By Michel Gaudin (translated by Jean-Sébastien Caux) Cambridge University Press
Hardback: £70 $110
E-book: $88
Available in English for the first time, this translation of Michel Gaudin’s book La fonction d’onde de Bethe brings this classic work on exactly solvable models of quantum mechanics and statistical physics to a new generation of graduate students and researchers in physics. The book begins with the Heisenberg spin chain, starting from the co-ordinate Bethe ansatz and culminating in a discussion of its thermodynamic properties. Delta-interacting bosons (the Lieb–Liniger model) are then explored, and extended to exactly solvable models associated to a reflection group. After discussing the continuum limit of spin chains, the book covers six- and eight-vertex models in extensive detail, while later chapters examine advanced topics such as multi-component delta-interacting systems and Gaudin magnets.
By K K Phua, L C Kwek, N P Chang and A H Chan (eds) World Scientific
Hardback: £56
Paperback: £29
E-book: £22
As a tribute to Freeman Dyson on the occasion of his 90th birthday, and to celebrate his lifelong contributions in physics, mathematics, astronomy, nuclear engineering and global warming, a conference covering a range of topics was held in Singapore in August 2013. This memorial volume brings together an interesting lecture by Professor Dyson, “Is a Graviton Detectable?”, contributions by speakers at the conference, as well as guest contributions by colleagues who celebrated Dyson’s birthday at Rutgers University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
By S Giani, C Leroy, L Price, P-G Rancoita and R Ruchti (eds) World Scientific
Hardback: £117
E-book: £88
Exploration of the subnuclear world is done through increasingly complex experiments covering a range of energy in diverse environments, from particle accelerators and underground detectors to satellites in space. These research programmes call for new techniques, materials and instrumentation to be used in detectors, often of large scale. The reports from this conference review topics that range from cosmic-ray observations through high-energy physics experiments to advanced detector techniques.
By Antonino Zichichi (ed.) World Scientific
Hardback: £104
E-book: £78
This book is the proceedings of the International School of Subnuclear Physics, ISSP 2012, 50th Course, held in Erice on 23 June–2 July 2012. The course was devoted to celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the subnuclear-physics school, started in 1961 by Antonino Zichichi with John Bell at CERN, and formally established in 1962 by Bell, Blackett, Weisskopf, Rabi and Zichichi in Geneva (at CERN). The lectures cover the latest, most significant achievements in theoretical and experimental subnuclear physics.
By Susan J Seestrom (ed.) World Scientific
Hardback: £63
E-book: £47
The neutron lifetime is an important fundamental quantity, as well as a parameter influencing important processes such as nucleosynthesis and the rate of energy production in the Sun, so there is great interest in improving the limits of its value to a precision level of 0.1 s. This workshop, held in November 2012, aimed to create a road map of R&D for a next-generation neutron-lifetime experiment that can be endorsed by the North American neutron community. The focus was on experiments using traps with ultracold neutrons and confinement by a combination of magnetic and/or gravitational interaction to avoid systematic uncertainties introduced by neutron interactions with material walls.
By Eric Poisson and Clifford M Will Cambridge University Press
Hardback: £50 $85
E-book: $68
Also available at the CERN bookshop
I heard good things about this book before I got my hands on it, and turning the pages I recognized a classic. Several random reads of its 788 large, dense pages offered a deeper insight into a novel domain, far away from my daily life where I work with the microscopic and cosmological worlds. On deeper inspection, it was nearly all that I hoped for, with only a couple of areas where I was disappointed.
The forward points out clearly that the reader should not expect any mention of cosmology. Yet the topic of the book has a clear interface with the expanding universe via its connection to our solar system, the so-called vacuole Einstein–Straus solution. Another topic that comes in too short for my taste is that of Eddington’s isotropic (Cartesian) co-ordinates. They appear on pages 268–269, and resurface in a minor mention on page 704 before the authors’ parametrized post-Newtonian approach is discussed. While this is in line with the treatment in the earlier book by one of the authors (Theory and Experiment in Gravitational Physics by C M Will, CUP 1993), it seems to me that this area has grown in significance in recent years.
