The European strategy for particle physics (ESPP), updated by the CERN Council in June 2020, lays the foundations for a bright future for accelerator-based particle physics. Its 20 recommendations – covering the components of a compelling scientific programme for the short, medium and long terms, as well as the societal and environmental impact of the field, public engagement and support for early-career scientists – set out an ambitious but prudent approach to realise the post-LHC future in Europe within the worldwide context.
Full exploitation of the LHC and its high-luminosity upgrade is a major priority, both in terms of its physics potential and its role as a springboard to a future energy-frontier machine. The ESPP identified an electron–positron Higgs factory as the highest priority next collider. It also recommended that Europe, together with its international partners, investigate the technical and financial feasibility of a future hadron collider at CERN with a centre-of-mass energy of at least 100 TeV, with an electron–positron Higgs and electroweak factory as a possible first stage. Reinforced R&D on a range of accelerator technologies is another ESPP priority, as is continued support for a diverse scientific programme.
Implementation starts now
It is CERN’s role, in strong collaboration with other laboratories and institutions in Europe and beyond, to help translate the visionary scientific objectives of the ESPP update into reality. CERN’s recently approved medium-term plan (MTP), which covers the period 2021–2025, provides a first implementation of the ESPP vision.
Starting this year, CERN will deploy efforts on the feasibility study for a Future Circular Collider (FCC) as recommended by the ESPP update. One of the first goals is to verify that there are no showstoppers to building a 100 km tunnel in the Geneva region, and to gather pledges for the necessary funds to build it. The estimated FCC cost cannot be met only from CERN’s budget, and special contributions from non-Member States as well as new funding mechanisms will be required. Concerning the enabling technologies, the first priority is to demonstrate that the superconducting high-field magnets needed for 100 TeV (or more) proton–proton collisions in a 100 km tunnel can be made available on the mid-century time scale. To this end CERN is implementing a reinforced magnet R&D programme in partnership with industry and other institutions in Europe and beyond. Fresh resources will be used to explore low- and high-temperature superconducting materials, to develop magnet models towards industrialisation and cost reduction, and to build the needed test infrastructure. These studies will also have vast applications outside the field. Minimising the environmental impact of the tunnel, the colliders and detectors will be another major focus, as well as maximising the benefits to society from the transfer of FCC-related technologies.
The 2020 MTP includes resources to continue R&D on key technologies for the Compact Linear Collider and for the establishment of an international design study for a muon collider. Further advanced accelerator technologies will be pursued, as well as detector R&D and a new initiative on quantum technologies.
Continued progress requires a courageous, global experimental venture involving all the tools at our disposal
Scientific diversity is an important pillar of CERN’s programme and will continue to be supported. Resources for the CERN-hosted Physics Beyond Colliders study have been increased in the 2020 MTP and developments for long-baseline neutrino experiments in the US and Japan will continue at an intense pace via the CERN Neutrino Platform.
Immense impact
The discovery of the Higgs boson, a particle with unprecedented characteristics, has contributed to turning the focus of particle physics towards deep structural questions. Furthermore, many of the open questions in the microscopic world are increasingly intertwined with the universe at large. Continued progress on this rich and ambitious path of fundamental exploration requires a courageous, global experimental venture involving all the tools at our disposal: high-energy colliders, low-energy precision tests, observational cosmology, cosmic rays, dark-matter searches, gravitational waves, neutrinos, and many more. High-energy colliders, in particular, will continue to be an indispensable and irreplaceable tool to scrutinise nature at the smallest scales. If the FCC can be realised, its impact will be immense, not only on CERN’s future, but also on humanity’s knowledge.
To explore all our coverage marking the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson ...
You started out studying electrical engineering. Why the switch to physics, and what have been your main research interests?
Actually, I studied them both in parallel, having started out in electrical engineering and then attending physics courses after I found myself getting a bit bored. I graduated with a Masters in electrical engineering, and then pursued a PhD in particle physics, working on the MARK-J experiment at DESY studying muon pairs, which allowed us to make estimates of the Z mass and sin2θ. To some level at MARK-J we could already test electroweak theory. Afterwards, I did a postdoc at CERN for two years on the L3 experiment, and ended up staying on L3 for 12 years. My background in engineering has helped several times during my career. For example, I acted as an interface between the physicists at CERN and the engineers in Aachen who designed and built the complicated L3 readout electronics, as they couldn’t always speak the same language.
How do you remember your LEP days?
It was a marvellous time, certainly some of the best years of my life. For the firsts few years at L3 I didn’t do any physics analysis – I was down in the tunnel dealing with the readout electronics. After a few years I was able to pick up physics again, going back to electroweak physics, and becoming the coordinator of the line-shape group that was in charge of measurements of Z parameters. I later became L3 analysis coordinator. I was there for essentially the whole duration of LEP, leaving CERN at the end of 1999 and joining the CMS group at Aachen University.
What are your key achievements since becoming DESY’s director for particle and astroparticle physics in 2009?
