By Alexander Cardona, Iván Contreras and Andrés F Reyes-Lega (eds.) Cambridge University Press
Hardback: £75 $125
Also available as an e-book
Based on lectures given at the Villa de Leyva Summer School, this book presents modern geometric methods in quantum field theory. Covering areas in geometry, topology, algebra, number-theory methods and their applications to quantum field theory, the book covers topics such as Dirac structures, holomorphic bundles and stability, Feynman integrals, geometric aspects of quantum field theory and the Standard Model, spectral and Riemannian geometry and index theory. It is a valuable guide for graduate students and researchers in physics and mathematics wanting to enter this interesting research field at the border between mathematics and physics.
By Ladislav Šamaj and Zoltán Bajnok Cambridge University Press
Hardback: £80 $130
Also available as an e-book
Beginning with a treatise of non-relativistic 1D continuum Fermi and Bose quantum gases of identical spinless particles, this book describes the quantum inverse-scattering method and analysis of the related Yang–Baxter equation and integrable quantum Heisenberg models. It also discusses systems within condensed-matter physics, the complete solution of the sine-Gordon model and modern trends in the thermodynamic Bethe ansatz. Each chapter concludes with problems and solutions to help consolidate the reader’s understanding of the theory and its applications.
By Helmut Satz C H Beck
Hardback: €19.95
Also available as an e-book
Also published as:
Ultimate Horizons: Probing the Limits of the Universe
Springer
Hardback: £44.99 €53.49
E-book: £35.99 €41.65
This book is one of the most interesting introductions to today’s problems and advances in the fields of cosmology, particle and nuclear physics that I have seen. The author’s talent in explaining complex problems with “simple” language is certainly the fruit of his life-long teaching experience at the University of Bielefeld and other places. There are numerous examples where the reader is given easy “visualizations” of scientific findings. For instance, if our eyes were sensitive to photons with a wavelength of about 7 cm, then we would see the sky illuminated even at night, thanks to the cosmic microwave background – the afterglow of the Big Bang. Another example is the Casimir effect – a curious demonstration that “the vacuum is not empty” – while Paul Dirac’s sea is revisited to define empty space as a “sea of unborn particles”.
It is worth emphasizing that this book does not simply present a collection of facts. The author deliberately discusses implications of certain findings and manages to connect ideas and concepts from different branches of physics extremely well. For example, the term “horizon” is transported from general relativity to the field of particle physics, in the context of quark confinement, in introducing the concept of the “colour horizon” – the distance beyond which the quarks no longer interact with each other.
Each of the different topics is introduced properly from a historical perspective, always quoting the originator of the idea carefully, which sometimes goes back to the Ancient Greeks. It is interesting to depict the historical evolution of the concept of elementary particles as the “Matryoshka doll” of physics: atoms, thought at first to be indivisible, are actually composed of electrons and nuclei, the latter being themselves composed of protons and neutrons, which are composed of quarks.
A part of the book is dedicated to the studies of quark–gluon plasma, an area where the author has done pioneering work, including a seminal paper that is currently one of the most cited publications in particle physics. Also of interest is the collection of carefully inserted historical anecdotes. Even writers and poets, such as Michael Ende, Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allan Poe and Italo Calvino, find their words in the book.
From reading the book it transpires that, often, formulating a new problem is even more important than solving it. Scientific progress is mostly made through abstract thinking. Helmut is interested in understanding old and new problems of physics and, building on many years of studies and deep reflection, successfully transmits this enthusiasm to the reader. It certainly triggers further thinking.
By Alexander Wu Chao, Karl Hubert Mess, Maury Tigner and Frank Zimmermann (eds.) World Scientific
Hardback: £91
Paperback: £51
E-book: £38
Also available at the CERN bookshop
Edited by internationally recognized authorities in the field, this expanded and updated second edition contains more than 100 new articles. With more than 2000 equations, 300 illustrations and 500 graphs and tables, it is intended as a vade mecum for professional engineers and physicists engaged in the design and operation of modern accelerators. In addition to the common formulae of previous compilations, it includes hard-to-find, specialized formulae, as well as material pooled from the lifetime experience of many of the world’s experts. The eight chapters include both theoretical and practical matters, as well as an extensive glossary of accelerator types. A detailed name and subject index is provided, with reliable references to the literature where the most detailed information available on all of the topics can be found.
