From Physics to Daily Life: Applications in Informatics, Energy, and Environment and From Physics to Daily Life: Applications in Biology, Medicine and Healthcare By Beatrice Bressan (ed.) Wiley-Blackwell
Hardback: £60 €75
E-book: £54.99 €66.99
(The prices are for each book separately)
Also available at the CERN bookshop
The old adage that “necessity is the mother of invention” explains, in a nutshell, why an institution like CERN is such a prolific source of new technologies. The extreme requirements of the LHC and its antecedents have driven researchers to make a host of inventions, many of which are detailed in these informative volumes that cover two broad areas of applications.
Eclectic is the word that comes to mind reading through the chapters of the two tomes that are all linked, in one way or another, to CERN. The editor, Beatrice Bressan, has done a valiant job of weaving together different styles and voices, from technical academic treatise to colourful first-hand account. For example, in one of his many insightful asides in a chapter entitled “WWW and More”, Robert Cailliau, a key contributor to the development of the World Wide Web, muses wryly that even after a 30-year career at CERN, it was not always clear to him what “CERN” meant.
Indeed, as the reader is reminded throughout these two books, CERN is the convenient shorthand for several closely connected organizations and networks, each with its own innovation potential. There’s the institution in Geneva whose staff consist primarily of engineers, technicians and administrators who run the facility. Then there’s the much more numerous global community of researchers that develop and manage giant experiments such as ATLAS. And underpinning all of this is the vast range of industrial suppliers, which provide most of the technology used at CERN, often through a joint R&D process with staff at CERN and its partner institutions.
From a purely utilitarian perspective, the justification for CERN surely lies in the contracts it provides to European industry. Without the billions of euros that have been cycled through European firms to build the LHC, there would be little political appetite for such a massive project. As explained in the introductory chapter by Bressan and Daan Boom – reproduced in both volumes, together with a chapter on Swiss spin-off – there has been a great deal of knowledge transfer thanks to these industrial contracts. Indeed, this more mundane part of CERN’s industrial impact may well dwarf many of the more visible examples of innovation illustrated in subsequent chapters.
Still, as several examples in these two volumes illustrate, there is no doubt that CERN can also generate the sort of “disruptive technologies” that shape our modern world. The web is the most stunning example, but major advances in particle accelerators and radiation sensors have had amazing knock-on effects on industry and society, too, as chapters by famous pioneers such as Ugo Amaldi and David Townsend illustrate clearly.
The question that journalists and other casual observers never cease to ask, though, is why has Europe not benefitted more directly from such breakthroughs? Why did touch screens, developed for the Super Proton Synchrotron control room, not lead to a slew of European high-tech companies? Why was it Silicon Valley and not some valley in Europe that reaped most of the direct commercial benefits of the web? Where are all of the digital start-ups that the hundreds of millions of euros invested in Grid technology were expected to generate?
Chapters on each of these technologies provide some clues to what the real challenge is. As Cailliau remarks wistfully, “WWW is an excellent example of a missed opportunity, but not by CERN.” In other words, to be successful, invention needs not only a scientific mother, it requires an entrepreneurial midwife, too. That is an area where Europe has been sorely lacking.
The only omission in these otherwise wide-ranging and well-researched books, in my opinion, is the lack of discussion on the central role of openness in CERN’s innovation strategy. Open science and open innovation are umbrella terms mentioned enthusiastically in the introductory chapter by Sergio Bertolucci, CERN’s director for research and computing. But there are no chapters dealing specifically with how open-access publication or open-source software and hardware – areas where CERN has for years been a global pioneer – have impacted knowledge transfer and innovation. Perhaps that is a topic broad enough for a third volume.
That said, there is, in these two volumes, already ample food for more thoughtful debate about successful knowledge management and technology transfer in and around European research organizations like CERN. If these books provoke such debate, and that debate leads to progress in Europe’s ability to transform innovations sparked by fundamental physics into applications that improve daily life, they will have made an important contribution
As many as 340 physicists, engineers, science managers and journalists gathered in Washington DC for the first annual meeting of the global Future Circular Collider (FCC) study. The FCC week covered all aspects of the study – designs of 100-km hadron and lepton colliders, infrastructures, technology R&D, experiments and physics.