The book is not about special relativity, but it is a topic that must of course appear. However, it is odd that Box 4.1 on pages 191–192 on “Tests of Special Relativity” relies on publications from 1977, 1966, 1941 and 1938. I can feel the pain of colleagues – including friends in particle and nuclear physics – who have worked hard during recent decades to improve limits by many orders of magnitude. And on page 190, I see a dead point in the history of special relativity – authors, please note. Lorentz failed to write down the transformation named after him by Poincaré, who guessed the solution to the invariance of Maxwell’s equations, a guess that escaped Lorentz. However, Einstein was first to publish his own brilliant derivation.
We know that no book is perfect and complete, entirely without errors and omissions. So the question to be asked is, how useful is this book to you? To find the answer, I’d recommend reading the highly articulate preface available, for example, under “Front Matter” on the publisher’s website. I quote a few words because I could not say it better: “This book is about approximations to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and their applications to planetary motion around the Sun, to the timing of binary pulsars, to gravitational waves emitted by binary black holes and to many real-life, astrophysical systems…this book is therefore the physics of weak gravitational fields.”
Personally, I found in the book what I was looking for: the technical detail of the physics of large objects such as planets and stars, which can be as many times larger than the proton as they are smaller than the universe. I could not put the book down, despite its weight (1.88 kg). Some might prefer the Kindle edition, but I would hope for a shrunk-silk volume. Whichever you choose or is available, in dollars per page this book is a bargain. It is a great read that will enrich any personal library.
By Olaf Behnke, Kevin Kröninger, Grégory Schott and Thomas Schörner-Sadenius (eds) Wiley
Paperback: £60 €72
E-book: £48.99 €61.99
Also available at the CERN bookshop
This book is actually 11 books in one, with 16 authors, four of whom are also editors. All are high-energy physicists, including one theorist, and all are experts in their assigned areas of data analysis, so the general level of the book is excellent. In addition, the editors have done a good job putting the 11 chapters together so that they work as a single book, and they have even given it a global index. Still, each chapter has its own author(s) and its own style, and I will comment on the individual contributions that I found most interesting.
Roger Barlow (“Fundamental Concepts”) gives a good introduction to the foundations, but surprisingly he has some trouble with frequentist probability, which is the one that physicists understand best because it is the probability of quantum mechanics. Instead of taking an example from physics, where experiments are repeatable and frequentist probability is applicable, he uses life insurance and finds problems. But his example for Bayes’s theorem works fine with frequentist probabilities, even if they are not from physics.
Olaf Behnke and Lorenzo Moneta (“Parameter Estimation”) have produced a useful practical guide for their chapter. The treatment is remarkably complete and concise. I especially liked figure 2.9, which illustrates the fit of a typical histogram to a single peak, showing the value of chi-square as a function of peak position across the whole range of the abscissa, with a local minimum at every fluctuation in the data.
Luc Demortier (“Interval Estimation”) displays an impressive knowledge of both frequentist and Bayesian methodologies, and is careful to list the good and bad features of both in a level of detail that I have seen nowhere else, and did not expect to find in a “practical guide”. He succeeds in presenting a balanced view overall, even though his personal prior shows through in the first sentence, where the point estimate is intuitively defined as “in some sense the most likely value”, instead of the more tangible “in some sense the value closest to the true value”.
The most remarkable aspect of this book is found in the chapters devoted to topics that are not usually covered in books on statistics. Therefore “Classification” (by Helge Voss) is treated separately from “Hypothesis Testing” (by Grégory Schott), describing techniques that are common in data analysis but not used in traditional statistics. In “Unfolding”, Volker Blobel reminds us that statistics is really an inverse problem, although it is not usually treated as such. There are two separate chapters on “Theory Uncertainties” and other “Systematic Uncertainties”, a chapter on “Constrained Fits” and two chapters on “Applications”, some of which duplicate subjects treated elsewhere, but of course from a different point of view. In the concluding chapter, Harrison Prosper, in his inimitable style, takes the reader on “a journey to the field of astronomy”.
In summary, this ambitious project has produced a useful book where experimental physicists will find expert knowledge about a range of topics that are indispensable to their work of data analysis.