By Vakhtang Gogokhia and Gergely Gabor Barnaföldi World Scientific
Hardback: £65
E-book: £49
QCD is the most up-to-date theory of strong interactions. However, standard perturbative procedures fail if applied to low-energy QCD. Even the discovery of a Higgs boson will not solve the problem of masses originating from the non-perturbative behaviour of QCD. This book presents a new method – the introduction of the “mass gap” – first suggested by Arthur Jaffe and Edward Witten at the turn of the millennium. As the energy difference between the lowest order and the vacuum state in Yang–Mills quantum-field theory, the mass gap is – in principle – responsible for the large-scale structure of the QCD ground state, and therefore for its non-perturbative phenomena at low energies. The book also presents the applications and outlook of the mass-gap method and includes problems for students.
By René Brun, Federico Carminati and Giuliana Galli Carminati (eds.) Springer
Hardback: £62.99 €74.85 $99.00
E-book: £49.99 €59.49 $69.95
Also available at the CERN bookshop
To tell the story behind the title, the editors of this book have brought together chapters written by many well-known people in the field of computing in high-energy physics.
It starts with enlightening accounts by René Brun and Ben Segal of how things that I have been familiar with since being a postdoc came to be. I was intrigued to discover how we alighted on so much of what we now take for granted, such as C++, TCP/IP, Unix, code-management systems and ROOT. There is a nice – and at times frightening – account of the environment in which the World Wide Web was born, describing the conditions that needed to be present for it to happen as it did, and which nearly might not have been the case. The reader is reminded that ground-breaking developments in high-energy physics do not, in general, come about from hierarchical management plans, but from giving space to visionaries.
There are several chapters on the Grid (Les Robertson, Patricia Méndez Lorenzo and Jamie Shiers) and the evolution from grids to clouds (Pedrag Buncic and Federico Carminati). These will be of interest to those who, like me, were involved in a series of EU Grid projects that absorbed many of us completely during the era of “e-science”. The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid was built and is of course now taken for granted by all of us. The discussion of virtualization and the evolution from grids to clouds presents an interesting take on what is a change of name and what is a change of technology.
In another chapter, Carminati gives his candid take on software development – and I found myself smiling and agreeing. Many of us will remember when some sort of religion sprang up around OO design methods, UML, OMT, software reviews and so on. He gives his view of where this helped and where it hindered in our environment, where requirements change, users are developers, and forward motion is made by common consent not by top-down design.
Distributed data and its access is discussed in depth by Fabrizio Furano and Andrew Hanushevsky, who remind us that this is one of the most demanding sectors in computing for high-energy physics. A history of parallel computing by Fons Rademakers is interesting because this has become topical recently, as we struggle to deal with many-core devices. Lawrence Pinsky’s chapter on software legal issues delves into how instruments such as copyright and patents are applied in an area for which they were never designed. It makes for engrossing reading, in the same way that technical issues become captivating when watching legal drama on television.
It is not clear – to me at least – whether Giuliana Galli Carminati’s final chapter on “the planetary brain” is a speculation too far and should be politely passed over, as the author invites the reader to do, or whether there is something significant there that the reader should be concerned about. The speculation is whether the web and grid form something that could be considered as a brain on a planetary scale. I leave you to judge.
It is a highly interesting book, and I plan to read many of the chapters again.