I came to DESY shortly before the experiments at HERA stopped and became director as the analyses were ramping down and LHC activities were ramping up. Certainly, one of the biggest achievements during this time was helping DESY transition from having local experiments onsite to a laboratory that now plays a key role in the CMS and ATLAS experiments. DESY became one of the largest Tier-2 data centres of the worldwide LHC computing grid, plus it had a lot of experts on proton structure and in detector operation who were highly welcomed by the LHC experiments. DESY joined the LHC relatively late, in 2008, but now has a very strong involvement in the ATLAS and CMS trackers, for example, and has set up a large infrastructure to build one end-cap tracker for ATLAS and one for CMS. DESY also joined the Belle experiment at KEK, and continues to be one of the leading labs in the development of detector R&D for future colliders. Smaller scale experiments at DESY also picked up speed, in particular axion searches. Recently the 24th dipole for the ALPS-II experiment was installed, which is really impressive. The motivation for astroparticle physics was always more concentrated at DESY’s Zeuthen site, and two years ago it was decided to create an independent division for astroparticle physics to give it more visibility.
How has the transition from collider physics to X-ray science changed life at DESY?
Well, there is no longer the burden at DESY to operate large accelerators and other facilities for particle physics, so those resources are now all directed towards photon science, such as the operation of the PETRA light source, the FLASH facility and the European XFEL. On the other hand, the laboratory has also grown over the last decade, to the benefit of photon science. However, if you count the number of DESY authors in ATLAS and CMS, it is still the second or third largest laboratory, so DESY is still very significant in particle physics.
How would you sum-up the state of high-energy physics today?
I’m optimistic, otherwise I wouldn’t be here! Often when I talk to students, I tell them that the best is yet to come in particle physics. Yes it’s true, we do not have at the moment a scenario like we had for the LHC, or for the SppS, which had clear targets to discover new particles, but if you look back in history, this hasn’t been the case very often. We would not have built several machines, including LEP, if that was the case. Discovery doesn’t have to necessarily mean new particles. So that’s why I am optimistic for the future of the field, because we have the Higgs boson now, which is a very special particle. It’s the first of its kind – not another quark or lepton. Studying the Higgs in detail might be the key to new insights into fundamental physics. This is also the central theme of the recent European strategy update.
I don’t think the question of linear vs circular is a technology one
What do you see as your main opportunities and challenges during the next five years?
CERN is a very complicated thing. I have been away for 20 years now, so I am still in a learning phase. It is very clear what our challenges are though. We have to make the next LHC run a success, and we also need to prepare for the HL-LHC. The world is looking on us for that. The second most important thing is the implementation of the European strategy update, and in particular, the preparation for the longer-term future of CERN. We have to prepare a convincing plan for the post-LHC collider, to be ready for decision at the next strategy update at the latest.
What is in store for computing?
Computing will remain a major challenge. LHC Run 3 will start soon and we have to prepare for it now, including securing the necessary funds. On the horizon there is the high-luminosity LHC, with an enormous increase in data volumes that would by far exceed the available capacities in a flat-budget scenario. We will have to work in close collaboration with the experiments and our international partners to address this challenge and be open to new ideas and emerging technologies. I believe that the new Prévessin Computing Centre will be instrumental and enhance collaboration among the experiments and the IT department.
What involvement did you have in the European strategy update?
I was a member of the European strategy group in my capacity as research director for particle physics at DESY. The strategy group contained the scientific delegates to council, plus about a dozen people from the national laboratories. I was in Bad Honnef in January 2020 for the final drafting session – it was an interesting time. If you had asked me on the Monday of that week what the result at the end would be, I would have said there was no way that we could reach consensus on a strategy. But we did, even if deciding on the specific facility to be built was beyond the ESPP mandate.
Should a post-LHC electron–positron Higgs factory be linear or circular?
Its shape is not my principal concern – I want one to be built, preferably at CERN. However, if we can get additional resources from outside the field to have one built in Japan or China, then we should grab the opportunity and try a global collaboration. I think even for the next project at CERN, we also need support from outside Europe. I don’t think the question of linear vs circular is a technology one – I think we have already mastered both technologies. We have pros and cons for both types of machine, but for me it is important that we get support for one of them, and the feasibility study that has been requested for a large circular tunnel in the Geneva area is an important step.
Young people ask me which horse will win the race – I don’t know. I consider it as my task as CERN’s director for research and computing to unite the community behind the next collider because that will be vital for our success. The next collider will be a Higgs factory and there are so many things in common between the various proposals if you consider the detectors or the physics. People should come together and try to push the idea of a Higgs factory in whatever topology. Look, I am a scientist. At DESY I have been working on linear colliders. And in the European XFEL we essentially already have a prototype for the International Linear Collider. But if CERN or China build a circular collider, I will be the first one who signs up for an experiment! I think many others think like me.
What are the main challenges in getting the next collider off the ground?
