ATLAS multimedia contest winners announced

August 31, 2009 | 4:24 am

Back in July, the ATLAS experiment at CERN announced an internship contest for multimedia artists with an interest in physics. Applications were in the form of short multimedia pieces about the ATLAS experiment, and the grand prize was an ATLAS internship at CERN during the time of the LHC re-start. ATLAS has now announced the winners of the contest, and has posted the winning entries online for your LHC-video-viewing pleasure.

The top six videos out of 13 submitted were chosen by the vote of 50 ATLAS scientists and students. The contest panel made the final selection based on submitted videos and other application materials.

“I had seen the things people produced about the LHC on YouTube, and knew there was an opportunity there,” said contest organizer Claudia Marcelloni. “The quality of the thirteen entries was quite impressive, and we were surprised at the number of animations submitted. All the applicants told us that they really enjoyed creating their pieces.”

The grand prize winner was Phil Owen, an Australian-American currently finishing a bachelor’s degree in IT. His entry, titled <i>The Origin of Mass: Search for the Higgs</i>, uses original 3D graphics to educate the viewer about the Standard Model, the Higgs field and the Higgs boson, and the ATLAS experiment. Owen will travel to CERN in November to take up the internship after finishing his degree from Monash University in Australia.

“I think it’ll be a great experience,” said Owen. “I really want to create something interesting and dynamic that shows the good work going on at CERN and helps the public understand.”

The rest of the top entries follow the animated theme. Jonathan Baldwin’s second-place entry follows two young CERN researchers on their lunch break in the LHC tunnel as they have a close encounter with the strange world of particles. In third place was an entry by 3D artist Simon Howells that recreates the construction of the ATLAS experiment and imagines an LHC collision. The other runners up include a talking proton traveling through the LHC tunnel, an overview of the ATLAS experiment, and a particle ballet.

Katie Yurkewicz

No Comments »

A grand tuning voyage

August 28, 2009 | 1:13 pm

This story is slightly adapted from one that originally appeared in ILC NewsLine.

When groups from different countries work together the usual procedure is to send the people to the machines they are working on. A team of engineers and technicians from DESY, Fermilab, and KEK decided to do the exact opposite: they sent the machines to the people. On August 3, 2009, two machines constructed at DESY embarked on a voyage to Fermilab in the United States.

The machines, so-called cavity tuning machines, are used to form superconducting radio-frequency cavities for accelerators like the European XFEL and the International Linear Collider, so that they match the construction plan exactly. Before the tuning starts, the machines measure the shape of the cavities geometrically as well as electrically. Then they squeeze and stretch each cell of the cavity while keeping the cavity straight so that the electromagnetic field is exactly the same in every cell: this is the only way to guarantee an optimal acceleration of the particles inside the accelerator.

Experts at DESY have been working with a prototype of these machines for 15 years. Since a huge number of cavities is needed for the ILC–16,000 of them–industrial production would require a strong automation of the machines to ensure that not only experts in their laboratories can work with the machines but also non-expert operators. Along with the automation the new machines will significantly reduce the time needed for the tuning of one cavity to approximately four hours or less. DESY will deliver two cavity tuning machines to cavity vendors for the tuning of XFEL cavities, and the ILC would have to adopt a similar plan.

At Fermilab, the cavity tuning machines will be used to support ILC R&D and Project X cavity tuning needs. One of them will later be shipped to KEK.

But at the moment the machines are missing two important parts: the control electronics and the software. This is the American contribution to the cavity tuning machines and will be added at Fermilab.

Before the machines could be shipped they had to be split in two parts, which were packed into boxes especially made for the machines’ voyage. All movable parts were fastened and the machines were carefully tied up within the boxes. “Of course we are afraid that something might break, but we did our best to prevent this,” said Wolf-Dietrich Moeller, leader of the group at DESY which is part of the collaboration. His team and people from the packaging company needed about one week to pack the machines. Only after this was done accurately the machines were flown to the United States.