The meeting began with an exciting presentation by US congressman Bill Foster, who recalled the history of the LHC as well as the former design studies for a Very Large Hadron Collider. A special session on Thursday was devoted to the experience with the US LHC Accelerator Research Program (LARP), to the US particle-physics strategy, and US R&D activities in high-field magnets and superconducting RF. A well-attended industrial exhibition and a complementary “industry fast-track” session were focused on Nb3Sn and high-temperature superconductor development.
James Siegrist from the US Department of Energy (DOE) pointed the way for aligning the high-field magnet R&D efforts at the four leading US magnet laboratories (Brookhaven, Fermilab, Berkeley Lab and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory) with the goals of the FCC study. An implementation plan for joint magnet R&D will be composed in the near future. Discussions with further US institutes and universities are ongoing, and within the coming months several other DOE laboratories should join the FCC collaboration. A first US demonstrator magnet could be ready as early as 2016.
A total of 51 institutes have joined the FCC collaboration since February 2014, and the FCC study has been recognized by the European Commission (EC). Through the EuroCirCol project within the HORIZON2020 programme, the EC will fund R&D by 16 beneficiaries – including KEK in Japan – on the core components of the hadron collider. The four key themes addressed by EuroCirCol are the FCC-hh arc design (led by CEA Saclay), the interaction-region design (John Adams Institute), the cryo-beam-vacuum system (CELLS consortium), and the high-field magnet design (CERN). On the last day of the FCC week, the first meeting of the FCC International Collaboration was held. Leonid Rivkin was confirmed as chair of the board, with a mandate consistent with the production of the Conceptual Design Report, that is, to the end of 2018.
The next FCC Week will be held in Rome on 11–15 April 2016.
• The FCC Week in Washington was jointly organized by CERN and the US DOE, with support from the IEEE Council of Superconductivity. More than a third of the participants (120) came from the US. CERN (93), Germany (20), China (16), UK (16), Italy (12), France (11), Russia (11), Japan (10), Switzerland (10) and Spain (6) were also strongly represented. For further information, visit cern.ch/fccw2015.
By Chris Quigg Princeton University Press
Hardback: £52.00 $75.00
Also available as an e-book, and at the CERN bookshop
The answer lies in the second edition of Chris Quigg’s Gauge Theories of the Strong, Weak, and Electromagnetic Interactions. By a remarkable coincidence, this essentially revised volume fills in much of what the “gifted amateur” wants to know about how QFT is applied in traditional particle physics. It is hard to find words to describe Quigg’s clean, high-quality work; as an author he is a virtuoso performer. He takes the reader through the Standard Model of particle physics to the first steps beyond it, showing the most important insights, describing open questions and proposing original literature and further reading. He has designed or collected many insightful figures that illustrate beautifully the intriguing properties of the Standard Model.
However, it’s hard for me personally to end the review on this high note since the research in the field of gauge theories of strong interactions does not end with the perturbative processes. Over the past 30 years, a vast new area has opened up with many fundamental insights. These connect to the QCD vacuum structure, the Hagedorn temperature and colour deconfinement as encapsulated in the new buzzword – quark–gluon plasma, the strongly-interacting colour-charged many-body state of quarks and gluons. Moreover, there is a wealth of numerical lattice results that accompany these developments.
I find no key word for this in the index of Quigg’s book, although there is mention of “confinement” (p336ff). On page 340, a phrase-long summary mentions the temperature of a chiral-symmetry-restoring transition (from what to what is not stated) that characterizes the lattice QCD results seen in figure 8.47 on p342. This one-phrase entry is all that describes in my estimate 20% of the experimental work at CERN of the past 25 years, and the majority of particle physics at Brookhaven for the past 15 years. In this section I also read how vacuum dielectric properties relate to confinement. I know this argument from Kenneth Wilson, as refined and elaborated on by TD Lee, and the lattice-QCD work initiated by Michael Creutz at Brookhaven, yet Quigg attributes this to an Abelian-interaction model that I did not think functioned.