We have competition now – very severe competition. I see that in Germany everybody is now speaking about life science and biology because of the pandemic, plus there are other key societal challenges such as climate and energy. These are topics that also have an interesting story to tell, and one which might be easier to understand. If someone asks me what the applications of the Higgs boson are, I reply that I don’t know. However, I am convinced that in 50 or 100 years from now, people will know. As particle physicists we have to continue to point out our role in society to motivate the investments and resources for our future plans, not just in science, but in technology and impact on society. If you look at the first accelerators, they were not built with other applications in mind – they were built to understand what the core of matter is. But look at the applications of accelerators, detectors and computing that have spun-off from this. X-ray science is one very strong, unforeseen example.
Would a lack of consensus for the next collider risk making physicists appear unsure about their ambitions?
Of course, there will be people who think that. However, there are also politicians, who I know in the US for instance, who are very supportive of the field. If you compare us to the synchrotron field for instance, there are dozens of light-source facilities around the world. This discipline has the benefit of not having to converge on only one – each country can essentially build its own facility. We have the challenge that we have to get a global consensus. I think many politicians understand this. While it is true that particle physics is not a decisive topic in elections, we have a duty to share our scientific adventure and results with the public. We are very fortunate in Germany that we have had a scientist as chancellor for the past 15 years, which I think this is one of the main reasons Germany is flourishing.
I consider it as my task as a CERN director for research to unite the community
What would be the implication for European particle physics were Japan or China to proceed with a Higgs factory?
I do not have a “gold-plated” answer for this. It really depends on things that are beyond our direct control as physicists. It could be an opportunity for CERN. One of the things that the strategy update confirms is that Europe is the leader of the field scientifically and also technologically, thanks mainly to the LHC. One of the arguments that CERN could profit from is the fact that Europe should want to remain the leader, or at least “a leader” in the field. That might be very helpful for CERN to also get a future project on track. Being the leader in the field is something that CERN, and Europe, can build upon.
What is your philosophy for successful scientific management?
I believe in flat hierarchies. Science is about competition for the best ideas, and the capital of research laboratories like CERN are the people, their motivation and their creativity. Therefore, I intend to foster the CERN spirit of fruitful collaboration in our laboratory but also with all our partners in Europe and the rest of the world.
The recently completed European strategy for particle physics (ESPP) outlines a coherent and fascinating vision for an effective and efficient exploration of the most fundamental laws of physics. Scientific recommendations for the field provide concrete guidance and priorities on future research facilities and efforts to expand our current knowledge. The depth with which we can address open mysteries about the universe depends heavily on our ability to innovate instrumentation and research infrastructures.
The ESPP calls upon the European Committee for Future Accelerators (ECFA) to develop a global detector R&D roadmap to support proposals at European and national levels. That roadmap will define the backbone of the detector R&D needed to implement the community’s vision for both the short and long term. At its plenary meeting in November, ECFA initiated a roadmap panel to develop and organise the process to realise the ESPP goals in a timely fashion. In addition to listing the targeted R&D projects required, the roadmap will also consider transformational, blue-sky R&D relevant to the ESPP.
Six technology-oriented task forces will capture each of the major components in detector instrumentation: gaseous and liquid detectors; solid-state detectors; photon detection and particle-identification; calorimetry; and quantum and emerging technologies. Along with three cross-cutting task forces devoted to electronics, integration and training, these efforts will proceed via in-depth consultation with the research community. An open symposium for each task force, due to be held in March or April 2021, will inform discussions that will eventually culminate in a roadmap document in the summer. To identify synergies and opportunities with adjacent research fields, an advisory panel – comprising representatives from the nuclear and astrophysics fields, the photon- and neutron-physics communities, as well as those working in fusion and space research – will also be established.
The roadmap will also consider transformational, blue-sky R&D relevant to the ESPP
In parallel, with a view to stepping up accelerator R&D, the European Laboratory Directors Group is developing an accelerator R&D roadmap as a work-plan for this decade. Technologies under consideration include high-field magnets, high-temperature superconductors, plasma-wakefield acceleration and other high-gradient accelerating structures, bright muon beams, and energy-recovery linacs. The roadmap, to be completed on a similar timeline as that for detectors, will set the course for R&D and technology demonstrators to enable future facilities that support the scientific objectives of the ESPP.
Gathering for a Higgs factory
The global ambition for the next-generation accelerator beyond the HL-LHC is an electron–positron Higgs factory, which can include an electroweak and top-quark factory in its programme. Pending the outcome of the technical and financial feasibility study for a future FCC-like hadron collider at CERN, the community has at this stage not concluded on the type of Higgs factory that is to emerge with priority. The International Linear Collider (ILC) in Japan and the Future Circular Collider (FCC-ee) at CERN are listed, with the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) as a possible backup.
It goes without saying, and for ECFA within its mandate to explore, that the duplication of similar accelerators should be avoided and international cooperation for creating these facilities should be encouraged if it is essential and efficient for achieving the ESPP goal. At this point, coordination of R&D activities is crucial to maximise scientific results and to make the most efficient use of resources.
