By John Marburger Cambridge University Press
Hardback: £17.99 $29
E-book: $23
This is easily the best introduction to quantum theory and particle physics that I have ever seen. The book is remarkable both for what it covers and for what it does not. Unlike many recent popular books, this one avoids references to unproven hypotheses such as grand unification, supersymmetry, strings and extra dimensions. The total space devoted to these ideas is under two pages. Rather, the book describes the story of the development of physical theory from Newtonian mechanics through the changes that were required by relativity and quantum mechanics. It continues all the way through to a lucid description of the Standard Model, nuclear physics and the periodic table and conveys tremendous excitement at how far physics has advanced while sticking to what is really known. It presents a clear and deep account of the physicist’s view of the basic bits that make up the world and how they interact.
The author provides a great deal of mathematical detail, but this never requires anything beyond what would be expected of a high-school student or first-year university undergraduate. Even concepts such as complex numbers, vectors, matrices and Hilbert space are introduced just enough to make the basic ideas clear without getting bogged down in detail. If I hadn’t just read the book, I would have doubted that such a presentation would even be possible.
Each chapter has detailed notes and references at the end. These could easily lead a serious reader a good way into an undergraduate physics education. Without “dumbing things down”, the mathematical concepts are presented with clear physical insight and motivated by their necessity to understand observed reality.
One caveat is that there is little detail on experiments, but I think this sacrifice is worthwhile to maintain focus and keep the book to under 300 readable pages. Certainly the key role played by experiments in physics is made extremely clear. Perhaps the best single overall feature of the book from the view of a practicing particle physicist, is that you can give it to any bright person to give them a good idea of the field and not have them wondering which parts correspond to tested ideas and which are purely speculative.
Many friends and colleagues have asked me to point them to something that could give them a clear picture of what’s actually known and this is, in every way, just the sort of book I’ve wanted. Sadly, the author died this past July after having been director of Brookhaven National Laboratory and also director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy under US President George W Bush. I’d like to think of the book as a parting gift to those he left behind. He has done a real service to all of us in the field and I recommend the book heartily to everyone. I’ll certainly be buying quite a few for Christmas.
By Giovanni Vignale Oxford University Press
Hardback: £16.99 $22
Most things in life are not “invariants”. Consider two identical glasses of good wine. A thirsty person quickly drinks the first one and then complains about the ensuing headache. The other glass has its aromas and textures slowly appreciated, mixed with the whispering sounds of waves breaking on a nearby shore, dimly illuminated by the crimson shades of the late afternoon sun – still bright but so tired from the long day’s journey that its descent behind the shallow mountains can be directly followed, triggering an everlasting memory associating the wine’s flavours with a pleasant feeling. The Beautiful Invisible is a truly remarkable opus, better appreciated if read in a slow and relaxed mood, savouring each sentence, each paragraph. I wonder if I have ever read another book with so few misprints, unclear sentences, or misplaced arguments. Each word is the right word, in the right place. And yet, as if to disturb the poet Stefan Mallarmé (“We do not write poems with ideas, but with words”), the continuum of great ideas is, at least for physicists, what makes this book such a wonderful “poem”.
Giovanni Vignale, besides being a professor at the University of Missouri and a condensed-matter theorist, is a connoisseur of literature, art, theatre and cinema, and seems to have spent plenty of time in transatlantic flights to conceive this “travel guide”. It takes the interested reader through a journey of invisible fields and virtual characters, intertwined with the reality of surreal but beautiful landscapes, surpassing the most imaginative creations of the human mind. As every condensed-matter theorist knows, “more is different”, and if you dive into this book, your mind will be filled with much more than just physics. Saint-Exupery, Musil, Bulgakov, Borges, García Márquez, Elliot, Poe, Shakespeare, Magritte, Vermeer and many others will walk along with you on this path to enlightenment. Some of the scenery is impressive and breathtaking. Maxwell’s discovery of electromagnetic waves by a purely theoretical argument, Dirac’s bringing together of quantum mechanics and special relativity, and other magnificent viewpoints welcome you along this incredible journey, which connects mechanics, thermodynamics, relativity, electrodynamics and quantum mechanics and ends on superconductivity – “one of the highest achievements of the physics of the 20th century” – a natural stop for a book published in 2011.