The author, renowned for his work addressing two-particle interactions, represents in his book the traditional particle-physics programme as continued today at Fermilab, where the novel area of QCD many-body physics is not on the research menu, though it has come of age at CERN and Brookhaven. One can argue that this new science is not “particle physics” – but it is definitively part of “gauge theories of strong interactions”, words embedded in the title of Quigg’s book. Thus, quark–gluon plasma, vacuum structure and confinement glare brightly by their absence in this volume.
Looking again at both books it is remarkable how complementary they are for a CERN Courier reader. These are two excellent texts and together they cover most of modern QFT and its application in particle physics in 1000 pages at an affordable cost. I strongly recommend both, individually or as a set. As noted, however, the reader who purchases these two volumes may need a third one covering the new physics of deconfinement, QCD vacuum and thermal quarks and gluons – the quark–gluon plasma.
By José W F Valle and Jorge C Romão Wiley-VCH
Paperback: £75 €€90
Also available at the CERN bookshop
Neutrinos have kept particle physicists excited for at least the past 20 years. After they were finally proved to be massive, two mass-squared differences and all three mixing angles have now been determined, the final remaining angle, θ13, in 2012 by the three reactor experiments: Daya Bay, RENO and Double Chooz. As neutrino masses are expected to be linked intimately to physics beyond the Standard Model that can be probed at the LHC, and as neutrinos are about to start a “second career” as astrophysical probes, it seems a perfect time to publish a new textbook on the elusive particle. The authors Jose Vallé and Jorge Romão are leading protagonists in the field who have devoted most of their careers to the puzzling neutrino. In this new book they share their experience of many years at the forefront of research.
They begin with a brief historical introduction, before reviewing the Standard Model and its problems and discussing the quantization of massive neutral leptons. The next three chapters deal with neutrino oscillations and absolute neutrino masses – the mass being one of the fundamental properties of neutrinos that is still unknown. Here the authors give a detailed discussion of the lepton-mixing matrix – the basic tool to describe oscillations – and seesaw models of various types. An interesting aspect is the thorough discussion of what could be called “Majorananess” and its relation to neutrino masses, lepton-number violation and neutrinoless double beta decay – for example, in the paragraphs dealing with the Majorana–Dirac confusion and black-box theorems, a point that is rarely covered in text books and often results in confusion.
Next, the book discusses how neutrino masses are implemented in the Standard Model’s SU(2) × U(1) gauge theory and the relationship to Higgs physics. This is followed by a detailed treatment of neutrinos and physics beyond the Standard Model (supersymmetry, unification and the flavour problem), which constitutes almost half of the entire book. Here the text exhibits its particular strength – also in comparison to the competing books by Carlo Giunti and Chung Kim, and by Vernon Barger, Danny Marfatia and Kerry Whisnant, both of which concentrate more on neutrino oscillation phenomenology – by discussing exhaustively how neutrino physics is linked to physics beyond Standard Model phenomenology, such as lepton-flavour violation or collider processes. The inclusion of a detailed discussion of these topics is a good choice and it makes the book valuable as a textbook, although it does make this part rather long and encyclopedic. Another strong point is the focus on model building. For example, the book discusses in detail the challenges in flavour-symmetry model building to accommodate a non-zero θ13, and the deviation of the lepton-mixing matrix from the simple tri-bi-maximal form.
The authors end with a brief chapter on cosmology, concentrating mainly on dark matter and its connection to neutrinos. While this chapter obviously cannot replace a dedicated introduction to cosmology, a few more details such as an introduction of the Friedmann equation could have been helpful here. In general, the treatment of astroparticle physics is shorter than expected from the title of the book. For example, the detection of extragalactic neutrinos at IceCube is not covered – indeed, IceCube is only mentioned in passing as an experiment that is sensitive to the indirect detection of dark matter. Also leptogenesis and supernova neutrinos are mentioned only briefly.