Recognising the need for the experimental and theoretical communities involved in physics studies, experiment designs and detector technologies at future Higgs factories to gather, ECFA supports a series of workshops from 2021 to share challenges and expertise, and to respond coherently to this ESPP priority. An international advisory committee will soon be formed to further identify synergies both in detector R&D and physics-analysis methods to make efforts applicable or transferable across Higgs factories. Concrete collaborative research programmes are to emerge to pursue these synergies. With the strategy discussion behind us, we now need to focus on getting things done together.
The recent update of the European strategy for particle physics (ESPP) offered a unique opportunity for early-career researchers (ECRs) to shape the future of our field. Mandated by the European Committee for Future Accelerators (ECFA) to provide input to the ESPP process, a diverse group of about 180 ECRs were nominated to debate topics including the physics prospects at future colliders and the associated implications for their careers. A steering board comprising around 25 ECRs organised working groups devoted to topics including detector and accelerator physics, and key areas of high-energy physics research. Furthermore, working groups were dedicated to the environment and sustainability, and to human and social factors – aspects that have been overlooked in previous ESPP exercises. A debate took place in November 2019 and a survey was launched to obtain a quantitative understanding of the views raised.
The feedback from these activities was combined into a report reflecting the opinions of almost 120 signed authors. The survey suggests that more than half of the respondents are postdocs, around two-fifths PhD students and approximately a tenth staff members. Moreover, roughly one-third were female and two-thirds male. Several areas, such as which collider should follow the LHC and environmental and sustainability considerations, were highlighted by the participating ECRs. Among the many topics discussed, we highlight here a handful of aspects that we feel are key to the future of our field.
Building a sustainable future
A widespread concern is that the attractiveness of our field is at risk, and that dedicated actions need to be taken to safeguard its future. Certain areas of work are vital to the field, but are undervalued, resulting in shortages of key skills. Due to significant job insecurity many ECRs struggle to maintain a healthy work–life balance. Moreover, the lack of attractive career paths in science, compared to the flexible working hours and family-friendly policies offered by many companies these days, potentially compromises the ability of our field to attract and retain the brightest minds in the short- and long-term future. With the funding for the proposed Future Circular Collider (a key pillar of the ESPP recommendations) not yet clear, and despite it receiving the largest support among future-collider scenarios in CERN’s latest medium-term financial plan, an additional risk arises for ECRs to back the wrong horse.
The future of the field will depend on the success of reaching a diverse community
It is imperative to holistically include social and human factors when planning for a sustainable future of our field. Therefore, we strongly recommend that long-term project evaluations and strategy updates assess and include the impact of their implementation on the situation of young academics. Specifically, equal recognition and career paths for domains such as computing and detector development have to be established to maintain expertise in the field.
Next-generation colliders beyond the LHC will need to overcome major technical challenges in detector physics, software and computing to meet their ambitious physics goals. Our survey and debate showed that young researchers are concerned about a shortage of experts in these domains, where very few staff positions and even less professorships are open for particle physicists specialised in detector development and software and computing. In particular in the light of ever increasing project time scales, a sizable fraction of funding for non-permanent positions must be converted to funding for permanent positions in order to establish a sustainable ratio between fixed-term postdocs and staff scientists.
The possibility for a healthy work–life balance and the reconciliation of family and a scientific career is a must: currently, most of the ECRs consulted think that having children could damage their future and that moving between countries is generally a requirement to pursue a career in particle physics. These might constitute two reasons why only 20% of the polled ECRs have children. Put in a broader perspective, the future of the field will depend on the success of reaching a diverse community, with viable career paths for a wide spectrum of schemes of life. In order to reach this diverse community, it is not enough to simply offer more day-care places to parents. Similarly, the #BlackInTheIvory movement in 2020 shone a spotlight on the significant barriers faced by the Black community in academia – an issue also shared by many other minority groups. Discrimination in academia has to be counteracted systematically, including the filling of positions or grant-approval processes, where societal and diversity aspects must be taken into account with high priority.
The environmental sustainability of future projects is a clear concern for young researchers, and particle-physics institutes should use their prominent position in the public eye to set an example to other fields and society at large. The energy efficiency of equipment and the power consumption of future collider scenarios are considered only partially in the ESPP update, and we support the idea of preparing a more comprehensive analysis that includes the environmental impact of the construction as well as the disposal of large infrastructures. There should be further discussion of nuclear versus renewable energy usage and a concrete plan on how to achieve a higher renewable energy fraction. The ECRs were also of the view that much travel within our field is unnecessary, and that ways to reduce this should be brought to the fore. Since the survey was conducted, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, various conferences have already moved online, proving that progress can be made on this front.
Collider preference
In the context of the still-open questions in particle physics and potential challenges of future research programmes, the ECRs find dark matter, electroweak symmetry breaking and neutrino physics to be the three most important topics of our field. They also underline the importance of a European collider project soon after the completion of the HL-LHC. Postponing the choice of the next collider project at CERN to the 2030s, for example, would potentially negatively impact the future of the field: there could be fewer permanent jobs in detector physics, computing and software if preparations for future experiments cannot begin after the current upgrades. Additionally, it could be difficult to attract new, young bright minds into the field if there is a gap in data-taking after the LHC. While physics topics were already discussed in great detail during the broader ESPP process, many ECRs stated their discomfort about the way the next-generation scenarios were compared, especially by how the different states of maturity of the projects were not sufficiently taken into account.