On 19 December, CERN’s director-general, Rolf Heuer, and the chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, Ansar Parvez, signed in Islamabad the agreement admitting the Islamic Republic of Pakistan to associate membership of CERN, in the presence of prime minister Nawaz Sharif and diplomatic representatives of CERN member states. This followed approval by CERN Council to proceed towards associate membership for Pakistan during its 172nd session held in September 2014. The agreement is still subject to ratification by the government of Pakistan.
The Islamic Republic of Pakistan and CERN signed a co-operation agreement in 1994. The signature of several protocols followed, and Pakistan contributed to building the CMS and ATLAS experiments. Today, Pakistan contributes to the ALICE, ATLAS and CMS experiments, and operates a Tier-2 computing centre in the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid that helps to process and analyse the massive amounts of data that the experiments generate. Pakistan is also involved in accelerator developments, making it an important partner for CERN.
The associate membership of Pakistan will open a new era of co-operation that will strengthen the long-term partnership between CERN and the Pakistani scientific community. Associate membership will allow Pakistan to participate in the governance of CERN, through attending the meetings of the CERN Council. Moreover, it will allow Pakistani scientists to become CERN staff members, and to participate in CERN’s training and career-development programmes. Finally, it will allow Pakistani industry to bid for CERN contracts, therefore opening up opportunities for industrial collaboration in areas of advanced technology.
During its December meeting, Council also welcomed the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, JINR, for the first time as an observer to Council, as part of a reciprocal arrangement that also sees CERN becoming an observer at JINR. Founded as an international organization at Dubna near Moscow in 1956, JINR soon forged a close partnership with CERN that saw exchanges of personnel and equipment throughout the cold war and beyond.
Never has such an illustrious career at CERN hung from so slender a thread of improbability. He was in Genoa, I was in Geneva. Were we destined to meet? In Bristol? As a result of some tiny chance? His final day of a one-year sabbatical. My first day of a visit. All alone on his last evening, Emilio wanted to say goodbye to Bristol and went to a bar. Out of hundreds of options, I ended up in the same bar…and got a warm welcome. I described the new g-2 experiment, which was just starting to roll: the first ever muon storage ring at 1.2 GeV to dilate the muon lifetime to 27 μs and see more precession cycles. Simon van der Meer was on board but no one else. Emilio loved fundamental physics, and there and then he offered to join the project, visiting CERN from Genoa and later becoming a full-time member of staff. Little did I know that I would be making speeches and writing articles in his honour: Chevalier of Legion of Honour of France and Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Italy. Francis J M Farley
Emilio read physics at the University of Genoa, where he stayed after receiving his doctorate in July 1956. Within a small team, he worked mainly on technical aspects of visual particle detectors, first with gas bubble chambers – based on using a supersaturated solution of gas in a liquid at room temperature – and diffusion chambers. By the early 1960s, he had moved on with some of his collaborators to study proton and meson interactions in nuclear emulsions, and participated in the International Co-operative Emulsion Flights, which took two large stacks of emulsion plates high into the atmosphere to detect the interactions of energetic cosmic rays. This international collaborative effort included the Bristol group of Cecil Powell, recipient of the 1950 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on emulsions and their use in the discovery of the particle now known as the pion in cosmic rays.
So it was not surprising that Emilio arrived in Bristol as a NATO postdoctoral fellow in 1962/1963. There, his chance meeting with Farley in Bristol in 1963 set him on course to CERN. When he offered to join the g-2 experiment, Farley accepted with pleasure, and soon Emilio started travelling to Geneva from Genoa, becoming a research associate at CERN in 1964. From the beginning he insisted on understanding everything in depth. He wrote Fortran programs, checked the calculations and found some mistakes, which luckily for the future of the experiment were not lethal.
Emilio’s enthusiasm was contagious, and he and Farley gradually assembled a small team. Farley recalls: “There were many difficulties, but eventually it worked and we measured the anomalous moment of the muon to 270 ppm. The result disagreed with theory by 1.7σ but we were sure of our number (confirmed by the next experiment) and we published anyway. (The fashionable shibboleth is that you need 5σ for an effect; true if you are looking for a bump in a wiggly graph, which might be anywhere. But for one number 2–3σ is important and anything over 3σ is huge). The discrepancy was enough to worry the theorists, who set to work and discovered a new correction. Then they agreed with us. This was a triumph for the experiment.”