Along the way, casually dropped here and there by the side of the path, you might find some pearls of wisdom: “we must already know what we are looking for, in order to see it”; “theory grows at the confluence of fantasy and truth”; “there is no better way to test a theory than to apply it to a scenario different from the one that initially prompted its development”. We are also reminded of the fascinating and paradoxical mysteries of quantum mechanics: “there is nothing I can say to demystify it, words attempt the task and come back defeated”. And we are given some good advice: “complex calculations often simplify dramatically when approached from the right angle”; “different representations stimulate our imagination in different ways, producing vastly different results”; certain issues are “ignorable in the limit of interest”. At the end, after almost 300 pages, the pilgrim is offered some final take-home souvenirs: “there are no final truths at the frontier, only an inexhaustible activity that creates and continuously destroys its own creations”, “the search for the truth has more value than the truth itself”.
Vignale shows, convincingly, that no one should think that physicists are any less imaginative than novelists or poets. In summary, this book is the best Christmas reading for physicists this year (even better than Dirac’s Principles of Quantum Mechanics), at least for physicists who manage to relax for a week or two. I will surely enjoy reading it again, some day. But first I would like to follow up some of the many “suggestions for further reading”. Maybe I will start by reminding myself of Le Petit Prince: “anything essential is invisible to the eye and one sees clearly only with the heart”.
By Peter Ginter, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, Franzobel Edition Lammerhuber
Hardback: €64
This large-format, lavishly produced volume in its psychedelic slipcase is a fitting celebration of the “world machine” that is the LHC. To describe it as a coffee-table book is to demean it. Long after the LHC has been superseded, it will remain as a beautiful record of the astonishing complexity and achievement of what currently hums and whirls beneath placid Swiss and French fields.
LHC is built around the photographs of Peter Ginter, master of the demanding craft – and art – of photographing technology and industry. The pictures are complemented by an interview with Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director-general of CERN, and an essay by Franzobel (pseudonym of the Austrian writer Stefan Griebl). Together with the explanatory picture captions, the text (in English, German and French) builds up to provide an excellent layperson’s introduction to the LHC, how it works and what it aims to achieve.
The book divides into sections on the collider, the four big detectors (ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, LHCb), event displays and computing (“from www to grid”), together with a brief history of CERN and the LHC project.
The photographs are magnificent. To any child or adult unfamiliar with particle physics, and even to people who visit CERN frequently or work there every day, they reveal the LHC and its detectors as a soaring pinnacle of research, built with the precision, coordination and search for truth that informed the great medieval cathedrals, updated to the 21st century.
One photograph shows four Russian workmen perched on a mound of artillery shell casings; a second shows the brass from the casings turned into a wheel of giant golden segments arranged like the iris diaphragm of a camera; and a third shows this huge “wheel” – designed to cause showers of secondary particles after an initial collision – being installed as one of the elements of the CMS detector.
And there is more. A physicist abseils into the gleaming innards of LHCb, like a mountaineer into a crevasse. Pakistani workmen pose beside one of the “feet” on which the 14,000 tonne CMS will sit. Engineers are dwarfed as one of the giant coils of the ATLAS toroid is manoeuvred into position. ALICE’s innermost detector gleams with myriad silicon faces like a futuristic Fabergé egg.
This book is a great photographic feat by Ginter; the result of endless visits to CERN over many years. Each picture has been planned, negotiated, composed and lit, representing many hours of work and inspiration.
Edition Lammerhuber has produced a magnificent volume to the highest publishing standards. Everyone concerned with or interested in CERN should have a copy. I also urge the publishers to produce an e-book version that could reach a mass audience worldwide. These pictures would look glorious on a tablet computer.