About 90% of ECRs believe that the next collider should be an electron–positron machine
About 90% of ECRs believe that the next collider should be an electron–positron machine, concurring with the ESPP recommendations, although there is not a strong preference if this machine is linear or circular. While there was equal preference for CLIC and FCC-ee as the next-generation collider, a clear preference was expressed for the full FCC programme over the full CLIC programme. Given the diverse interest in future collider scenarios, and keeping in mind the unclear situation of the ILC, we strongly believe that a robust and diverse R&D programme on both accelerators and detectors must be a high priority for the future of our field.
In conclusion, both the debate and the report were widely viewed as a success, with extremely positive feedback from ECFA and the ECRs. Young researchers were able to share their views and concerns for the future of the field, while familiarising themselves with and influencing the outcome of the ESPP. ECFA has now established a permanent panel of ECRs, which is a major milestone to make such discussions among early-career researchers more regular and effective in the future.
In June 2020, the CMS collaboration submitted a paper titled “Observation of the production of three massive gauge bosons at √s= 13 TeV” to the arXiv preprint server. A scientific highlight in its own right, the paper also marked the collaboration’s thousandth publication. ATLAS is not far from reaching the same milestone, currently at 964 publications. With the rest of the LHC experiments taking the total number of papers to 2852, the first ten years of LHC operations have generated a bumper crop of new knowledge about the fundamental particles and interactions.
The publication landscape in high-energy physics (HEP) is very exceptional due to a long-held preprint culture. From the 1950s paper copies were kept in the well-known red cabinets outside the CERN Library (pictured), but since 1991 they have been stored electronically at arXiv.org. Preprint posting and actual journal publication tend to happen in parallel, and citations between all types of publications are compiled and counted in the INSPIRE system.
Particle physics has been at the forefront of the open-science movement, in publishing, software, hardware and, most recently, data. In 2004, former Director-General Robert Aymar encouraged the creation of SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) at CERN. Devoted to converting closed access HEP journals to open access, it has grown extensively and now has over 3000 libraries from 44 different countries. All original LHC research results have been published open access. The first collaboration articles by the four main experiments, describing the detector designs, and published in the Journal of Instrumentation, remain amongst the most cited articles from LHC collaborations and — despite being more than a decade old — are some of the most recently read articles of the journal.
Closer analysis
Since then, along with the 2852 publications by CERN’s LHC experiments, a further 380 papers have been written by individuals on behalf of the collaboration, and another 10,879 articles (preprints, conference proceedings, etc.) from the LHC experiments that were not published in a journal. However, this only represents part of the scientific relevance of the LHC. There were tens of thousands of papers published over the past decade that write about the LHC experiments, use their data or are based on the LHC findings. The papers published by the four experiments received on average 112 citations per paper, compared to an average of 41 citations per paper across all experimental papers indexed in INSPIRE and even 30 citations per paper across all HEP publications (4.8 million citations across 163,000 documents since 2008). Unsurprisingly, the number of citations peaks with the CMS and ATLAS papers on the Higgs discovery, with 10,910 and 11,195 citations respectively, which at the end of 2019 were the two most cited high-energy physics papers released in the past decade.
Large author numbers are another exceptional aspect of LHC-experiment publishing, with papers consistently carrying hundreds or even thousands of names. This culminated in a world record of 5,154 authors on a joint paper between CMS and ATLAS in 2015, which reduced the uncertainty on the measurement of the Higgs-boson mass to ±0.25%.
Teasing fluctuations
Ten years of LHC publications have established the Standard Model at unprecedented levels of precision. But they also reveal the hunger for new physics, as illustrated by the story of the 750 GeV diphoton ‘bump’. On 15 December 2015, ATLAS and CMS presented an anomaly in data that showed an excess of events at 750 GeV in proton collisions, fueling rumours a new particle could be showing itself. While the significance of the excess was only 2σ and 1.6σ respectively, theorists were quick to respond with an influx of hundreds of papers (see “750 shades of model building”). This excitement was however damped by the release of the August 2016 data, where there was no further sign of the anomaly, and it became commonly recognised as a statistical fluctuation – part and parcel of the scientific process, if ruining the fun for the theorists.
With the LHC to continue operations to the mid-2030s, and only around 6% of its expected total dataset collected so far, we can look forward to thousands more publications about nature’s basic constituents being placed in the public domain.
When theorist Richard “Dick” Roberts began his career in the 1960s, the strong force was largely mysterious. Today, with the advent of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), we understand the detailed quark and gluon sub-structure of protons and even atomic nuclei. This development is due in no small part to the work that Roberts performed with his collaborators Alan Martin, James Stirling and, latterly, Robert Thorne.