In the middle of August a team from DESY followed the machines and helped to reassemble them. Finally it’s again people who are sent to the machines…

by Gerrit Hörentrup, DESY

Guest author

No Comments »

A new central service for physics postdoc applications

August 25, 2009 | 8:21 pm

As postdoctoral job season approaches, applicants, writers of reference letters, and hiring departments alike struggle to manage all the pieces of information that must flow hither and thither to match prospective hires with departments.

We at SPIRES are happy to announce a new development in this arena.  SPIRES Jobs database is now working with AcademicJobsOnline (AJO) so that any job posted on AJO in the HEP domains will be automatically harvested and posted on SPIRES Jobs.  AJO is a fee-based service that originated at Duke University for the American Mathematical Society.  It allows applicants and hiring departments (alas, departments must be North American) to manage reference letters, applicant packets, and the hiring process in a single online resource.

Several physicists, notably R. Sekhar Chivukula and E. Simmons at Michigan State and Jonathan Bagger at Johns Hopkins, worked with the Division of Particles & Fields and SPIRES to find an optimal way to manage applicant information.  We identified AJO as a possible partner for institutions who want to take part in a central service, and an Open Letter has been sent to the HEP theory community.

We expect that people will continue to use SPIRES jobs as an announcement and posting board, as not everyone will post on AJO, but we hope that AJO may serve as a useful place to manage private applicant information.  If AJO becomes successful within high-energy physics, then SPIRES Jobs will interoperate with them even more to provide extra services for the HEP community (for instance, CVs could be created on SPIRES…or soon INSPIRE…and sent directly into AJO) .

We’re quite happy to serve as catalysts like this to help organize and promote such services.  Services like AJO, and visionary and excited physicists like those involved here, help SPIRES serve the information needs of the HEP community.   Let us know if you have ideas to make information flow more smoothly in the community.

Travis Brooks

No Comments »

Physics movies: A top-25 list and a film festival

August 25, 2009 | 12:21 pm

CERN’s film-making club is calling for entries for its second CineGlobe Festival, which will be held in February at the lab’s Globe of Science and Innovation and other locations in and around Geneva, Switzerland.  Prizes will be awarded in three categories: general fiction, science or scientific fiction, and science documentary, and films can be in any format or genre so long as they are short and in English or French — or at least subtitled in English or French.   For more details see this press release. Gentlefolk, start your cameras!  Entries are due Sept. 30th.

Meanwhile, in some sort of cinematic convergence,  a blog called Online Engineering Degree has posted a list of Top 25 Movies for Physics Geeks.   It’s a mixed bag. Movies are singled out for their faithful adherence to the laws of physics  (2001: A Space Odyssey) and for their utterly impossible tricks (Armageddon and Goldeneye, for enabling James Bond to catch up with a falling plane by jumping off a cliff, among other feats. )   Star Wars and Star Trek are there, of course, along with the Harry Potter series:

Once realism lovers get over magical powers and mystical creatures, there’s a lot of physics fun to be had with Harry Potter. Figuring out wands alone—and the nature and frequency of the energy traveling through them—can leave one dizzy. 

Plus lots of space and astronaut action (Apollo 13, The Right Stuff), wormholes (Stargate), time travel (Back to the Future), Richard Feynman (Infinity) and, for some reason, Gattaca:

This movie expands upon the ideas in Brave New World, illustrating what the ethical problems would be in a world of liberal eugenics. Of particular note to science lovers is the use of genetic information as, essentially, a fake ID—a chilling portrait of the future.

Hmm.  No physics in there that I can see.  But I guess its inclusion makes this a list for the well-rounded physics geek.

For more about physics in the movies, see “The Wrong Stuff” in symmetry’s Oct/Nov 07 issue.

Glennda Chui

2 Comments »

A twenty-seven kilometer film

August 24, 2009 | 1:32 pm

This story first appeared in the CERN Bulletin. Read this and other latest news and stories from CERN in their regular newsletter.

For the past two weeks, Bram Conjaerts, a Belgian filmmaker, has been touring the CERN sites and surrounding countryside conducting research for his new documentary. The film will follow the entire 27 km length of the LHC ring, but unlike most documentaries about the LHC, it will take place mostly above ground!