It has now been a full publishing year for the new-look design of CERN Courier. The dynamic layout, features and wide-ranging articles in 2011, as well as the lively covers, have all been well received by readers in the particle-physics community.
Now we would like your help to make CERN Courier magazine and the preview-courier.web.cern.ch website even better. This is your chance to tell us what you think and give us your suggestions and wish lists.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the first International Women’s Day and, appropriately, the awarding in December 1911 of a second Nobel prize to Marie Curie. No other woman physicist has achieved such worldwide acclaim, and although there have been a number of high-flyers they remain relatively unknown. One such person is Zehui He (Zah-Wei Ho), who worked at the Curie Institute in Paris in the 1940s before becoming a leading figure in nuclear physics in her own country of China.
Zehui was born in 1914 in Suzhou, on the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, into a family of eight children where culture and learning were as important for the girls as for the boys. After studying at a school for girls (which had been established by her maternal grandmother) and succeeding in a national competition, she was admitted to the physics department of the Tsinghua University, Peking (now Beijing), in 1932. In a class of 28 there were 10 women, and the head of the department strongly discouraged all of them from pursuing a career in physics, a common habit at the time (not only in China). However, he did not succeed with Zehui, and she came out top of the 10 students – including two other women – who graduated in 1936.
Some of the professors, Zehui later recalled, did appreciate her talent and pushed her towards a stimulating final research project on “A voltage stabilizer of electric current used in laboratories”. Yet, afterwards, like the other female graduates she was offered no support when looking for somewhere to continue her studies or to work. It was thanks again to her persistence, as well as to a fund granted by her native Shanxi Province, that she was able to go to Germany to pursue a doctoral degree at the Technical Physics Department of the Technische Hochschule in Berlin. Sanqiang Qian (San-Tsiang Tsien), who was also at the top of Zehui’s class in 1936, after working in the institute of physics in Peking for a year, went to Paris in 1937 to the laboratory of Irène Curie (Marie’s daughter) and her husband Frédéric Joliot. He obtained his doctorate there in 1940 with a thesis on “Étude des collisions des particules α avec les noyaux d’hydrogène” supervised by the Joliot-Curies.
In Berlin, meanwhile, Zehui pursued a doctorate in experimental ballistics with a thesis on “A new precise and simple method of measuring the speed of flying bullets”. By then it was 1940 and the Second World War had begun. Zehui was stuck in Germany, but she found work in Berlin with the Siemens Company and did research on magnetic materials from 1940 to 1942. However, during her studies Zehui had stayed at the home of Friedrich Paschen, well known for spectroscopy and the eponymous hydrogen series and line-splitting in a strong magnetic field. The Paschen family loved Zehui as one of their own, and Paschen introduced her to his friend Walther Bothe, director of the Physics Institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg. There, Zehui converted to basic research in nuclear physics.
Given the time (1943) and the place (soon to be not far from the war’s front line), it was an improbable scenario. Bothe, one of the principals of the German Uranium Project, had returned to basic research in Heidelberg, where in December 1943 the 10 MeV cyclotron came into operation – the first in Germany. While Bothe used counters and electronics to study cosmic rays and radioactive nuclei, his colleague Heinz Maier-Leibnitz built a cloud chamber and, together with Bothe and Wolfgang Gentner, in 1940 published the Atlas of Typical Cloud Chamber Images – a reference for identifying scattered particles.
Zehui worked with Maier-Leibnitz on building a second cloud chamber to study positron–electron collisions, using positrons from the decays of artificially produced radioactive isotopes, with a view to checking the validity of Homi Bhabha’s and Bothe’s calculations based on Paul Dirac’s theory. The advantage with respect to electron–electron elastic collisions was the lack of ambiguity between recoil and scattered particles, allowing a separation between events of large and small energy-exchange. The experiment, which used positrons from a source of 52Mn, also allowed a cross-check of Hans Bethe’s calculation of the ratio of annihilation to elastic cross-sections.