The eponymous MRS and MRST collaborations analysed inelastic data on hadrons for more than three decades, extracting with ever higher precision the structure functions and thereby the momentum distributions of quarks and gluons in the proton. The MRS(T) distribution functions became a staple of particle physics and key to much of the planning for experiments at the LHC, and the subsequent analyses that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson.
Dick Roberts was born in North Wales, UK in 1940. He studied mathematics at King’s College, London, and won the Drew medal for achieving the highest mathematics degree in the whole of the University of London. He went on to complete a PhD at Imperial College, followed by research at Durham, CERN and UC San Diego, and then, in 1971, the Rutherford High Energy Laboratory (today the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory) near Oxford, where he remained until his retirement in 2000.
Throughout his career, he specialised in the theory and phenomenology of the strong interaction. The 1960s were the days of Regge theory and, while at CERN, he started working on the related Veneziano model and ideas about duality, which he subsequently developed, mainly with Hong-Mo Chan and D P Roy. Towards the end of the 1970s, with the discovery of the J/ψ, he became one of the first to apply the then novel ideas of QCD to the analysis of structure functions. With increasing precision, the MRS team extracted the parton distributions, which soon became a standard tool for experimental analysis and interpretation of data. He also made important contributions to understanding the EMC effect – where the distributions of quarks in atomic nuclei are subtly evolved in momentum space relative to what is found for quarks in free nucleons – and to the proton spin puzzle of the 1980s. His pedagogic understanding of QCD was to shine in his 1990 textbook Structure of the Proton (Cambridge University Press).
During the 1990s Dick was quick to develop the phenomenological implications of supersymmetric grand-unified theories that might be tested by the LHC. He also tackled the mystery of the origin of quark mass structure in work that has stimulated much of the ongoing activity in this area.
His retirement from research after 2000 soon led to another career, which revealed his talent for teaching. For the past 15 years he tutored first-year students at Oxford University’s Exeter College, and continued teaching until the university was closed by the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020.
Quiet, unassuming but extremely effective, he was the powerhouse behind the scenes in many of his collaborations. Dick loved opera, piano playing, poetry, teaching, reading, sport, gardening and physics. He had a spark of good humour, a gentleness of spirit, and a warmth without parallel.
A quantum physicist has mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind two mirrors, a strange machine, hallucinogenic drugs and a diary filled with ramblings and Feynman diagrams. His last thoughts reveal his views on the many-worlds interpretation – the controversial idea that there are as many worlds as there are possible outcomes in quantum measurements.
The Mirror Trap is an online performance where the audience has the chance to experiment with the psychology of self-identity and explore the interpretations of quantum mechanics. The public is asked to draw Feynman diagrams on a mirror, plonk themselves down in front of it and listen to the play using headphones, thereby transforming a dimly lit room into a private theatrical space.
The experience is hypnotic, eerie and introspective. Ideas at the intersection between physics and psychology are described in a beautifully written monologue. The protagonist believes that he has devised a new way to access a parallel universe and replicate Schrödinger’s thought experiment; however, he must play the role of the cat, and be observed. Under severe emotional pressure, he begs the audience to witness his desperate attempt to reach a universe where he did not make the biggest mistake of his life.
Visual and auditory illusions play tricks with the participants’ brains
While the physicist is digging deep into his psyche and preparing for a leap into the unknown, visual and auditory illusions play tricks with the participants’ brains. From Snow White to Alice Through the Looking-Glass, mirrors have been linked to mysterious portals, superstition and fairy tales. In this play, they are portals to other worlds, and also tools to reflect about life, self and perception. Many people feel subjective sensations of otherness and report dissociative identity effects when looking at themselves in a mirror. This strange-face-in-the-mirror illusion is more pronounced in dim light and is associated with Troxler’s fading and neural adaptation: when we look at an unchanging image some features disappear temporarily from our perception and our brain fills this missing information with other elements. This effect is particularly spooky when applied to one’s own face.
The performance was written, created and played by biologist and science communicator Simon Watt, with assistance from playwright Alexandra Wood. The 20-minute piece was followed by a discussion and question-and-answer session with Watt, psychologist Julia Shaw, and physicist Harry Cliff of LHCb and the University of Cambridge, who was scientific consultant for this work and guest physicist at the Bloomsbury Festival, under the auspices of which the piece was performed. Watt is now looking for other researchers and festivals interested in collaborating.
As arts and science festivals have moved online because of Covid-19 restrictions, this show found a creative way to engage the public while sitting at home. A well-thought-out merging of drama and science engagement, The Mirror Trap is an intense and intriguing experience for physicists and non-physicists alike.