The book mainly serves as a detailed and concise, thorough and pedagogical introduction to the relationship of neutrinos to physics beyond the Standard Model, and in particular the related particle-physics phenomenology. This subject is highly topical and will be more so in the years to come. As such, Neutrinos in High Energy and Astroparticle Physics does an excellent job and belongs on the bookshelf of every graduate student and researcher who is seriously interested in this interdisciplinary and increasingly important topic.
By Francesco Cianfraniet al World Scientific
Hardback: £84
E-book: £63
Also available at the CERN bookshop
This book aims to present a pedagogical and self-consistent treatment of the canonical approach to quantum gravity, starting from its original formulation to the most recent developments in the field. It begins with an introduction to the formalism and concepts of general relativity, the standard cosmological model and the inflationary mechanism. After presenting the Lagrangian approach to the Einsteinian theory, the basic concepts of the canonical approach to quantum mechanics are provided, focusing on the formulations relevant for canonical quantum gravity. Different formulations are then compared, leading to a consistent picture of canonical quantum cosmology.
By Tom Lancaster and Stephen J Blundell Oxford University Press
Hardback: £65 $110
Paperback: £29.99 $49.95
Also available as an e-book, and at the CERN bookshop
Many readers of CERN Courier will already have several introductions to quantum field theory (QFT) on their shelves. Indeed, it might seem that another book on this topic has missed its century – but that is not quite true. Tom Lancaster and Stephen Blundell offer a response to a frequently posed question: What should I read and study to learn QFT? Before this text it was impossible to name a contemporary book suitable for self-study, where there is regular interaction with an adviser but not classroom-style. Now, in this book I find a treasury of contemporary material presented concisely and lucidly in a format that I can recommend for independent study.
Quantum Field Theory for the Gifted Amateur is in my opinion a good investment, although of course one cannot squeeze all of QFT into 500 pages. Specifically, this is not a book about strong interactions; QCD is not in the book, not a word. Reading page 308 at the end of subsection 34.4 one might expect that some aspects of quarks and asymptotic freedom would appear late in chapter 46, but they do not. I found the word “quark” once – on page 308 – but as far as I can tell, “gluon” did not make its way at all into the part on “Some applications from the world of particle physics.”
If you are a curious amateur and hear about, for example, “Majorana” (p444ff) or perhaps “vacuum instability” (p457ff, done nicely) or “chiral symmetry” (p322ff), you can start self-study of these topics by reading these pages. However, it’s a little odd that although important current content is set up, it is not always followed with a full explanation. In these examples, oscillation into a different flavour is given just one phrase, on p449.
Some interesting topics – such as “coherent states” – are described in depth, but others central to QFT merit more words. For example, figure 41.6 is presented in the margin to explain how QED vacuum polarization works, illustrating equations 41.18-20. The figure gives the impression that the QED vacuum-polarization effect decreases the Coulomb–Maxwell potential strength, while the equations and subsequent discussion correctly show that the observed vacuum-polarization effect in atoms adds attraction to electron binding. The reader should be given an explanation of the subtle point that reconciles the intuitive impression from the figure with the equations.
Despite these issues, I believe that this volume offers an attractive, new “rock and roll” approach, filling a large void in the spectrum of QFT books, so my strong positive recommendation stands. The question that the reader of these lines will now have in mind is how to mitigate the absence of some material.
Technologies developed for fundamental research in particle, astro-particle and nuclear physics have an enormous impact on everyday lives. To push back scientific frontiers in these fields requires innovation: new ways to detect one signal in a wealth of data, new techniques to sense the faintest signals, new detectors that operate in hostile environments, new engineering solutions that strive to improve on the best – and many others.
The scientific techniques and high-tech solutions developed by high-energy physics can help to address a broad range of challenges faced by industry and society – from developing more effective medical imaging and cancer diagnosis through positron-emission tomography techniques, to developing the next generation of solar panels using ultra-high vacuum technologies. However, it is difficult and costly not only for many organizations to carry out the R&D needed to develop new applications, products and processes, but also for scientists and engineers to turn their technologies into commercial opportunities.
