Saturday 17 March was the last day of the Moriond QCD 2012 conference in La Thuile. Closing the week with an overview of the conference were Günther Dissertori from ETH Zurich, who gave the experimental summary talk, and Davison Soper from the University of Oregon, who reviewed the theoretical topics covered during the week.
>>
|
Friday’s sessions took a trip into the domain of the Top quark, which was discovered at Fermilab back in early March 1995 and was reported two weeks later at Moriond. The LHC and Tevatron experiments presented the latest measurements of the production of the top quark and its decays. An understanding of the top quark is vital for the verification of the Standard Model as well as a potential window for new physics beyond the Standard Model.
>>
|
Not too long before the first long technical stop of the LHC, engineers and physicists are already working on the next generation of accelerators: HL-LHC and LHeC. The first would push proton-proton collisions to an unprecedented luminosity rate; the second would give a second wind to electron-proton collisions.
>>
|
_image.jpg?subformat=icon)
Increasing membership of the CERN family featured strongly at the CERN Council meetings this week, with Serbia’s ratification documents being received along with an application for Associate Membership from Ukraine. We also learned that an official application is on its way from Brazil and I can report that discussions are ongoing with several other countries around the world.
>>
|
The powering tests described in the last edition of the Bulletin were successfully finished at the end of the first week of March opening the way for 4 TeV operations this year. The beam was back in the machine on Wednesday 14 March. The first collisions at 4 TeV are scheduled for the first week of April.
>>
|
In June 2011, the ALPHA Collaboration announced that they had successfully managed to trap and hold atoms of antimatter for 1000 seconds. Last week they announced that their success in changing the internal state of antihydrogen and made the first ever measurement of its spectrum. The Collaboration is now installing an all-new experimental set-up – ALPHA-2 – and shows no signs of slowing down its investigations into the anti-world.
>>
|
ESA has named a space ferry after Edoardo Amaldi, one of the founding fathers of CERN but also of ESRO, the ancestor of ESA. Although they have developed in different ways, the three large European scientific organisations – CERN, ESO and ESA – have common roots. A webcast on the day of the launch of the spaceship from Kourou (French Guiana) will celebrate this fact with historic recollections and the participation of members of the Amaldi family.
>>
|
Cristoforo Benvenuti knows a lot about CERN, having been here since 1966. He also knows an awful lot about vacuum technology and getters, which he developed for ISR, LEP and LHC at CERN and which is an integral part of the revolutionary new solar panels he has invented. Now in industrial production, a first batch of panels will be delivered to Geneva Airport this week (see the CERN Press Release). Cristoforo Benvenuti, now retired from CERN but vice-president of the company producing the panels, SRB Energy, spoke to the Bulletin about solar panels and other energy projects he has up his sleeve.
>>
|
Did you know that computer centres are like people? They breathe air in and out like a person, they have to be kept at the right temperature, and they can even be organ donors. As part of a regular cycle of equipment renewal, the CERN Computer Centre has just donated 161 retired servers to universities in Morocco.
>>
|
The tools physicists are currently sharing with doctors to defeat cancer are high-tech sensors for early detection and particles for use as sharp projectiles. The latest advances in medical physics and some of the most sophisticated devices for imaging, monitoring and treatment were presented at the ICTR-PHE 2012 conference. They will shape the future of advanced healthcare.
>>
|
We are becoming used to the many applications that physics transfers to society. They span from vacuum techniques to electronics, and, of course, medicine and biophysics. The EU-supported PICOSEC project, of which CERN is the coordinator, goes beyond the simple spin-off technology and opens the doors of state-of-the-art crystal research to 22 researchers for applications that include calorimetry but also the next generation PET scanners.
>>
|
Have you noticed how the queues seem to be getting longer and longer in Restaurant 1 as more and more scientists are coming to work at CERN? GS (General Services) has the solution: a new chip in CERN access cards will allow you to pay automatically at the restaurant.
>>
|
Do you want to make your commute to CERN easier, while saving money at the same time? Would you prefer not to spend a quarter of an hour crawling round the CERN car parks looking for a space? If so, read on: this article might well be of great interest to you.
>>
|
The first diversity interaction workshop took place on 8 March. Although the choice of date was intended as a tribute to women, the real focus of the event was raising awareness about all types of diversity at CERN.
>>
|
The third edition of CinéGlobe, the international film festival founded at and hosted by CERN, will be taking place 27 March to 1 April. Some 55 short films will be shown in the Globe of Science and Innovation, all based around this year’s theme: “infinitely interconnected”.
>>
|
Alan Alda, the actor best known for playing medic Hawkeye Pierce on yesteryear’s TV series M*A*S*H, really likes science. Moreover, the Scientific American Frontiers TV program inspired his passion for science communication. Since then, he has become an advocate for increased public literacy in science. He visited CERN and the ATLAS experiment last week.
>>
|
CERN continues to be a very popular candidate for film locations at the moment. Not only has it inspired a German author and a film-maker interested in the more exotic interpretations of the science being worked on at the Organization, but even the recent puppet animation film by the legendary Muppets featured some CERN scenes.
>>
|
Many external companies work for CERN, including ISS, a market leader in the area of service provision. In an article, republished in full below, due to appear in the next edition of the ISS Magazine, the company puts CERN in the spotlight. Take a moment to discover how an external company sees CERN.
>>
|
Publish or perish. Given the large variety of information which needs to be published, you have the freedom at CERN to deploy your own web-server and put your data online on the Internet. Web content management systems like Joomla! or WordPress together with dedicated add-ons and modules make it easy to quickly create a posh look-and-feel. But hold on. With this freedom also comes responsibility!
>>
|
In this series, the Bulletin aims to explain the role of the Ombuds at CERN by presenting practical examples of misunderstandings that could have been resolved by the Ombuds if he had been contacted earlier. Please note that, in all the situations we present, the names are fictitious and used only to improve clarity.
>>
|
The Library has activated two different new online services, as a result of very successful trial periods and thanks to your positive feedback and strong support: PressDisplay and Nucleonica.
>>
|
