niobium SRF cavities operated at liquid-helium temperatures, with all required auxiliary systems.
The success of the SRF separator led to ambitious plans for upgrading the energy of LEP at CERN, which were initiated in 1981. A first SRF cavity with its auxiliaries (RF couplers, frequency tuner, cryostat) was installed and successfully tested in 1983 in the PETRA collider at DESY in Hamburg. Following this, in 1987, an SRF cavity with all auxiliaries and a new helium refrigerator was installed and tested at CERN’s SPS. In parallel, Herbert orchestrated the development of niobium sputtering on copper cavities as a cheaper alternative to bulk niobium. Gradually, additional SRF cavities were installed in the LEP collider, resulting in a doubling of its beam energy by the end of its running period in 2000.
From 1989 onwards, Herbert gradually retired from the LEP upgrade programme and devoted more time to other activities at CERN, such as consultancy for SRF activities at KEK, DESY and Jefferson Lab. In 1993 he was appointed project leader for the next-generation neutron source for Europe, the European Spallation Source, a position he held until his retirement from the project and CERN in 1996.
Herbert was always interested in communicating his experience to younger people. From 1989 to 2001 he frequently gave lectures on accelerator physics and technology as an honorary professor at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany. In 1998 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Russian Academy of Sciences for his contribution to the CERN–IHEP collaboration.
Herbert was an enthusiastic musician. He had been married since 1959 to Rosmarie Müllender- Lengeler, and the couple had four children and 10 grandchildren.
Our colleague and friend Luc Pape passed away on 9 April after a brief illness. Luc’s long and rich career covered all aspects of our field, from the early days of bubble-chamber physics in the 1960s and 1970s, to the analysis of CMS data at the LHC.
In the former, Luc contributed to the development of subtle methods of track reconstruction, measurement and event analysis. He participated in important breakthroughs, such as the first evidence for scaling violation in 1978 in neutrino interactions in BEBC and early studies of the structure of the weak neutral current. Luc developed software to allow the identification of produced muons by linking the extrapolated bubble-chamber tracks to the signals of the external BEBC muon identifier.
Luc’s very strong mathematical background was instrumental in these developments. He acquired a deep expertise in software and stayed at the cutting edge of this field. He also exploited clever techniques and rigorous methods that he adapted in further works. At the end of the bubble-chamber era, Luc was among the experts studying the computing environment of future experiments. He was also one of the people involved in the origin of the PhysicsAnalysis Workstation (PAW) tool.
After this, Luc joined the DELPHI collaboration. Analysing the computing needs of the LEP experiments, he was among the first to realise the necessity of moving from shared central computing to distributed farms for large experiments. He thus conceived, pushed and, with motivated collaborators, built and exploited the DELPHI farm (DELFARM), allowing physicists to rapidly analyse DELPHI data and produce data-summary (DST) files for the whole collaboration. Using his strong expertise in most available software tools, Luc progressively improved track analysis, quality checking and event viewing. DELPHI users will remember TANAGRA (track analysis and graphics package), the backbone of the DELANA (DELPHI analysis) program, and DELGRA for event visualisation.
Luc’s passion for physics never faded. Open minded, but with a predilection for supersymmetry (SUSY), the subtle phenomenology of which he mastered brightly, he became the very active leader of the DELPHI, and then of the full LEP SUSY groups.
After retiring from CERN in 2004, he enjoyed the hospitality of the ETH Zurich group in CMS, to which he brought his expertise on SUSY. Collaborating closely with many young physicists, he introduced into CMS the “stransverse mass” method for SUSY searches, and pioneered several leptonic and hadronic SUSY analyses. He first convened the CMS SUSY/BSM group (2003–2006), then the SUSY physics analysis group (2007–2008), preparing various topological searches to be performed with the first LHC collisions. Responsible for SUSY in the Particle Data Group from 2000–2012, he helped define SUSY benchmark scenarios within reach of hadron colliders, present and future. Comforted by the discovery of a light scalar boson in 2012 (a necessary feature of but not proof of SUSY), he continued exploring novel analysis methods and strategies to interpret any potential evidence for SUSY particles.
We will remember Luc for the exceptional combination of a genuine enthusiasm for physics, an outstanding competence and rigour in analysis, incorporating quite technical matters, and a deep concern about young colleagues with whom he interacted beautifully. Luc had a strong interest in other domains, including cosmology, African ethnicities and arts, and Mesopotamian civilisations. With his wife, he also undertook some quite demanding Himalayan treks.