The aim of the high-energy physics technology-transfer network – HEPTech – is to bring together leading European high-energy physics research institutions so as to provide academics and industry with a single point of access to the skills, capabilities, technologies and R&D opportunities of the high-energy physics community in a highly collaborative open-science environment. As a source of technology excellence and innovation, the network bridges the gap between researchers and industry, and accelerates the industrial process for the benefit of the global economy and wider society.
HEPTech is made up of major research institutions active in particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics. It has a membership of 23 institutions across 16 countries, including most of the CERN member states (see table). Detailed information about HEPTech member organizations and an overview of the network’s activities are published annually in the HEPTech Yearbook and are also available on the network’s website.
So, how was the network born? Jean-Marie Le Goff, the first co-ordinator and present chairman of HEPTech, explains: “Particle physics is a highly co-operative environment. The idea was to spread that spirit over to the Technology Transfer Offices.” So in 2008 a proposal was made to the CERN Council to establish a network of Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs) in the field of particle physics. The same year, Council approved the network for a pilot phase of three years, reporting annually to the European Strategy Session of Council. In the light of the positive results obtained over those three years, Council approved the continuation of the network’s activities and its full operation. “Since then it has grown – both in expanding the number of members and in facilitating bodies across Europe that can bring innovation from high-energy physics faster to industrial exploitation”, says Le Goff.
The primary objective of the HEPTech network is to enhance technology transfer (TT) from fundamental research in physics to society. Therefore, the focus is on furthering knowledge transfer (KT) from high-energy physics to other disciplines, industry and society, as well as on enhancing TT from fundamental research in physics to industry for the benefit of society. The network also aims to disseminate intellectual property, knowledge, skills and technologies across organizations and industry, and to foster collaborations between scientists, engineers and business. Another important task is to enable the sharing of best practices in KT and TT.
HEPTech’s activities are fully in line with its objectives. To foster the contacts with industry at the European level, the network organizes regular academia–industry matching events (AIMEs). These are technology-themed events that provide matchmaking between industrial capabilities and the needs of particle physics and other research disciplines. They are HEPTech’s core offering to its members and the wider community, and the network has an active programme in this respect. Resulting from joint efforts by the network and its members, the AIMEs usually attract about 100 participants from more than 10 countries (figures from 2014). Last year, the topics ranged from the dissemination of micropattern-gas-detector technologies beyond fundamental physics, through potential applications in the technology of controls, to fostering academia–industry collaboration for manufacturing large-area detectors for the next generation of particle-physics experiments, and future applications of laser technologies.
HEPTech has teamed up with the work package on relations with industry of the Advanced European Infrastructures for Detectors at Accelerators (AIDA) project
“The topics of the events are driven on the one hand by the technologies we have – it’s very much a push model. On the other hand, they are the results of the mutual effort between the network and its members, where the members have the biggest say because they put in a lot of effort”, says Ian Tracey, the current HEPTech co-ordinator. He believes that a single meeting between the right people from academia and industry is only the first step in the long process of initiating co-operation. To establish a project fully, the network should provide an environment for regular repetitive contact for similar people. To address this need, HEPTech looks at increasing the number of AIMEs from initially four up to eight events per year.
“The benefit of having HEPTech as a co-organizer of the AIMEs is clearly the European perspective”, says Katja Kroschewski, head of TT at DESY. “Having speakers from various countries enlarges the horizon of the events and allows coverage of the subject field across Europe. It is different from doing a local event – for instance, having companies only from Hamburg or just with the focus on Germany. As the research work concerned has an international scope, it absolutely makes sense to organize such events. It is good to have the input of HEPTech in shaping the programme of the event and to have the network’s support within the organizing committee as well.”