More than 350 world experts in accelerators and particle physics, including several laboratory directors, came together at the University of Geneva on 12–15 February to launch the Future Circular Collider (FCC) study, which will examine options for an energy-frontier collider based on a new 80–100-km-circumference tunnel infrastructure. The FCC study, which will be organized as a worldwide international collaboration, comprises a 100 TeV proton (and heavy-ion) collider at the energy frontier, a high-luminosity e+e– (H, Z, W, and tt) factory as a potential intermediate step, and an analysis of options for a hadron-lepton collider. The goal of the study is to deliver a conceptual design report (CDR) together with a cost review by 2018, in time for the next update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics. The CDR will integrate physics, detector, accelerator and infrastructure aspects.
The FCC design study responds to a high-priority request in the 2013 update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics (CERN Courier July/August 2013 p9) stating that “A conceptual design study of options for a future high-energy frontier circular collider at CERN for the post-LHC era shall be carried out”. February’s kick-off meeting was co-sponsored by the Extreme Beams work package 5 of the EuCARD-2 project, within the European Commission’s FP7 Capacities Programme. Participants came from all over the world, with particularly strong representation from China, Japan, Russia and the US, in addition to the many attendees from laboratories and universities across Europe. The goals of the meeting were to introduce the FCC study, to discuss its scope and organization, and to prepare and establish global collaborations.
In his opening address, CERN’s director-general, Rolf Heuer, presented an exciting perspective and explained the main motivations for the FCC, while also cautioning that it was too early to make any cost estimate. Nima Arkani-Hamed of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and recently appointed as the first director of the Centre for Future High Energy Physics at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Beijing, highlighted the compelling physics case for the 100 TeV hadron collider. Precision physics will be essential at both the lepton and hadron colliders, as Christoph Grojean from the Institut de Física d’Altes Energies in Barcelona underlined.
A similar study for a 50–70 km, double-purpose lepton and hadron collider is being pursued in China, with an attractive site proposal and ambitious schedule. In presenting the project, Yifang Wang, director of IHEP in Beijing, conceded that it would be a difficult project but it would also be very exciting. Even if implemented somewhere other than in China, it would still be beneficial to the field of particle physics in general and to the Chinese high-energy physics and scientific community in particular. To this end, IHEP fully supports a global effort. Fermilab’s associate director for accelerators, Stuart Henderson, also reported a broad acknowledgement in the US that any future collider would need to be a global enterprise, requiring financial and human resources from across the world. He stressed that the US community wishes to play a role in any future collider, while also mentioning several domestic “grass-roots” activities.
Frédérick Bordry, CERN’s director of accelerators and technology, presented the roadmap for CERN. Europe’s top priority for the next two decades is the exploitation of the LHC, with nominal parameters and a total integrated luminosity of about 300 fb–1 by 2023, and with the High-Luminosity LHC upgrade to reach 3000 fb–1 by 2035 (CERN Courier January/February 2014 p12 and p23). In parallel, as one of the next-highest-priority items, the FCC design study will be pursued along with CLIC as a potential post-LHC accelerator project at CERN. Michael Benedikt, the FCC study co-ordinator, reviewed the baseline parameters, design challenges and preparations for global collaboration, stressing that new partner institutes will be welcome throughout the duration of the study. Key technologies are high-field magnets for the hadron collider and an efficient high-power superconducting RF (SRF) system for the lepton collider. Possible R&D goals for the study include the development of short 16-T dipole models in all regions (America, Asia and Europe) by 2018 and, in parallel, demonstration of 20-T magnet technology based on the combination of high- and low-temperature superconductors as well as SRF developments, targeted at overall optimization of system efficiency and cost.
Philippe Lebrun, former head of CERN’s Accelerator Technology Department, pointed out that, although CERN’s experience in building machines of increasing size and performance can be applied to the study of 80–100 km circular accelerators in the Geneva basin, the step from the 27 km Large Electron–Positron collider and the LHC to the FCC represents major challenges. These will require inventive solutions in accelerator science and technology as well as in conventional facilities. Felix Amberg from Amberg Engineering – a company involved in the Gotthard Base Tunnel project – reported and analysed specific aspects of building long tunnels. His presentation suggested that tunnelling costs and risks can be predicted fairly reliably, provided that the project does not extend over too long a time interval and that the legal framework remains stable during the construction period.