While working towards his film degree in 2008, Bram Conjaerts won an award at the International Documentary Festival for his documentary “Henri and the Islands”, an anthropological documentary about the smallest village in Belgium. In an unlikely change of subject matter he decided to use the prize money to make a film about the LHC.

“With the money granted by the Flemish government, I wanted to create a documentary about something adventurous and something that I did not know about, ” explains Conjaerts. “I started doing research about the LHC and CERN and I came across the fantasy of black holes and all the conspiracies revolving around CERN.”

However, the proposed documentary will not focus on black holes. Conjaerts plans on taking a tour of the countryside under which the LHC ring is laid, in order to gain perspectives from those who inhabit the local surroundings. “We will follow the path of the ring above ground. So we’ll interview scientists, but also meet locals who have formed their own opinions about what is going on at CERN,” says Conjaerts. “We might also meet the priests of churches on the route, who have special ideas about religion and science. And also the Chateau Voltaire is near the top of the ring, so there are ideas about incorporating philosophical perspectives of science and the history of the chateau.”

Conjaerts, who is only beginning his career as a filmmaker, will be conducting research for three weeks before starting preliminary filming in September. The rest of the filming will be completed before December 2010.

Symmetry Intern

No Comments »

Groove to the physics mix tape

August 21, 2009 | 12:47 pm

The likes of Frank Sinatra, The Beatles, Janis Joplin, and Mick Jagger may have forever sealed the popular notion that musicians are the hallmark of cool. On the flip side is the popular notion of a physicist as uncool. Einstein may have been beloved, but in terms of cool, he did physicists in. No matter how much the scientific community may resist, it’s hard to associate physics with the hip crowd.

The only way around this might be a direct tip of the hat from those music icons themselves. Perhaps surprisingly, this may already be happening. With a quick look through iTunes you might notice that a lot of popular musicians have taken a cue from physics.

This year, besides seeing the CERN Rap top the YouTube charts, physics got a big break on a big scale when legendary musician Beck released a single called “Gamma Ray.” High-energy electromagnetic waves have never sounded so good.

Neil Young was spotted wearing a t-shirt bearing a design for a high-energy physics conference–if that doesn’t convince you that physics is poetic, then nothing will–but he also wrote a song called “Transformer Man,” with the lyric “Your eyes are shining on a beam through the galaxy of love.” A little sappy, Mr. Young, but I like it anyway. Mary Abraham also combined physics and love in the song “Entropy,” in which she croons “You give me light, you give me heat, but you never give me warmth, you’re entropy.”

Then there are bands that dedicate even more than a song title to physics. The band Hawkwind, a psychedelic troupe active in the late 1960s, were known for having a love of science fiction, but they often promoted real science, as with their 1977 album “Quarks strangeness and charm.” The title song discussed how nerdy physicists like Einstein had trouble with the ladies, unlike the awesome rock stars.

The band Modest Mouse seems to really straddle the line with many songs referencing math and physics concepts, such as “Perpetual Motion Machine,” “She Ionizes and Atomizes,” and “Calculus Man.” And the science doesn’t stop at the song titles. In the tune “3rd Planet,” lead man Isaac Brock belts out, “The universe is shaped exactly like the Earth/If you go straight long enough you’ll end up where you were.” Songs about universal topology? Believe it.

On a similar note, the Irish band British Sea Power rails about the oh-so-confusing Planck scale and the entrance to the quantum world in the song “Atom“: “Open the atom’s core…When you get down, down to the subatomic part of it/that’s when it breaks, you know/ that’s when it falls apart.” Then the song repeats, “I just don’t get it.”

Taking it one step further, here are a few musicians who dedicated their band names to math and science:

Ingrid Lucia and the Flying Neutrinos

Jane Vain and the Dark Matter

Math and Physics Club

We Are Scientists

Dark Matter (I found evidence of at least four bands with this name, although none of them big enough to elbow the other ones out)

Dark Room Notes (and their album “We Love Dark Matter.”)