We have lost a most remarkable and complete physicist, a man of great integrity, devoid of personal ambition, a rich personality, interested by many aspects of life, and a very dear friend.
Jean Sacton, who put Belgium at the forefront of major discoveries in fundamental physics and the development of associated technologies, died peacefully in his home in Brussels on 12 February, aged 86. He combined his scientific qualities with great human ones, as a firm boss but always present, attentive, warm and intentioned.
Jean Sacton defended his bachelor’s thesis on mesic atoms in nuclear emulsion at Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in 1956, continuing there for his PhD. From 1960 to 1965, he surrounded himself with young researchers focusing on the properties of hyper-fragments produced by the interactions of K mesons in nuclear emulsions, which required significant human resources to scan the emulsion foils with microscopes. He defended his thesis in 1961 and, three years later as an associate lecturer, became head of the newly created department of elementary particle physics.
At the end of the 1960s, Sacton became professor and a member of various committees, including the management of the Belgian Interuniversity Laboratory for High Energies.
The foundation in 1972 of the Interuniversity Institute for High Energies (IIHE) was largely due to his efforts during the preceding decade. Co-directed for many years by its two founders (Sacton for ULB and Jacques Lemonne for Vrije Universiteit Brussel), IIHE has become the main centre for experimental research in particle physics in Belgium, and promotes close collaboration with other Belgian institutes.
In the 1970s the IIHE strongly contributed to the scanning and analysis of data from the giant bubble chambers GARGAMELLE and BEBC. In 1973 IIHE staff scanned one of the three events that spectacularly confirmed the existence of the weak neutral current, for which Sacton, together with the other members of the Gargamelle collaboration, received the European Physical Society’s High Energy and Particle Physics Prize in 2009. Other firsts that Sacton was involved in during the bubble-chamber era included the first direct observation of charged charmed particles in nuclear emulsions, and the measurement of the violation of scale invariance in deep-inelastic scattering.
Later, the IIHE, in collaboration with the University of Antwerpen and the University of Mons-Hainaut, contributed to the DELPHI experiment at LEP, for which they built the electronics for the muon chambers. The laboratory also engaged in the H1 collaboration at HERA, DESY. The Belgian contribution to H1 included the construction of two cylindrical multi-wire proportional chambers and associated data acquisition all of the detector’s multi-wire proportional chambers, during which Sacton continuously ensured that technical staff were retrained to keep up with the rapid pace of change.
At the same time, he became a member of the European Committee for Future Accelerators (as chair from 1984 to 1987), the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron Committee, the CERN Scientific Policy Committee, and the extended Scientific Council of DESY. While dean of the ULB sciences faculty from 1991–1995, he remained active as director of the laboratory, leaving to his teams the task of analysing DELPHI, H1 and CHORUS data, and preparing the IIHE contribution to the CMS experiment. In 1994 he became president of the particles and fields commission of the International Union for Pure and Applied Physics and a member of the International Committee for Future Accelerators, and from 1991–1994 chaired the High-Energy Physics Computer Coordinating Committee. He formally retired in 1999.
Jean Sacton lived a major scientific adventure starting from the discovery of the first mesons to the completion of the Standard Model. Through his quiet strength, professionalism, foresight and entrepreneurial spirit, he founded, developed and sponsored this field of research at ULB and made it shine far beyond.
On 22 December we lost our colleague and friend, a brilliant theoretical nuclear physicist, Vladimir Kukulin.
Vladimir Kukulin was born in Moscow in 1939. He graduated with honours from the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute in 1965, where he started his physics studies under the supervision of Arkady Migdal. Vladimir obtained his PhD in 1971 and his DSc in 1991. For more than 55 years, he worked in the Institute of Nuclear Physics at Moscow State University (MSU), becoming professor of theoretical physics in 1997 and head of the laboratory for atomic nucleus theory in 2012.
Vladimir had many close scientific relations, including the supervision of students’ work, at JINR (Dubna), KazNU (Almaty) and other leading physics institutes in Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Ukraine. He worked as a visiting professor and gave lectures at universities in the Czech Republic, Germany, the UK, Italy, Belgium, France, the US, Canada, Mexico, Japan and Australia, and since 1996 had maintained a scientific cooperation between MSU and the University of Tübingen.