HEPTech has teamed up with the work package on relations with industry of the Advanced European Infrastructures for Detectors at Accelerators (AIDA) project (which was co-funded by the European Commission under FP7 in 2011–2014), to organize AIMEs on detectors, with a view to fostering collaboration with industry during the pre-procurement phase. A total of seven AIMEs were organized in collaboration with AIDA and the RD51 collaboration at CERN, covering most of the technology fields of importance for detectors at accelerators. HEPTech financed four of them. A total of 101 companies attended the events, giving an average of 14 companies per event. For technology topics where Europe could meet the needs of academia, the percentage of EU industry was about 90% or above, going down to 70% when the leading industry for a technology topic was in the US and/or Asia.
To help event organizers find pertinent academic and industrial players in the hundreds, sometimes thousands, of organizations active in a particular technology, CERN used graph-analysis techniques to develop a tool called “Collaboration spotting”. The tool automatically processes scientific publications, patents and data from various sources, selects pertinent information and populates a database that is later used to automatically generate interactive sociograms representing the activity occurring in individual technology fields. Organizations and their collaborations are displayed in a graph that makes the tool valuable for monitoring and assessing the AIMEs.
However, the findings from AIDA show that it is difficult to conduct an assessment of the impact on industry of an AIME. “To keep a competitive advantage, companies entering a partnership agreement with academia tend to restrict the circulation of this news as much as possible, at least until the results of the collaboration become commercially exploitable,” explains Le Goff. “Although it tends to take some years before becoming visible, an increase in the number of co-publications and co-patents among attendees is a good indicator of collaboration. Clearly some of them could have been initiated at preceding events or under other circumstances, but in any case, the AIME has contributed to fostering or consolidating these collaborations.”
Learning and sharing
Another area of activity is the HEPTech Symposium, which is dedicated to the support of young researchers in developing entrepreneurial skills and in networking. This annual event brings together researchers at an early stage in their careers who are working on potentially impactful technologies in fields related to astro-, nuclear and particle physics. For one week, HEPTech welcomes these Early Stage Researchers from around Europe, providing an opportunity for networking with commercially experienced professionals and TT experts and for developing their entrepreneurial potential.
The first HEPTech Symposium took place in June 2014 in Cardiff. The young researcher whose project attracted the greatest interest was awarded an expenses-paid trip around the UK to look for funding for his project. The 2015 symposium will be held in Prague on 31 May–6 June and will be hosted by Inovacentrum from the Czech Technical University in collaboration with ELI Beamlines and the Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences. HEPTech has established a competitive procedure for members that would like to host the event in future. Those interested have to demonstrate their capacity for organizing both a quality training programme and the entertainment of the participants.
CERN Council encouraged HEPTech to continue its activities and amplify its efforts
Providing opportunities for capacity-building and sharing best practice among its members is of paramount importance to HEPTech. The network is highly active in investigating and implementing novel approaches to TT. A dedicated workgroup on sharing best practices responds to requests from members that are organizing events on a number of subjects relevant to the institutions and their TT process. These include, for instance, workshops presenting cases on technology licensing, the marketing of science and technology ond others. Through workshops, the network is able to upscale the skills of its member institutions and provide capacity-building by sharing techniques and different approaches to the challenges faced within TT. These events – an average of four per year – are driven by the members’ enthusiasm to explore advanced techniques in KT and TT, and help to create a collaborative spirit within the network. The members provide significant assistance to the implementation of these events, including lecturers and workshop organization.
Bojil Dobrev, co-convener of the workgroup on best practices provides a recent example of best-practice transfer within the network, in which intellectual property (IP) regulations elaborated by a HEPTech workgroup were successfully used as a basis for development of IP regulations at Sofia University, Bulgaria. In 2013–2014, a survey focusing on the needs and skills of HEPTech members was conducted within the remit of this workgroup. The objectives were to identify the skills and potential of the HEPTech members and their requirement for support through the network, focusing mainly on the early stage (established recently) TTOs. The survey covered all aspects of a TTO’s operation – from organization and financing, through IP activities, start-ups, licensing and contacts with industry, to marketing and promotion. “The survey was used as a tool to investigate the demand of the TTOs. Its outcomes helped us to map HEPTech’s long-term strategy and to elaborate our annual work plan, particularly in relation to training and best-practice sharing”, explains Dobrev.