In 1967 Farley moved to a job in England and Emilio became group leader, having joined the CERN staff in November 1966. Together with John Bailey they discovered the magic energy, 3.1 GeV, at which electric fields do not affect the spin precession. This led to a new muon storage ring with a uniform magnetic field and vertical focusing using an electric quadrupole field. Emilio masterminded this much larger project, creating a warm happy atmosphere and encouraging new ideas. The muon precession could now be followed out to 500 μs and g-2 was measured to 7 ppm. The team had the right number again (confirmed by the later measurement at Brookhaven National Laboratory) and this time it agreed with the theory.
While the g-2 saga was coming to an end, Emilio and Luigi Radicati, who was then a visiting scientist at CERN, became interested in the possibility of detecting gravitational waves by exploiting suitably coupled superconducting RF cavities. The idea was to detect the change of the cavity Q-value induced by gravitational waves. They were joined by Francesco Pegoraro and CERN’s Philippe Bernard, and published papers analysing the principle in 1978/1979. It was an unconventional idea, which Emilio continued to consider and improve on and off with various collaborators for the next quarter of a century. However, at the end of the 1970s a much larger project lay on CERN’s horizon.
In November 1978, John Adams – then CERN’s executive director-general – decided to push R&D on superconducting RF with a view to increasing the energy reach of the proposed Large Electron–Positron (LEP) collider. He asked Philippe Bernard and Herbert Lengeler to put together a research programme, and they in turn proposed that Emilio should co-ordinate collaboration with outside laboratories because of his “vivid interest in RF superconductivity” and his “excellent contacts” in the field. The result was that in spring 1979, Emilio became team leader of the development programme at CERN, and responsible for co-ordination with other laboratories – in Genoa, Karlsruhe, Orsay and Wuppertal.
The development work at CERN led to superconducting cavities that could achieve the necessary high electric-field gradients, and the team went on to design and build, in collaboration with European industries, the system of superconducting RF that was eventually deployed in LEP during the 1990s. In 1986, Emilio and others proposed the installation of a maximum of 384 superconducting cavities to reach an energy of at least 220 GeV in the centre-of-mass. In the end 288 such cavities were installed, and LEP eventually reached a total energy of 208 GeV. Emilio would later express sadness that the collider’s energy was never brought to its fullest potential with the maximum number of cavities.
Leader of LEP
However, he was to take on a still more significant role in 1980, when at the suggestion of the new director-general, Herwig Schopper, CERN Council designated him LEP project leader. With Schopper’s agreement, Emilio began by setting up the LEP Management Board, consisting of the best experts at CERN, in all of the various aspects, from magnets, RF and vacuum to civil engineering and experimental halls. The board met one day a week throughout the period of LEP’s construction, discussing all of the decisions that needed to be taken, including the technical specifications for contracts with industry. Schopper would regularly join in, mainly to observe and participate in the decision-making process, which took place in a warm and enthusiastic atmosphere.
The main aspect of the project in which Emilio had no experience was civil engineering, but one of the early major issues concerned the exact siting of the tunnel, which in the initial plans was to pass for 12 km beneath some 1000 m of water-bearing limestone in the Jura mountains. While this would avoid the larger communities in France and Switzerland, it presented formidable tunnelling challenges. Rather than downsize, Emilio decided to look into locating the ring further from the mountains. This needed crucial support from the local people, and he was instrumental in setting up regular meetings with the communes around CERN. The result was that in the final design, the LEP tunnel passed for only 3.3 km under the Jura, beneath 200 m of limestone at most.
This final design was approved in December 1981 and construction of the tunnel started in 1983. It was not without incident: when water burst into the part of the tunnel underneath the Jura, it formed a river that took six months to eliminate, and the smooth planning for construction and installation became a complex juggling act. Nevertheless by July 1988, the first sector was installed completely. A test with beam proved that the machine was indeed well designed, and just over a year later, the first collisions were observed on 13 August 1989.
Following the completion of the construction phase of LEP, and the end of his successful mandate as leader of the LEP project, Emilio began to focus again on the detection of gravitational waves, an interest that had continued even while he was a director at CERN, when he supported the installation of the EXPLORER gravitational-wave detector at the laboratory in 1984. He was nominated director of the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa in 1991, where he had been named professor a decade earlier, and served as such for the following four years, retiring from CERN in 1992. At Pisa, he played a key role in supporting approval of Virgo – the laser-based gravitational-wave detector adopted by INFN and CNRS, which is currently running near Cascina, Pisa.