Vladimir’s research interests embraced theoretical hadronic, nuclear and atomic physics, few-body physics, nuclear astrophysics, quantum scattering theory, mathematical and computational physics, among others. Many of the approaches he developed, such as the multi-cluster model of light nuclei, the method of orthogonalising pseudopotentials, and the stochastic variational method, opened new directions in nuclear physics and quantum theory of few- and many-body scattering. During the past two decades, Vladimir and his co-workers developed the effective wave-packet continuum discretisation approach for quantum scattering, and proposed a scheme for the ultra-fast quantum scattering calculations on a graphics processing unit.
A deep understanding of nuclear and mathematical physics allowed Vladimir to suggest, in 1998, a new mechanism for the short-range nucleon–nucleon (NN) interaction based on the formation of the intermediate six-quark bag dressed by meson clouds (the dressed dibaryon). He developed, with his colleagues from MSU and the University of Tübingen, the original dibaryon concept for the nuclear force, which received new experimental confirmation with the discovery of hexaquark states at COSY (Jülich) in 2011. More recently, Vladimir and his coauthors demonstrated the decisive role of dibaryon resonances in NN elastic scattering and NN-induced meson production at intermediate energies.
A combination of strong intuition, comprehensive knowledge, and experience in various fields of science and technology, enabled Vladimir to generate new ideas and carry out pioneering interdisciplinary research at the intersection of physics, mathematics, chemistry and engineering. He made an indispensable contribution to solving important applied problems, such as controlled thermonuclear fusion, cleaning of natural gas, fire-fighting and neutron-capture cancer therapy.
Vladimir was distinguished by non-standard thinking, humanity, a sparkling sense of humour and an inexhaustible love of life. His enthusiasm and intellectual freedom inspired several generations of his colleagues and students. We will always remember Vladimir as an outstanding scientist, a wise teacher and a good friend.
Naples, 1938. Ettore Majorana, one of the physics geniuses of the 20th century, disappears mysteriously and never comes back. A tragedy, and a mystery that has captivated many writers.
The latest oeuvre, Nils Barrellon’s Le Neutrino de Majorana, is a French-language detective novel situated somewhere at the intersection of physics history and science outreach. Beginning with Majorana’s birth in 1906, Barrellon highlights the events that shaped and established quantum mechanics. With factual moments and original letters, he focuses on Majorana’s personal and scholarly life, while putting a spotlight on the ragazzi di via Panisperna and other European physicists who had to face the Second World War. In parallel, a present-day neutrino physicist is found killed right at the border of France and Switzerland. Majorana’s volumetti (his unpublished research notes) become the leitmotif unifying the two stories. Barrellon compares the two eras of research by entangling the storylines to reach a dramatic climax.
Using the crime hook as the predominant storyline, the author keeps the lay reader on the edge of their seat, while comically playing with subtleties most Cernois would recognise, from cultural differences between the two bordering countries to clichés about particle physicists, via passably detailed procedures of access to the experimental facilities – a clear proof of the author (who is also a physics school teacher) having been on-site. The novel feels like a tailor-made detective story for the entertainment of physicists and physics enthusiasts alike.
And, at the end of the day, what explanation for Majorana’s disappearance could be more soothing than a love story?
CERN technologies and personnel make it a hub for so much more than exploring the fundamental laws of the universe. In an event organised by the CERN Alumni Relations team on 30 April, five CERN alumni who now work in the environmental industry discussed how their high-energy physics training helped them to get to where they are today.
One panellist, Zofia Rudjor, used to work on the ATLAS trigger system and the measurement of the Higgs-boson decays to tau leptons. Having spent 10 years at CERN, and with the discovery of the Higgs still fresh in the memory, she now works as a data scientist for the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA). “For my current role, a lot of the skills that I acquired at CERN, from solving complex problems to working with real-time data streams, turned out to be very key and useful,” she said at the virtual April event. Similar sentiments were shared by fellow panelist Manel Sanmarti, a former cryogenic engineer who is now the co-founder of Bamboo Energy Platform: “CERN is kind of the backbone of my career – it’s really excellent. I would say it’s the ‘Champions League’ of technology!”