Taking into consideration the overall achievements of HEPTech and based on the annual reports of the network co-ordinator, CERN Council encouraged HEPTech to continue its activities and amplify its efforts in the update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics in May 2013. The following year, in September, the Council president gave strong support and feedback for HEPTech’s work.
HEPTech’s collaborative efforts with the European Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) project resulted in network membership of all three pillars of the project. Moreover, at the Annual Forum of the EU Strategy for the Danube Region, representatives of governments in the Danube countries acknowledged HEPTech’s role as a key project partner in the Scientific Support to the Danube Strategy initiative.
With its stated vision to become “the innovation access-point for accelerator- and detector-driven research infrastructures” within the next three years, HEPTech is looking to expand – indeed, three new members joined the network in December 2014. It also aims to take part in more European-funded projects and is seeking closer collaboration with other large-scale science networks, such as the European TTO Circle – an initiative of the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, which aims to connect the TTOs of large European public research organizations.
In my journey as a migrant scientist, crossing continents and oceans to serve physics, institutions and nations wherever and whenever I am needed and called upon, CERN has always been the focal point of illumination. It has been a second home to whichever institution and country I have been functioning from, particularly at times of major personal and professional transition. Today, at the completion of yet another major transition across the seas, I am beginning to connect to the community from my current home at Fermilab and Northern Illinois University. Eight years ago, I wrote in this column on “Amazing particles and light” and, serendipitously, I am drawn by CERN’s role in shaping developments in particle physics to comment again in this International Year of Light, 2015.
“For the rest of my life I want to reflect on what light is!”, Albert Einstein exclaimed in 1916. A little later, in the early 1920s, S N Bose proposed a new behaviour for discrete quanta of light in aggregate and explained Planck’s law of “black-body radiation” transparently, leading to a major classification of particles according to quantum statistics. The “photon statistics” eventually became known as the Bose–Einstein statistics, predicting a class of particles known as “bosons”. Sixty years later, in 1983, CERN discovered the W and Z boson at its Super Proton Synchrotron collider, at what was then the energy frontier. In another 30 years, a first glimpse of a Higgs boson appeared in 2012 at today’s high-energy frontier at the LHC, again at CERN.
CERN has again taken the progressive approach of basing such colliders on technological innovation
Today, CERN’s highest-priority particle-physics project for the future is the High-Luminosity LHC upgrade. However, the organization has also taken the lead in exploring for the long-term future the scientific, technological and fiscal limits of the highest energy scales achievable in laboratory based particle colliders, via the recently launched Future Circular Collider (FCC) design effort, to be completed by 2018. In this bold initiative, in line with its past tradition, CERN has again taken the progressive approach of basing such colliders on technological innovation, pushing the frontier of high-field superconducting dipole magnets beyond the 16 T range. The ambitious strategy inspires societal aspirations, and has the promise of returning commensurate value to global creativity and collaboration. It also leaves room for a luminous electron–positron collider as a Higgs factory at the energy frontier, either as an intermediate stage in the FCC itself or as a possibility elsewhere in the world, and is complementary to the development of emerging experimental opportunities with neutrino beams at the intensity frontier in North America and Asia.
What a marvellous pursuit it is to reach ever higher energies via brute-force particle colliders in an earth-based laboratory. Much of the physics at the energy frontier, however, is hidden in the so-called “dark sector” of the vacuum. Lucio Rossi wrote in this column last month how light is the most important means to see, helping us to bridge reality with the mind. Yet even light could have a dark side and be invisible – “hidden-sector photons” could have a role to play in the world of dark matter, along with the likes of axions. And dark energy – is it real, what carries it?