Breakthrough
The first ever picture of a positron–electron scatter was shown at the cosmic-ray conference in Bristol in September 1945 and mentioned in a report on the meeting published in November (Nature 1945). In all, Zehui measured 178 elastic collisions from 2774 positrons and found that: “In the first approximation, there is a general agreement between the theoretical and the experimental curves [for the number of collisions]. But it seems that in the case of strong energy exchange (A> 0.6), for which the measurements are more precise, the experimental values are higher than the theoretical ones” (Ho 1947). She also observed three annihilation events, as expected from Bethe’s calculations.
The results were widely disseminated. On 5 April 1946, a paper on the measurements was read by R W Pohl in Gottingen, then on 15 April by Joliot in Paris. In July 1946, Sanqiang Qian presented the work at the International Conference on Fundamental Particles and Low Temperatures in Cambridge; and a letter, sent at around the same time to Physical Review, was published in August that year (Ho 1946).
Sanqiang and Zehui proved the existence of ternary fission from the measurement of fission traces
Meanwhile, Zehui had moved from Heidelberg to Paris, where she rejoined her classmate Sanqiang, marrying him in the spring of 1946. From 1946 to 1948 she worked at the Nuclear Chemistry Laboratory of Collège de France and the Curie Laboratory of the Institut du Radium. Continuing the research she had started in Germany and using a cloud chamber with a long time sensitivity, as developed by Joliot, Zehui measured the spectrum of positrons and gammas from the decays of 34Cl and 18F, and also confirmed her previous result on positron–electron collisions. However, the discrepancy with the theory at large-energy transfer was not observed by others.
Working with Sanqiang and two PhD students – R Chastel and L Vigneron – Zehui went on to study the fission processes induced by slow neutrons, using nuclear emulsions loaded with uranium. After the discovery of fission in 1938 it was generally believed that the nucleus of a heavy atom splits into two lighter nuclei. However, with these experiments Sanqiang and Zehui proved the existence of ternary fission from the measurement of fission traces; they also explained the mechanism of such a reaction and predicted the mass spectrum of the fragments (Tsien et al. 1947). Zehui also made the first observation of quaternary fission in November 1946. Ternary fission was not understood by the physics community until the late 1960s, and multifission not verified until the 1970s.
In May 1948 Zehui returned to China with her husband and their six-month-old daughter. (A second daughter was born in 1949 and a son in 1951.) The couple’s involvement in science became deeply intertwined with the history of their country, echoing the farewell advice of the Joliot-Curies that they should “serve science, but science must serve the people”.
Zehui was immediately recruited as the only full-time research fellow in the Atomic Research Institute of the National Peking Research Academy. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 she became a research fellow (1950–1958) at the Modern Physics Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and then research fellow (1958–1973) and deputy director (1963–1973) of the Atomic Energy Institute. Following the establishment of the Institute of High-Energy Physics (IHEP) at the CAS in 1973, she moved there as a research fellow and deputy director (1973–1984). She was elected a member of the academy in the Mathematics and Physics Division in 1980 and was also a standing member of the Chinese Space-Science Society.
Focusing on nuclear research
In all of her administrative positions, Zehui’s constant preoccupation was to develop her country’s nuclear research, almost from scratch to the current achievements. In 1956, for example, her group succeeded in making nuclear emulsions of a quality comparable to the most advanced in the world, mainly with respect to the ones sensitive to protons, alpha particles and fission fragments.
An important change took place in 1955 when the Chinese government decided to move into nuclear energy. Sanqiang took on major responsibilities in setting up a nuclear industry and by 1958, with help from the Soviet Union, the first Chinese nuclear reactor and a cyclotron had started operation. Zehui led the Neutron Physics Research Division of the Modern Physics Institute (later renamed Atomic Energy Institute) and made important contributions to the establishment of basic laboratory infrastructure, the design and manufacture of measuring instruments, and the development of various types of equipment.