And of course, there are all the songs inspired by the starry skies and the physics going on way up there. Many of these songs are ballads inspired by earthly love, but many are tributes to the cosmos themselves. Here’s my list of celestial gems:

Astrophysics Mix Tape

Song/Artist

“Big Bangs, Black Holes and Meteorites”/ Love Is All

“Dark Center of the Universe“/Modest Mouse

“Center of the Universe“/Built To Spill

“Star Bodies”/New Pornographers

“Lost In Space“/Aimee Mann

“Outta Space Canoe Race”/5ive Style

“Intergalactic“/Beastie Boys

“Planet of Sound“/Pixies

“Star Power“/Sonic Youth

“Looking for Astronauts“/The National.

“No Atmosphere“/A Band of Bees.

“Space Oddity“/David Bowie

“Rocket Man“/ Elton John

“Speeds of Light”/Fiver

“The Big Sky”/ Kate Bush

“Black Hole Sun”/ Sound Garden

“Space Walk“/ Lemon Jelly

“Moonland“/ Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

“Music To Watch Space Girls By“/ Leonard Nimoy (Yup, Star Trek)

All pulled together, here’s my particle physics mix tape, which should satisfy the ears of the most general listener and tickle the fancy of the most ingrained PhD student:

Physics Mix Tape

Song/Artist

“Gamma Ray“/ Beck

“Gravity Rides Everything“/ Modest Mouse

“Dark Matter“/ Andrew Bird

“Quantum Physics”/ Can

“CernLHC”/ Monolake

“Tachyon Paradox“/ Merzbow Vs. Nordvic

“Finding Higgs’ Boson“/ Frank Zappa

“Protons, Neutrons, Electrons“/ The Cat Empire

“Quarks Strangeness and Charm“/ Hawkwind

“The Universe!”/ Do Make Say Think

“Big Bizang“/ MC Hawking

“I Am A Scientist“/ Guided By Voices

“Algebra“/ Soul Hooligan

“Make a Circuit With Me,”/ The Polecats

“Entropy”/ Mary Abraham

“Relativity”/ The Pale Pacific

“Physics”/ Park Like Setting

So is physics the new black? Is it the new subject about which every serious musician must write a song sooner or later? We won’t tell the artists what to do; we’ll just have faith in the awesome power of physics to inspire.

Calla Cofield

10 Comments »

Sen. Al Franken goes deep to learn about particle physics

August 20, 2009 | 5:24 pm

Sen. Al Franken showed a serious interest in particle physics when he toured the Soudan Mine 2500-feet underground in Minnesota last week.

The former comedy writer and talk show host was full of earnest questions about the physics behind the mine’s current operating experiments: a dark matter detector called the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, or CDMS II; and a high-energy neutrino detector called the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search, or MINOS. Still, occasionally, his humorous side revealed itself such as when he stopped the initial jargon-laden explanations from physicists with a helpful hint that they just “pretend he’s not a physicist”.

After Franken got a tour of the mine and its experiments, physicists and staff from the University of Minnesota and Fermilab outlined the research planned for NOvA, or NuMI Off-Axis Neutrino Appearance Experiment, the nearby neutrino project that will use the same particle beam as MINOS. They also explained how the project is boosting the northern Minnesota economy. NOvA has been infused with more than $40 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money. The stimulus funding allowed for the May groundbreaking of the NOvA far detector site in Ash River, Minn., which will create more than 125 construction-related jobs.

Franken showed his down-to-earth side when he engrossed himself in a impromptu lunchtime, picnic-table demonstration of how a neutrino beam from Fermilab in Illinois (a knot in the picnic table) makes its way almost 500 miles underground to the MINOS detector in Soudan (a Pepsi can) and eventually will also travel to the NOvA detector in nearby Ash River (a Sprite can).

The senator left the tour with T-shirts representing both ends of the neutrino beam: Fermilab and the underground MINOS experiment.

He was invited by the University of Minnesota School Of Physics and Astronomy, Fermilab, and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources to tour the experiments. They are housed in the Soudan Underground Mine, part of a state park. The headframe that caps the mine shaft is its most distinctive feature. Read more about the trip.

Photos courtesy of Jerry Meier, assistant laboratory manager from the University of Minnesota.

Tona Kunz

No Comments »

August 2009 issue of symmetry now online

August 19, 2009 | 1:36 pm

We’ve been calling this our Manga issue because it highlights the work of Takuya Uruno, who created a physics Manga series for kids for the Japanese laboratory KEK–featured in our gallery–and also drew us a gorgeous Manga cover.