All general considerations for the laboratory detection of dark matter and dark energy lead to the requirement of spectacular signal sensitivities with the discrimination of one part in 1025, and an audacious ability to detect possible dark-energy “zero-point” fluctuation signals at the level of 10–15 g. Already today, the electrodynamics of microwave superconducting cavities offers a resonant selectivity of one part in 1022 in the dual “transmitter–receiver” mode. Vacuum, laser and particle/atomic beam techniques promise gravimeters at 10–12 g levels. Can we stretch our imagination to consider eavesdropping on the spontaneous disappearance of the “visible” into the “dark”, and back again? Or of sensing directly in a laboratory setting the zero-point fluctuations of the dark-energy density, complementing the increasingly precise refinement of the nonzero value of the cosmological constant via cosmological observations?
The comprehensive skills base in accelerator, detector and information technologies accumulated across decades at CERN and elsewhere could inspire non-traditional laboratory searches for the “hidden sector” of the vacuum at the cosmic frontier, complementing the traditional collider-based energy frontier.
Like the synergy between harmony and melody in music – as in the notes of the harmonic minor chord of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons played on the violin, and the same notes played melodiously in ascending and descending order in the universal Indian raga Kirwani (a favourite of Bose, played on the esraj) – the energy frontier and the cosmic frontier are tied together intimately in the echoes of the Big Bang, from the laboratory to outer space.
By Miao Li, Xiao-Dong Li, Shuang Wang and Yi Wang World Scientific
Hardback: £56
E-book: £42
The first volume in the Peking University–World Scientific Advance Physics Series, this book introduces the current state of research on dark energy. The first part deals with preliminary knowledge, including general relativity, modern cosmology, etc. The second part reviews major theoretical ideas and models of dark energy, and the third part reviews some observational and numerical work. It will be useful for graduate students and researchers who are interested in dark energy.
By Alessandro Bettini Cambridge University Press
Hardback: £40 $75
Also available as an e-book, and at the CERN bookshop
The second edition of Alessandro Bettini’s Introduction to Elementary Particle Physics appeared on my doorstep just in time for me to plan my next teaching of the class for beginning graduate students. I liked the first edition very much, and used it for my classes. I like the second edition even better.
First, the level is not overburdened with mathematics, while still introducing enough theory to make meaningful homework assignments. Inspection of the 10 chapter titles – beginning with “Preliminary Notions” of kinematics and the passage of radiation through matter, and ending with the mixing and oscillation of “Neutrinos” – shows that it is clearly written by a knowledgeable experimentalist. The organization illustrates the critical interplay between experiment and theory, but leaves the reader with no doubts that physics is an experimental science.
In the first version, I already liked the presentation of the core material such as the quantum numbers of the pion and their measurement, as well as the more sophisticated presentation of material such as the Lamb shift and the resulting development of quantum electrodynamics. Fortunately, the best of this material has also propagated into the second edition, not always the case even in famous physics texts such as those by Jackson and by Halliday and Resnick, where at least to me, the first editions are better than what followed.
Bettini weaves in a good amount of history of the pivotal discoveries that shaped the Standard Model. Beginning students were not even born when the LHC was designed, and their parents were toddlers when the W and Z bosons were discovered. I was on a bus tour at a recent physics meeting in Europe, when a young postdoc asked me what I had worked on in the past. When I told him UA1, he asked “What’s that?” I was speechless, as were the more senior colleagues around us who overheard our conversation. Bettini gives a must-read, whole and balanced introduction to particle physics, appropriate for a first course.
A companion website from Cambridge University Press has some nice slides of plots and figures. I generally do not like to lecture from my laptop, but sometimes data are essential to the presentation, so this is a real time saver. There is also a new solutions manual for all of the end-of-chapter problems – available only to instructors. I like many of these problems, and will use a mix of them together with my own. Best of all, for the current version, there are some timely additions, most notably the discovery of the Higgs boson and an expanded chapter on neutrino oscillations. I will need to supplement this material with the latest measurements, but I am happy to do that because it reminds me that although progress at the frontier of knowledge is painfully slow, it is not zero. Let us hope that Run 2 at the LHC will necessitate the writing of a third edition of this wonderful book.
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