“Why do you give all those secrets to the Russians?” So teases an inebriated Mary Bunemann, confidante to the leading nuclear physicists at the UK’s Atomic Energy Research Establishment, at the emotional climax of Frank Close’s new book Trinity: The Treachery and Pursuit of the Most Dangerous Spy in History. The scene is a party on New Year’s Eve in 1949, in the cloistered laboratory at Harwell, in the Berkshire countryside. With her voice audible across a room populated by his close colleagues and friends, Bunemann unwittingly confronted theoretical physicist Klaus Fuchs with the truth of his double life. As Close’s text suspensefully unfolds, the biggest brain working on Britain’s effort to build a nuclear arsenal had been faced with the very same allegation by an MI5 interrogator just 10 days earlier.
Close’s story expands dramatically in scope when Peierls and Fuchs are recruited to the Manhattan Project
Klaus Fuchs began working on nuclear weapons in 1941, when he was recruited by Rudolf Peierls – the “midwife to the atomic age”, in Close’s estimation. Both men were refugees from Nazi Germany. A few years older, and better established in Britain, Peierls would become a friend and mentor to Fuchs. A quarter of a century later, Peierls would also establish a relationship with a young Frank Close, when he arrived at Oxford’s theoretical physics department. Close has now been able to make a poignant contribution to the literature of the bomb by sharing the witness of his connection to the Peierls family, who felt Fuchs’ betrayal bitterly, and were personally affected by the suspicion engendered by his espionage.
Close’s story expands dramatically in scope when Peierls and Fuchs are recruited to the Manhattan Project. Though Peierls was among the first to glimpse the power of atomic weapons, Fuchs began to exceed him in significance to the project during this period. In one of the strongest portions of the book, Close balances physics, politics and the intrigue of shady meetings with Fuchs’ handlers at a time when he passed to the Soviet Union a complete set of instructions for building the first stage of a uranium bomb, a full description of the plutonium bomb used in the Trinity test in the New Mexico desert, and detailed notes on Enrico Fermi’s lectures on the hydrogen bomb.
Intensely claustrophobic
The story becomes intensely claustrophobic when Fuchs returns to England to head the theoretical physics department at Harwell. Here, Close evokes the contradictions in Fuchs’ character: his conviction that nuclear knowledge should be shared between great powers to avert war; his principled but tested faith in communism, awakened while protesting the rise of Nazism; his devoted pastoral care for members of his inner circle at Harwell, even as the net closed around him; and his willingness to share not only nuclear secrets but also the bed of his colleague’s wife. Close has a particular obsession with the question of whether Fuchs’ eventual confession was induced by unrealistic suggestions that he could be forgiven and continue his work. But inducement did not jeopardise Fuchs’ ultimate conviction and imprisonment, despite MI5’s fears, and Close judges his 14-year sentence, later reduced, to be just. Even here, however, the Soviets had the last laugh, with Fuchs’ apprehension not only depriving the British nuclear programme of its greatest intellectual asset, but also precipitating the defection of Bruno Pontecorvo.
Close chose an ideal moment to research his history, writing with the benefit of newly released MI5 records, and before several others were withdrawn without notice. He applies forensic attention to the agency’s pursuit of the nuclear spy. Occasionally, however, this is to the detriment of the reader, with events seemingly diffracted onto the pages – both prefigured and returned to as the story progresses and new evidence comes to light. We step through time in Fuchs’ shoes, for example only learning at the end of the book that two other spies at the Manhattan Project were also passing information to the Russians. While Close’s inclination to let the evidence speak for itself is surely the mark of a good physicist, readers in search of a more analytical history may wish to also consult Mike Rossiter’s 2014 biography The Spy Who Changed the World: Klaus Fuchs and the secrets of the nuclear bomb, which offers a more rounded presentation of the Russian and American perspectives.
By bringing physics expertise, personal connections and impressive attention to detail to bear, Frank Close’s latest book has much to offer readers seeking insights into a formative time for the field, when the most talented minds in nuclear physics also bore the weight of world politics on their shoulders. He eloquently tells the tragedy of “the most dangerous spy in history”, as it played out between the trinity of Fuchs, his mentor Peierls and a shadowy network of spooks. Above all, the text is an intimate portrait of the inner struggles of a principled man who betrayed his adopted homeland, even as he grew to love it, and by doing so helped to shape the latter half of the 20th century.
The nuclear physics division of the European Physical Society today awarded the 2020 Lise Meitner Prize to three physicists who have played a decisive role in turning a small-scale nuclear-physics experiment at CERN into a world-leading facility for the investigation of nuclear structure.
Klaus Blaum (Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics), Björn Jonson (Chalmers University of Technology) and Piet Van Duppen (KU Leuven) are recognised for the development and application of online instrumentation and techniques, and for the precise and systematic investigation of properties of nuclei far from stability at CERN’s Isotope mass Separator On-Line facility (ISOLDE).
Blaum has made key contributions to the high-precision determination of nuclear ground state properties with laser and mass spectroscopic methods and to the development of new techniques in this field, while Jonson was acknowledged for his studies of the lightest exotic nuclei, namely halo nuclei, where he was the first to explain its surprisingly large matter radius. Van Duppen was recognised for his push in the production and investigation of post-accelerated radioactive beams with REX-ISOLDE. Since the 1960s, the ISOLDE user facility has produced extreme nuclear systems to help physicists understand how the strong interaction binds the ingredients of atomic nuclei, with advanced traps and lasers recently offering new ways to look for physics beyond the Standard Model.