Emilio’s love for physics problems lasted throughout his life in science – a life during which warmth and welcome radiated. He knew how to switch people on. Now, sadly, this bright light is dimmed, but the afterglow remains and will be with us for many years.
After a long illness, Emilio Picasso passed away on 12 October. One of the earliest and most outstanding staff members of CERN, he made remarkable contributions to the prodigious success of the organization for more than 50 years.
Born in Genoa on 9 July 1927, Emilio first studied mathematics, followed by two years of physics. After his doctorate he became assistant professor for experimental physics at the University of Genoa, and began research in atomic physics before changing to particle physics.
Short stays with the betatron at Torino and with the electron synchrotron at Frascati provided him with his first experiences with particle accelerators. He then went to Bristol in the years 1962/1963, where he joined the group of Cecil Powell, who had received the Nobel prize in 1950 for investigating cosmic radiation using photographic emulsions and discovering the π meson. There Emilio met Francis Farley who told him that he intended to measure at CERN the anomalous magnetic moment of muons circulating in a storage ring. After some drinks they became friends, and Emilio decided to join Farley on the CERN experiment.
The measurement of the anomalous magnetic moment – or more precisely the deviation of its value from the Bohr magneton, expressed as “g-2” – yields an extremely important quantity for testing quantum electrodynamics (QED). Emilio was attracted by this experiment because it matched two different aspects of his thinking. He was fascinated by fundamental questions, and at the same time the experiment required new technologies for magnets.
From 1963, Emilio commuted between Genoa and CERN, becoming a research associate in 1964 to work on the g-2 experiment and a CERN staff member in 1966. In addition to Farley, John Bailey and Simon van der Meer joined the group, which Emilio was later to lead. The measurements went on for 15 years at two successive storage rings (the second with Guido Petrucci and Frank Krienen), and achieved an incredible accuracy of 7 ppm, so becoming one of the most famous precision tests of QED.
In 1978, Luigi Radicati convinced Emilio to participate in an experiment to look for gravitational waves produced by particles circulating in a storage ring. Superconducting RF cavities were to be used as detectors. The attempt was unsuccessful, but it gave Emilio the opportunity to get to know the technology of superconducting cavities – knowledge that was to serve him extremely well later at the Large Electron–Positron collider (LEP).
In 1981, the LEP project was approved by CERN Council, alas under very difficult conditions, i.e. with a reduced and constant budget. In addition, the requisite personnel had to be found among the staff of the newly unified CERN I and CERN II laboratories. Under such conditions it was not easy to find the right person to lead the LEP project. Several outstanding accelerator experts were available at CERN, and it would have been an obvious step to appoint one of them as project leader. However, because it became necessary to reassign about a third of the CERN staff to new tasks – implying that personal relations established across many years had to be broken – I considered the human problems as dominant. Hence I appointed Emilio as project leader for LEP, a decision that was greeted by many with amazement. I considered his human qualities for this task to be more important than some explicit technical know-how. Emilio was respected by the scientists as well as by the engineers. He was prepared to listen to people, and his moderating temper, his honesty and reliability, and last but not least his Mediterranean warmth, were indispensable for the successful construction and operation of what was by far the largest accelerator of its time. His name will always remain linked with this unique project, LEP – a true testament to Emilio’s skills as a scientist and as a project leader.
After his retirement I visited Emilio often in a small office in the theory division, where he had settled to study fundamental physics questions again. But he also took up other charges. One of the most important tasks was the directorship of the Scuola Normale Superiore at Pisa from 1991 to 1995, where he had been nominated professor in 1981 – a commitment that he could not fulfil at the time because of his CERN engagements.
Emilio received many distinctions, among them the title of Cavaliere di Gran Croce dell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica, one of the highest orders of the Italian state.
Despite the heavy demands of his job he always cared about his family, and in return his wife Mariella gave him loving support in difficult times.
We all regret that sadly Emilio was not well enough to enjoy the enormous recent success of CERN. Science has lost a great physicist and many of us a dear friend.
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