Worldwide collaboration in all areas – physics, experiments and accelerators – was found to be essential to reach the level for a CDR by 2018
After two days of plenary sessions, which surveyed the scope, plan, international situation and design starting points of the FCC, seven parallel sessions gave space for feedback, additional presentations and lively international discussions. Worldwide collaboration in all areas – physics, experiments and accelerators – was found to be essential to reach the level for a CDR by 2018. Key R&D areas for the FCC, such as superconducting high-field magnets and SRF, are of general interest and relevant for many other applications. Significant R&D investments have been made over the past decade(s), for example in the framework of the LHC and High-Luminosity LHC. Further continuation will ensure efficient use of these investments. At the kick-off meeting a consensus emerged on the approach to form a global collaboration for this study, and many participants expressed a strong interest – both for themselves and their institutes.
Institutes worldwide are now invited to join the global FCC effort, and to submit non-committing written “expressions of interest” with regard to specific contributions by the end of May 2014.
The 1980s were characterized by two outstanding achievements that were to influence the long-term future of CERN. First came the discovery of the W and Z particles, the carriers of the weak force, produced in proton–antiproton collisions at the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) and detected by the UA1 and UA2 experiments. These were the first, now-typical collider experiments, covering the full solid angle and requiring large groups of collaborators from many countries. The production of a sufficient number of antiprotons and their handling in the SPS underlaid these successes, which were crowned by the Nobel Prize awarded to Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer in 1984.
Then came the construction and commissioning of the Large Electron–Positron (LEP) collider. With its 27 km tunnel, it is still the largest collider of this kind ever built. Four experiments were approved – ALEPH, DELPHI, L3 and OPAL – representing again a new step in international co-operation. More than 2000 physicists and engineers from 12 member states and 22 non-member states participated in the experiments. Moreover, most of the funding of several hundred million Swiss francs had to come from outside the organization. CERN contributed only about 10% and had practically no reserves in case of financial overruns. Therefore the collaborations had to achieve a certain independence, and had to learn to accept common responsibilities. A new “sociology” for international scientific co-operation was born, which later became a model for the LHC experiments.
A result of the worldwide attraction of LEP was that from 1987 onwards, more US physicists worked at CERN than particle physicists from CERN member states at US laboratories. In Europe, two more states joined CERN: Spain, which had left CERN in 1968, came back in 1983, and Portugal joined in 1985. However, negotiations at the time with Israel and Turkey failed, for different reasons.
But the 1980s also saw “anti-growth”. Previously, CERN had received special allocations to the budget for each new project, leading to a peak around 1974 and declining afterwards. When LEP was proposed in 1981, the budget was 629 million Swiss francs. After long and painful discussions, Council approved a constant yearly budget of 617 million Swiss francs for the construction of LEP, under the condition that any increase – including automatic compensation for inflation – across the construction period of eight years was excluded. The unavoidable consequence of these thorny conditions was the termination of many non-LEP programmes (e.g. the Intersecting Storage Rings and the bubble-chamber programme) and a “stripped down” LEP project. The circumference of the tunnel had to be reduced, but was maintained at 27 km in view of a possible proton–proton collider in the same tunnel – which indeed proved to be a valuable asset.
A precondition to building LEP with decreasing resources was the unification of CERN. CERN II had been established in 1971 for construction of the SPS, with its own director-general, staff and management. From 1981, CERN was united under one director-general, but staff tended to adhere to their old groups, showing solidarity with their previous superiors and colleagues. However, for the construction of LEP, all of CERN’s resources had to be mobilized, and about 1000 staff were transferred to new assignments.