I’m very impressed by the breadth of the recent prize winners
Eckhard Elsen
The biennial Lise Meitner prize, named after one of the pioneers in the discovery of nuclear fission in 1939, was established in 2000 to acknowledge outstanding work in the fields of experimental, theoretical or applied nuclear science. Former winners include a quartet of physicists (Johanna Stachel, Peter Braun-Munzinger, Paolo Giubellino and Jürgen Schukraft) from the ALICE collaboration in 2014, for the experimental exploration of the quark-gluon plasma using ultra-relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions, and for the design and construction of the ALICE detector.
This year’s awards were officially presented during the 2020 ISOLDE workshop and users meeting held online on 26-27 November. “I’m very impressed by the breadth of the recent prize winners….covering a range of topics and varying between individuals and teams,” said CERN director for research and computing Eckhard Elsen during the award ceremony. “It is a good indicator of the health and the push of the field – it is truly alive.”
In December last year, a beam of protons was used to treat a patient with cardiac arrhythmia – an irregular beating of the heart that affects around 15 million people in Europe and North America alone. The successful procedure, performed at the National Center of Oncological Hadrontherapy (CNAO) in Italy, signalled a new application of proton therapy, which has been used to treat upwards of 170,000 cancer patients worldwide since the early 1990s.
In parallel to CNAO – which is based on accelerator technologies developed in conjunction with CERN via the TERA Foundation – a Geneva-based start-up called EBAMed (External Beam Ablation) founded by CERN alumnus Adriano Garonna aims to develop and commercialise image-guidance solutions for non-invasive treatments of heart arrhythmias. EBAMed’s technology is centred on an ultrasound imaging system that monitors a patient’s heart activity, interprets the motion in real time and sends a signal to the proton-therapy machine when the radiation should be sent. Once targeted, the proton beam ablates specific heart tissues to stop the local conduction of disrupted electrical signals.
Fast learner
“Our challenge was to find a solution using the precision of proton therapy on a fast and irregular moving target: the heart,” explains Garonna. “The device senses motion at a very fast rate, and we use machine learning to interpret the images in real time, which allows robust decision-making.” Unlike current treatments, which can be lengthy and costly, he adds, people can be treated as outpatients; the intervention is non-invasive and “completely pain-free”.
The recipient of several awards – including TOP 100 Swiss Startups 2019, Venture Business Plan 2018, MassChallenge 2018, Venture Kick 2018 and IMD 2017 Start-up Competition – EBAMed recently received a €2.4 million grant from the European Union to fund product development and the first human tests.
Garonna’s professional journey began when he was a summer student at CERN in 2007, working on user-interface software for a new optical position-monitoring system at LHC Point 5 (CMS). Following his graduation, Garonna returned to CERN as a PhD student with the TERA Foundation and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and then as a fellow working for the Marie Curie programme PARTNER, a training network for European radiotherapy. This led to a position as head of therapy accelerator commissioning at MedAustron in Austria – a facility for proton and ion therapy based, like CNAO, on TERA Foundation/CERN technology. After helping deliver the first patient treatments at MedAustron, Garonna returned to CERN and entered informal discussions with TERA founder Ugo Amaldi, who was one of Garonna’s PhD supervisors, about how to take the technology further. Along with former CERN engineer Giovanni Leo and arrhythmia expert Douglas Packer, the group founded EBAMed in 2018.
“Becoming an entrepreneur was not my initial purpose, but I was fascinated by the project and convinced that a start-up was the best vehicle to bring it to market,” says Garonna. Not having a business background, he benefitted from the CERN Knowledge Transfer entrepreneurship seminars as well as the support from the Geneva incubator Fongit and courses organised by Innosuisse, the Swiss innovation agency. Garonna also drew on previous experience gained while at CERN. “At CERN most of my projects involved exploring new areas. While I benefitted from the support of my supervisors, I had to drive projects on my own, seek the right solutions and build the appropriate ecosystem to obtain results. This certainly developed an initiative-driven, entrepreneurial streak in me.”
Healthy competition
Proton therapy is booming, with almost 100 facilities operating worldwide and more than 35 under construction. EBAMed’s equipment can be installed in any proton-therapy centre irrespective of its technology, says Garonna. “We already have prospective patients contacting us as they have heard of our device and wish to benefit from the treatment. As a company, we want to be the leaders in our field. We do have a US competitor, who has developed a planning system using conventional radiotherapy, and we are grateful that there is another player on the market as it helps pave the way to non-invasive treatments. Additionally, it is dangerous to be alone, as that could imply that there is no market in the first place.”
Leaving the security of a job to risk it all with a start-up is a gradual process, says Garonna. “It’s definitely challenging to jump into what seems like cold water… you have to think if it is worth the journey. If you believe in what you are doing, I think it will be worth it.”
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