Around 1966, Zehui disappeared from public view as a result of the Cultural Revolution. This was over by 1978, when for the first time in more than 30 years she visited Germany as a member of a government delegation. Around the same time, Sanqiang led a Chinese delegation to visit CERN – where the Super Proton Synchrotron had recently become operational – and later to the US and many other countries, working hard to promote international scientific collaboration.
In the wake of that effort, the Beijing Electron–Positron Collider was initiated, achieving its first collisions on 16 October 1988. Meanwhile, Zehui, in charge of the Cosmic Ray and Astrophysics Division of IHEP, promoted research in these fields. Under her initiation and fostering, the former cosmic-ray research division of IHEP built – through domestic and international collaborations – nuclear emulsion chambers installed at the highest altitude in the world (5500 m) on Kam-Pala mountain in Tibet. Also, starting from scratch, the division launched scientific balloons of increasing size near Beijing. In parallel, following the launch of the first Chinese satellite in 1970, the technology was developed to detect hard X-rays in space. As before, under Zehui’s direction and influence, generations of young researchers rapidly grew up to become the key figures in nuclear and space science in China.
Zehui He died in June 2011, nearly 20 years after Sanqiang Qian (1913–1992). She had continued to work full time until late in life, maintaining the high standards that she had always cherished. She loved her country and science; to both she is now an icon.
By T Padmanabhan Cambridge University Press
Hardback: £50 $85
E-book: $68
The general theory of relativity – the foundation of gravitation and cosmology – may be as widely known today as Newton’s laws were before Einstein proposed their geometric interpretation. That was around 100 years ago, yet many unanswered questions and issues are being revisited from the current perspective, such as: why is gravity described by geometry and why is the cosmological constant so extraordinarily fine-tuned in comparison with the scale of elementary particles?
In an active research field – where the universe at large meets the discoveries in particle physics – there is much need for textbooks based on research that address gravity in depth. Thanu Padmanabhan’s book fills this need well and in a unique way. Within minutes of opening the rich, heavy, full, yet succinctly written 728 pages I realized that this is a new and personal view on general relativity, which leads beyond many excellent standard textbooks and offers a challenging training ground for students with its original exercises and study topics.
In the first 340 pages, the book presents the fundamentals of relativity in an approachable style. Yet, even in this “standard” part the text goes far beyond the conventional framework in preparing the reader in depth for mastering the “frontiers”. The titles of the following chapters speak for themselves: “Black Holes”, “Gravitational Waves”, “Relativistic Cosmology” and “Evolution of Cosmological Perturbations”, all of which address key domains in present-day research. Then, on page 591, the book turns to the quantum frontier and extensions of general relativity to extra dimensions, and to efforts to view it as an effective “emergent” theory.
This research-oriented volume is written in a format that is suitable for a primary text in a year-long graduate class on general relativity, although the lecturer is likely to leave a few of the chapters to self-study. “Padmanabhan” complements the somewhat older offerings of this type, such as “The Big Black Book” (Gravitation by Charles Misner, Kip Thorne and John Wheeler, W H Freeman 1973) or “Weinberg” (Gravitation and Cosmology: Principles and Applications of the General Theory of Relativity, Wiley 1972).
Naturally, this publication differs greatly from “text and no research” offerings, such as Ta-Pei Cheng’s Relativity, Gravitation and Cosmology: A Basic Introduction (OUP 2009) or Ray d’Inverno’s Introducing Einstein’s Relativity (OUP 1992). Any lecturer using these should consider adding “Padmanabhan” as an optional text to offer a wider view to students on what is happening in research today. In comparison with “Hartle” (Gravity: An Introduction to Einstein’s General Relativity, Addison-Wesley 2003), one cannot but admire that “Padmanabhan” does not send the reader to other texts to handle details of computations; what is mentioned is also derived and explained in depth. Of course, “Hartle” is often used in a “first” course on gravity but frankly how often is there a “second” course?