Another element of “anti-growth” had long-term consequences. Council was convinced that the scientific programme was first class, but had doubts about the efficiency of management. An evaluation committee was established to assess the human and material resources, with a view to reducing the CERN budget. In the end, the committee declined to consider a lower material budget because this would undoubtedly jeopardize the excellent scientific record of CERN. They proposed instead a reduction of staff from about 3500 to 2500, through an early retirement programme, and during the construction of the LHC this was even lowered to 2000. However, to cope with the increasing tasks and the rising number of outside users, many activities had to be outsourced, so considerable reduction of the budget was not achieved.
Yet despite these limiting conditions, LEP was built within the foreseen time and budget, thanks to the motivation and ingenuity of the CERN staff. First collisions were observed on 13 August 1989.
The theme of CERN’s 60th anniversary is “science for peace” – from its foundation, CERN had the task not only to promote science but also peace. This was emphasized at a ceremony for the 30th anniversary in 1984, by the American physicist and co-founder of CERN, Isidor Rabi: “I hope that the scientists of CERN will remember…[they are] as guardians of this flame of European unity so that Europe can help preserve the peace of the world.” Indeed during the 1980s, CERN continued to fulfil this obligation, with many examples such as co-operation with East European countries (in particular via JINR, Dubna) and with countries from the Far East (physicists from Mainland China and Taiwan were allowed to work together in the same experiment, L3, on LEP). Later, CERN became the cradle of SESAME, an international laboratory in the Middle East.
Unavoidably, CERN’s growth into a world laboratory is changing how it functions at all levels. However, we can be confident that it will perform its tasks in the future with the same enthusiasm, dedication and efficiency as in the past.
By David Gross, Marc Henneaux and Alexander Sevrin (eds.) World Scientific
Hardback: £58
Paperback: £32
E-book: £24
Since 1911, the Solvay Conferences have helped shape modern physics. The 25th edition in October 2011, chaired by David Gross, continued this tradition, while also celebrating the conferences’ first centennial. The development and applications of quantum mechanics have been the main threads throughout the series, and the 25th Solvay Conference gathered leading figures working on a variety of problems in which quantum-mechanical effects play a central role.
In his opening address, Gross emphasized the success of quantum mechanics: “It works, it makes sense, and it is hard to modify.” In the century since the first Solvay Conference, the worry expressed by H A Lorentz in his opening address in 1911 – “we have reached an impasse; the old theories have been shown to be powerless to pierce the darkness surrounding us on all sides” – has been resolved. Physics is not in crisis today, but as Gross says there is “confusion at the frontiers of knowledge”. The 25th conference therefore addressed some of the most pressing open questions in the field of physics. As Gross admits, the participants were “unlikely to come to a resolution during this meeting….[but] in any case it should be lots of fun”.
The proceedings contain the rapporteur talks and, in the Solvay tradition, they also include the prepared comments to these talks. The discussions among the participants – some involving dramatically divergent points of view – have been carefully edited and are reproduced in full.
The reports cover the seven sessions: “History and reflections” (John L Heilbron and Murray Gell-Mann); “Foundations of quantum mechanics and quantum computation” (Anthony Leggett and John Preskill); “Control of quantum systems” (Ignacio Cirac and Steven Girvin); “Quantum condensed matter” (Subir Sachdev); “Particles and fields” (Frank Wilczek); and “Quantum gravity and string theory” (Juan Maldacena and Alan Guth). The proceedings end – as did the conference – with a general discussion attempting to arrive at a synthesis, where the reader can judge if it fulfilled the prediction by Gross and was indeed “lots of fun”.
By Jan Dereziński and Christian Gérard Cambridge University Press
Hardback: £90 $140
Also available as an e-book
Unifying a range of topics currently scattered throughout the literature, this book offers a unique review of mathematical aspects of quantization and quantum field theory. The authors present both basic and more advanced topics in a mathematically consistent way, focusing on canonical commutation and anti-commutation relations. They begin with a discussion of the mathematical structures underlying free bosonic or fermionic fields, such as tensors, algebras, Fock spaces, and CCR and CAR representations. Applications of these topics to physical problems are discussed in later chapters.
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