However, much learning and preparation is also required to transition from particle physics to the environment. Charlie Cook began his career as an engineer at CERN and is now the founder of Rightcharge, a company which helps electric car drivers reduce the cost of charging and to use cleaner energy sources. Before taking the plunge into the environmental industry, he first completed a course at Imperial College Business School on climate-change management and finance, which helped him “learn the lingo” in the finance world. A stint at Octopus Electric Vehicles was followed by driving a domestic vehicle-to-grid demonstration project called Powerloop which launched at the beginning of 2018. “Sometimes it’s too easy to start talking in abstract terms about sustainability, but, to really understand things I like to see the numbers behind everything,” he said.
Everything that is happening in the environmental field today is all because of policymakers
Mario Michan, CEO of Daphne Technology (a company focused on enabling industries to decarbonise), and a former investigator of antihydrogen at CERN’s Antiproton Decelerator, also stressed the importance of being familiar with how the sector works, pointing out the large role that policymakers take in the field: “Everything that is happening in the environmental field today is all because of policymakers,” he remarked.
Another particle physicist who made the change is Giorgio Cortiana, who now works at E.ON’s global advanced analytics and artificial intelligence leading several data-science projects. His scientific background in complex physics data analysis, statistics, machine learning and object-oriented programming is ideal for extracting meaningful insights from large datasets, and for coping with everyday problems that need quick and effective solutions, he explained, noting the different mentality from academia. “At CERN you have the luxury to really focus on your research, down to the tiny details — now, I have to be a bit more pragmatic,” he said. “Here [at E.ON] we are instead looking to try and make an impact as soon as we can.
Leaving the field
The decision to leave the familiar surroundings of high-energy physics requires perseverance, stressed Rudjor, stating that it is important to pick up the phone to find out what type of position is really being offered. Other panelists also noted that it is vital to spend some time to look at what skills you can bring for a specific posting. “I think there are many workplaces which don’t really know how to recruit people with our skills – they would like the people, but they typically don’t open positions because they don’t know exactly how to specify the job.”
The CERN Alumni Network’s “Moving Out of Academia” events provide a rich source of candid advice for those seeking to make the change, while also demonstrating the impact of high-energy physics in broader society. The latest environment-industry events follow others dedicated to careers in finance, industrial engineering, big data, entrepreneurship and medical technologies. More are in store, explains head of CERN Alumni Relations, Rachel Bray. “One of our goals is to support those in their early careers – if and when they decide to leave academia for another sector. In addition to the Moving out of Academia events, we have recently launched a new series which brings together early-career scientists and the companies seeking the talents and skills developed at CERN.”
Felix H Boehm, who was William L Valentine Professor of Physics at Caltech, passed away on 25 May in his Altadena home. He was a pioneer in the study of fundamental laws in nuclear- physics experiments.
Born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1924, Felix studied physics at ETH Zürich, earning a diploma in 1948 and a PhD in 1951 for a measurement of the (p,n) reaction at the ETH cyclotron. In 1951 he moved to the US and joined the group of Chien-Shiung Wu at Columbia University, which was investigating beta decay. He joined Caltech in 1953 and spent the rest of his academic career there.
Felix worked first with Jesse DuMond, who had developed the bent-crystal spectrometer, an instrument with unrivalled energy resolution in gamma-ray spectrometry. He used it to determine nuclear radii by measuring X-ray isotope shifts in atoms. Later, he installed such devices at LAMPF, SREL and PSI to investigate pionic atoms, which led to a precise determination of the strong-interaction shift in pionic hydrogen. At Caltech, he also became interested in parity violation and time-reversal invariance. In 1957, in an experiment performed with Aaldert Wapstra, he demonstrated that electrons in beta decay have a predominantly negative helicity.
In the mid 1970s, discussions with Harald Fritzsch and Peter Minkowski convinced Felix that the study of neutrino masses and mixings might provide answers to fundamental questions. From then on, long before it was fashionable, it became his main field of activity. He first looked at neutrino oscillations and initiated an electron–neutrino disappearance experiment with Rudolf Mössbauer.
Theirs was the first dedicated search for neutrino oscillations, beginning with a short-baseline phase at the ILL reactor in Grenoble. The concept of the experiment was presented at the Neutrino ′79 conference in Bergen, at which the Gargamelle collaboration also reported limits on νμ ↔ νe oscillations. Both talks were relegated to a session on exotic phenomena. The ILL experiment was continued at the Gösgen reactor in Switzerland with a longer baseline. No evidence of oscillations was found and stringent limits in a given parameter space were derived, contradicting positive claims made by others. A larger detector was later built at the Palo Verde nuclear power station in Arizona, where again no evidence for oscillations was found. A logical continuation of the effort initiated by Felix was the KamLAND experiment in Japan, which was exposed to several reactors and eventually, in 2002, observed neutrino oscillations in the disappearance mode at a still-longer baseline.