“Padmanabhan” is, as noted earlier, voluminous, making it an excellent value for money because it contains the material of three contemporary books for the price of one. So who should own a copy? Certainly for any good library covering physics, the question is really not if to buy but how many copies. I also highly recommend it to anyone interested in general relativity and related fields because it offers a modern update. Students who have already had a “first” course in the subject and are considering taking up research in this field will find in “Padmanabhan” a self-study text to deepen their understanding. If you are a bookworm like me, you must have it, because it is a great read from start to finish.
The Pursuit of Quantum Gravity: Memoirs of Bryce DeWitt from 1946 to 2004
By Cécile DeWitt Morette
Springer 2011
Hardback: £31.99 €36.87 $49.95
Bryce DeWitt’s Lectures on Gravitation
By Bryce DeWitt (ed. Steven M Christensen) Springer 2011
Paperback: £62.99 €73.80 $89.95
Bryce DeWitt made many deep contributions to quantum field theory, general relativity and quantum gravity. He generalized Richard Feynman’s original approach to quantum gravity at the one-loop level, to a fully fledged, all-order quantization of non-abelian gauge theories, including ghosts. The formalism that he developed also transformed the way that we think about quantum field theory, although it took some time before his ideas percolated the community.
The Pursuit of Quantum Gravity is a charming and remarkable book put together by Cécile Morette, who became his wife and was to share his life for more than 50 years. Here we meet the man and his science. It is a remarkable story of vision, passion, independence and determination that led this scientist along such a difficult road, against all odds.
The material in the book is difficult to find elsewhere and it is not only highly informative but also a pleasure to read. For instance, the way that he organized an expedition to Mauritania to check the deflection of light by the Sun and thus verify the results from the 1919 eclipse by Arthur Eddington et al. There are also documents that are not easily accessible elsewhere, such as the essay that won him the first prize of the Gravity Research Foundation in 1953. It is quite remarkable how many aspects of the vision laid out in that paper that he was able to accomplish.
This book makes us aware of how much we owe Bryce DeWitt, and how deep and broad his influence has been. It pays homage to a truly great man – through the words of the person who knew and understood him best.
Back in 1971, he delivered a series of lectures on gravitation at Stanford University, before moving to the University of Texas at Austin. It has taken 40 years for them to be available to the physics community, but finally they are here as Bryce DeWitt’s Lectures on Gravitation, thanks to the efforts of his former student Steven M Christensen. Anyone who has seen the original realizes how grateful we should be to the editor for the large amount of work required in carrying out this task.
These lectures do not represent a standard introduction to the subject but rather DeWitt’s unique way of presenting it. Along with standard topics that include special relativity, continuous groups and Riemannian manifolds, one finds a remarkable treatment of the study of asymptotic fields, the energy–momentum of the gravitational field, and above all the dynamics of the production and propagation of gravitational waves.
Many of the results found here cannot be found in other books or review articles on the subject, despite the number of years that have elapsed since they were presented. Take, for example, the treatment of the angular momentum carried by gravitational waves, where a cursory look at the relevant chapters shows why this book is different. The complexity of the algebra involved requires a combination of tenacity, wizardry and understanding that is difficult to find in any other master of general relativity. DeWitt’s head-on, uncompromising approach is unique.
The book also has high historical value, showing how this maverick maven thought of the subject. It is a great tribute to his scientific legacy.
Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess have been awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae”. Perlmutter, professor of astrophysics at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley, receives half of the prize, with the other half being shared between Schmidt, distinguished professor at the Australian National University, and Riess, professor of astronomy and physics at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute. Their finding led to a dramatic change in perception of the universe by providing evidence for what has become known as “dark energy”.
