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”.
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.
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