In parallel, Felix decided to probe neutrino masses by searching for neutrinoless double- beta decay. He led a small collaboration that installed a germanium detector in the Gotthard underground laboratory in Switzerland to probe 76Ge, and then searched for the process using a time-projection chamber (TPC) filled with xenon enriched with 136Xe. The TPC, a novel device at the time, improved the event signature and thus reduced the background, allowing stringent constraints to be placed on the effective neutrino mass. The ongoing EXO experiment can be seen as a continuation of this programme, vastly improving the sensitivity in its first phase (EXO-200 at WIPP, New Mexico) and expected to do even better in the second phase, nEXO.
Felix Boehm had a talent to identify important issues on the theoretical side, and to select the appropriate technical methods on the experimental side. He was always ready to innovate. In particular, he realised very early on the importance of selecting radio-pure materials in low-count-rate, low-background experiments. All those who worked with him appreciated his open mind, his determination, his great culture and his kindness.
The high-energy and particle physics division of the European Physical Society (EPS-HEPP) has announced the recipients of its 2021 prizes. The five awards will be presented during the EPS-HEP Conference on 26 July, which will take place online.
2021 EPS High Energy and Particle Physics Prize
Torbjrn Sjöstrand (Lund University) and Bryan Webber (Cambridge University) have been announced as the winners of the the 2021 EPS-HEPP Prize for “for the conception, development and realisation of parton shower Monte Carlo simulations, yielding an accurate description of particle collisions in terms of quantum chromodynamics and electroweak interactions, and thereby enabling the experimental validation of the Standard Model, particle discoveries and searches for new physics.” Both Sjöstrand and Webber were also warded the 2012 Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics by the American Physical Society, along with the late Guido Altarelli.
2021 Giuseppe and Vanna Cocconi Prize
The 2021 Giuseppe and Vanna Cocconi Prize has been awarded to the Borexino Collaboration “for their ground-breaking observation of solar neutrinos from the pp and CNO chains that provided unique and comprehensive tests of the Sun as a nuclear fusion engine.” Gianpaolo Bellini, a former spokesperson of try experiment commented: “The Cocconi prize awarded to us by EPS is the recognition of a more than 30-year history that began in the late 1980s, when the experiment was conceived in the context of the scientific debate triggered by the then unsolved problem of the solar neutrino, and by the need for studying solar neutrinos from very low energies.”
2021 Gribov Medal
Bernhard Mistlberger (SLAC) has received the 2021 Gribov Medal “for his ground-breaking contributions to multi-loop computations in QCD and to high-precision predictions of Higgs and vector boson production at hadron colliders.” Mistlberger also recently won the $5000 Wu-Ki Tung Award for Early-Career Research on QCD for his work.
2021 Young Experimental Physicist Prize
The 2021 Outreach Prize of the High Energy and Particle Physics Division of the EPS has been awarded to Nathan Jurik (CERN) “for his outstanding contributions to the LHCb experiment, including the discovery of pentaquarks, and the measurements of CP violation and mixing in the B and D meson systems”; and to Ben Nachman (LBNL Berkeley) “for exceptional contributions to the study of QCD jets as a probe of QCD dynamics and as a tool for new physics searches, his innovative application of machine learning for characterising jets, and the development of novel strategies on jet reconstruction and calibration at the ATLAS experiment.”
2021 Outreach Prize
The three winners of the 2021 EPS-HEPP Outreach Prize are: Uta Bilow (TU Dresden) and Kenneth Cecire (University of Notre Dame), “for the long-term coordination and major expansion of the International Particle Physics Master Classes to include a range of modern methods and exercises, and connecting scientists from all the major LHC and Fermilab experiments to school pupils across the world”, and Sascha Mehlhase (LMU München) “for the design and creation of the ATLAS detector and other interlocking-brick models, creating an international outreach program that reaches to an unusually young audience.” After building the ATLAS detector out of 9500 Lego pieces in 2011, Mehlhase set up the popular “Build Your Own Particle Detector” programme.