In 1997 the Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP), led by Perlmutter and the High-z Supernova Search Team, led by Schmidt, were working independently on observations of distant Type 1a supernovae, using them as “standard candles” to measure cosmological distances as a function of time. (All such supernovae have similar intrinsic brightness, so their apparent brightness gives a measure of distance.) They expected to find evidence for a gradual slowdown in the expansion of the universe, resulting from the influence of gravity on the matter it contains.
Instead, the measurements revealed around 50 distant supernovae that appeared to be dimmer than predicted by calculations based on the gravitational effects of matter. In 1997 Gerson Goldhaber – well known in the particle-physics community – was the first person in the SCP team to notice the unexpected effect while plotting the brightness against redshift for Type Ia supernovae that the project had discovered. The same year, Adam Riess, then a research fellow at UC Berkeley who was leading an analysis of supernovae detected by the High-z project, uncovered a similar effect.
The observations pointed to the surprising conclusion that the expansion of the universe is not slowing under the influence of gravity, but is instead accelerating. This in turn implies the existence of some form of gravitationally repulsive “substance”, uniformly distributed across the universe, which counteracts the gravitational attraction of matter. This unknown substance has become known as “dark energy“.
The two teams published their results in 1998–1999 and since then their findings have been confirmed not only by further observations of supernovae but also by detailed measurements of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation and of baryon acoustic oscillations, i.e. clustering of baryonic matter in the early universe that also serves as a “standard ruler” for cosmological distance scales. All of the evidence suggests that dark energy contributes as much as 73% of the mass-energy content of the universe, with 23% from dark matter and only about 4% from normal baryonic matter – but the nature of both dark matter and dark energy remains unknown.
In November 1911, Heike Kammerlingth Onnes reported on the abrupt disappearance of resistance in mercury at 4.20 K. To mark the centenary of the discovery of superconductivity, this issue of CERN Courier looks at some of the aspects of its application – in particular in the context of particle accelerators – and at some more anniversaries. It is 75 years since type-II superconductivity was first observed in Kharkov (The discovery of type-II superconductors). Although sadly overlooked for 25 years, this made superconducting magnets a real possibility and led to the Tevatron – the first superconducting synchrotron – (Farewell to the Tevatron) and most recently the LHC, with its particular challenges (Superconductivity and the LHC: the early days), as well as to applications in medical scanners (PET and MRI: providing the full picture). First proposed 50 years ago, RF superconductivity also has an important role in many accelerators (Advances inacceleration: the superconducting way), exemplified in several of the applications of superconductivity at KEK, founded 40 years ago (Progress in applied superconductivity at KEK).
On 16 September, CERN’s director-general, Rolf Heuer, and the Israeli ambassador and permanent representative of Israel to the United Nations Office and other international organizations in Geneva, Aharon Leshno-Yaar, signed a document admitting Israel to associate membership of CERN, subject to ratification by the Knesset. Following ratification, Israel will become an associate member for a minimum of 24 months. Following this period, CERN Council will decide on the admission of Israel to full membership, taking into account the recommendations of a task force to be appointed for this purpose.
Israel has a strong tradition in both experimental and theoretical particle physics, with a major involvement at CERN during the 1990s in the OPAL experiment at the Large Electron–Positron (LEP) collider. Israel’s accession to observer status in 1991 followed an agreement to contribute funds to the CERN budget to support Israeli scientists, as well as providing equipment to CERN. The Israeli fund also contributed to running LEP and supported LHC construction and R&D for future accelerators. During its association with CERN, Israel has in addition supported Palestinian students at CERN, notably sending mixed Israeli–Palestinian contingents to CERN’s summer-student programme.
“It is a vital part of our mission to build bridges between nations. This agreement enriches us scientifically and is an important step in that direction,” says CERN director-general, Rolf Heuer. “I am very pleased that CERN’s relationship with Israel is moving to a higher level.”
In 2009, Israel was accepted as a special observer state, with the right to attend restricted Council sessions for discussions of LHC matters. Israel currently has strong involvement in the ATLAS experiment at the LHC and participates in a number of other experiments at CERN.
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