Open science has become a pillar of the policies of national and international research-funding bodies. The ambition is to increase scientific value by sharing data and transferring knowledge within and across scientific communities. To this end, in 2015 the European Union (EU) launched the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) to support research based on open-data science.
To help European research infrastructures adapt to this future, in 2019 the domains of astrophysics, nuclear and particle physics joined efforts to create an open scientific analysis infrastructure to support the principles of data “FAIRness” (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) through the EU Horizon 2020 project ESCAPE (European Science Cluster of Astronomy & Particle physics ESFRI research infrastructures). The ESCAPE international consortium brings together ESFRI projects (CTA, ELT, EST, FAIR, HL-LHC, KM3NeT and SKA) and other pan-European research infrastructures (RIs) and organisations (CERN, ESO, JIVE and EGO), linking them to EOSC.
Launched in February 2019, the €16M ESCAPE project recently passed its mid-point, with less than 24 months remaining to complete the work programme. Several milestones have already been achieved, with much more in store.
Swimming in data ESCAPE has implemented the first functioning pilot ‘Data Lake’ infrastructure, which is a new model for federated computing and storage to address the exabyte-scale of data volumes expected from the next generation of RIs and experiments. The Data Lake consists of several components that work together to provide a unified namespace to users who wish to upload, download or access data. Its architecture is based on existing and proven technologies: the Rucio platform for data management; the CERN-developed File Transfer Service for data movement and transfer; and connection to heterogenous storage systems in use across scientific data centres. These components are deployed and integrated in a service that functions seamlessly regardless of which RI the data belong to.
ESCAPE aims to deploy an integrated open “virtual research environment”
The Data Lake is an evolution of the current Worldwide LHC Computing Grid model for the advent of HL-LHC. For the first time, thanks to ESCAPE, it is the product of a cross-domain and cross-project collaboration, where scientists from HL-LHC, SKA, CTA, FAIR and others co-develop and co-operate from the beginning. The first data orchestration tests have been successfully accomplished, and the pilot phase demonstrated a robust architecture that serves the needs and use-cases of the participant experiments and facilities. Monitoring and dashboard services have enabled user access and selection of datasets. A new data challenge also including scientific data-analysis workflows in the Data Lake is planned for later this year.
ESCAPE is also setting up a sustainable open-access repository for deployment, exposure, preservation and sharing of scientific software and services. It will house software and services for data processing and analysis, as well as test datasets of the partner ESFRI projects, and provide user-support documentation, tutorials, presentations and training.
Open software The collaborative, open-innovation environment and training actions provided by ESCAPE have already enabled the development of original open-source software. High-performance programming methods and deep-learning approaches have been developed, benchmarked and in some cases included in the official analysis pipelines of partner RIs. Definition of data formats has been pursued as well as the harmonisation of approaches for innovative workflows. A common meta-data description of the software packages, community implementation based on an available standard (CodeMeta) and standard guidelines (including licensing) for the full software development lifecycles have been gathered to enable interoperability and re-use.
Following the lead of the HEP Software Foundation (HSF), the community-based foundation of ESCAPE embraces a large community. Establishing a cooperative framework with the HSF will enable HSF packages to be added to the ESCAPE catalogue, and to align efforts.
From the user-access point of view, ESCAPE aims to build a prototype ‘science analysis platform’ that supports data discovery and integration, provides access to the repository, enables user-customised processing and workflows, interfaces with the underlying distributed Data Lake and links to existing infrastructures such as the Virtual Observatory. It also enables researchers’ participation in large citizen-powered research projects such as Zooniverse. Every ESFRI project customizes the analysis platform for their own users on top of some common lower-level services such as JupyterHub, a pre-defined Jupyter Notebook environment and Kubernetes deployment application that ESCAPE is building. First prototypes are under evaluation for SKA, CTA and for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
In summary, ESCAPE aims to deploy an integrated open “virtual research environment” through its services for multi-probe data research, guaranteeing and boosting scientific results while providing a mechanism for acknowledgement and rewarding of researchers committing to open science. In this respect, together with four other thematic clusters (ENVRI-Fair, EOSC-Life, PANOSC and SSHOC), ESCAPE is partner of a new EU funded project ‘EOSC Future’ which aims to gather the efforts of more researchers in some cross-domain open-data ‘Test Science Projects’ (TSP). TSPs are collaborative projects, including two named Dark Matter and Extreme Universe, in which data, results and potential discoveries from a wealth of astrophysics, particle-physics and nuclear-physics experiments, combined with theoretical models and interpretations, will increase our understanding of the universe. This requires the engagement of all scientific communities, as already recommended by the 2020 update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics.
Open-data science projects In particular, the Dark Matter TSP aims at further understanding the nature of dark matter by performing new analyses within the experiments involved, and collecting all the digital objects related to those analyses (data, metadata and software) on a broad open-science platform that will allow these analyses to be reproducible by the entire community wherever possible.
The Extreme Universe TSP, meanwhile, intends to develop a platform to enable multi-messenger/multi-probe astronomy (MMA). There are many studies of transient astrophysical phenomena that benefit from the combined use of multiple instruments at different wavelengths and different probe types. Many of these are based on the trigger of one instrument generating follow-ups from others at different timescales, from seconds to days. Such observations could lead to images of strong gravitational effects that are expected near a black hole, for example. Extreme energetic astrophysical pulsing phenomena such as gamma-ray bursts, active galactic nuclei and fast radio bursts are also high-energy phenomena not yet fully understood. The intention within ESCAPE is to build such a platform for MMA science in such a way as to make it sustainable.
ESCAPE is also setting up a sustainable open-access repository for deployment, exposure, preservation and sharing of scientific software and services
The idea in both of these TSPs is to exploit for validation purposes all the prototype services developed by ESCAPE and the uptake of its virtual research environment. At the same time the TSPs aim to promote the innovative impact of data analysis in open science, validate the reward scheme acknowledging scientists’ participation, and demonstrate the increased scientific value implied by sharing data. This approach was discussed at the last JENAS 2019 workshop and will be linked to two homologue joint ECFA-NuPECC-APPEC actions (iDMEu and gravitational-wave probes of fundamental physics).
Half-way through, ESCAPE is clearly proving itself as a powerful catalyst to make the world’s leading research infrastructures in particle physics and astronomy as open as possible. The next two years will see the consolidation of the cluster programme and the inclusion of further world-class RIs in astrophysics, nuclear and particle physics. Through the TSPs and further science projects, the ESCAPE community will continue to engage in building within EOSC the open-science virtual research environment of choice for European researchers. In the even longer term, ESCAPE and the other science clusters are exploring how to evolve into sustained “Platform Infrastructures” federating large domain-based RIs. The platforms would operate to study, define and set up a series of new focuses around which they engage with the European Commission and national research institutes to take part in the European data strategy at large.
On 1 May, experimental astroparticle physicist Ignacio Taboada of the Georgia Institute of Technology began his two-year term as spokesperson of the IceCube collaboration. He replaces Darren Grant who has served as spokesperson for the South Pole neutrino observatory since 2019, during which time the collaboration made the first measurements of tau-neutrino appearance with IceCube DeepCore and reported the first observation of high-energy astrophysical tau neutrinos.
Taboada currently leads a research group at the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics at Georgia Tech, which has made significant contributions to IceCube by using data to search for neutrinos from transient sources, including blazar flares. Among his goals as spokesperson is to help consolidate the potential future of IceCube, IceCube-Gen2 – a proposed $350M upgrade that would increase the annual rate of cosmic neutrino observations by an order of magnitude, while increasing the sensitivity to point sources by a factor of five.
I want to make sure that everybody that is related to IceCube in one way or another feels welcome
Ignacio Taboada
“IceCube was initially conceived to study astrophysical neutrinos and to search for the sources of astrophysical neutrinos. However, the breadth of science that it can do in other areas — glaciology, cosmic rays, PeV gamma ray sources, searches for dark matter, etc. — has allowed IceCube to produce really good scientific results for a decade or longer,” says Taboada. “Because Gen2 is standing on similar premises, I think it has a really bright future.”
Another goal is to make every IceCube member feel welcome, he explains. “There are 350 authors whose names go into papers, but I want to make sure that everybody that is related to IceCube in one way or another feels welcome within IceCube. When I joined the AMANDA collaboration, the predecessor of IceCube, in the late 1990s it was maybe 25 people. Now that it’s a gigantic enterprise, it is very easy, for example, for new PhD students to feel intimidated by professors, the analysis coordinator, the spokesperson. That’s not what I want—what I want is for everybody to feel welcome, because every single one of these people has tremendous potential to contribute to the experiment.”
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Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