The new issue also features:

– Youhei Morita on Manga as a learning tool.

– Fermilab’s push to develop superconducting radio-frequency technology, considered crucial for the future of particle physics.

– How physicists at the LHC experiments are using the shutdown to their advantage

– A choreographer translates conversations with CERN physicists into dance

– Building better heart valves, the first in a new series on applications of accelerator technology

– The director of Japan’s Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe takes tea with the Emperor

– As always, our departments: Signal to Background, highlights from symmetry breaking, a 60-second explanation of Cherenkov light, thoughts on physics, technology and culture from the editor-in-chief, and a logbook from the discovery of the weak neutral current. The mathematical framework that predicted the weak neutral current became known as the Standard Model of particles and their interactions.

Glennda Chui

2 Comments »

Physicists play high-energy game of catch

August 17, 2009 | 10:02 am

The Washington Post today explains the cross-state particle physics experiment NOvA, which has been kicked into high-gear this summer with the help of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding.

Scientists are playing an exotic game of pitch and catch between Illinois and Minnesota. Their catcher’s mitt is solid iron, weighs 5,500 tons, and is parked in northern Minnesota in an abandoned iron mine. With millions of dollars from the federal stimulus package, construction crews are now building a second mitt near the Canadian border. It’s even heavier, some 15,000 tons, and is made of 385,000 liquid-filled cells of PVC plastic.

Five hundred miles to the south is the pitcher: Fermilab, a sprawling U.S. government laboratory west of Chicago where physicists do violent things with tiny particles.

The article goes on to give excellent explanations of the mysteries and behavior of neutrinos as well as why scientists consider the tiny particles key to understanding the universe.

The story by reporter Joel Achenbach also hints at how the basic research project could create a starting point for industrial applications that keep stimulating the economy long into the future.

This kind of basic research in particle physics has no obvious application to day-to-day life in the short run, but scientists say it’s likely to change society down the road.

“The technological impact of basic science has enormously changed the way we all live,” Marshak said. “It’s like when Albert Einstein came out with general relativity in 1915: he had no idea that Minnesota would use it, via GPS satellites, in order to plow straight rows of corn — in the dark.”

Read the full article here.

Tona Kunz

No Comments »

Recovery Act pushes high-field magnet development forward

August 14, 2009 | 6:37 am

A collaboration of national laboratories, universities, and industry may soon begin testing a new material that could help to revolutionize the superconducting magnet field.

The US Department of Energy is providing $4 million in Recovery Act funds to the Very High Field Superconducting Magnet Collaboration to test BSCCO2212, a bismuth-based material that may allow scientists to create high-field superconducting magnets that could achieve more than twice the strength of existing magnets. Fermilab will manage $1.5 million of the new funds and has already started making cable to test the new material.

Both the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN use superconducting magnets made out of niobium-titanium to steer beams of particles in accelerators. The Tevatron’s magnets have a field of 4 Tesla, and the LHC’s magnets can achieve 8 Tesla. Recent tests on alternative materials, such as niobium-tin, reached a magnetic field of 13 Tesla.

The development of high-field magnets that can exceed 50 Tesla could provide a path forward for a possible muon collider at Fermilab.

Led by spokesperson David Larbalestier of Florida State University, collaboration members believe that BSCCO2212 is the answer. But because it has a completely different structure than niobium, it comes with a whole new set of challenges, namely that it breaks very easily.

“In order to turn it into a superconductor, we heat the BSCCO2212 up to 800 degrees,” said Fermilab physicist Alvin Tollestrup. “The trouble is that it becomes more or less a ceramic. If you bend it, it breaks.”

In the project’s first phase, Fermilab will purchase the bismuth-based material from US vendors to conduct cabling and coil studies. Collaboration members will research the material’s properties in detail and determine how much they can stretch it and whether they can make it into cables. Collaboration member institutions include: Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermilab, Florida State University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology and Texas A&M University.

In addition, collaboration members will partner with businesses to encourage industrial fabrication of high-field magnets, an effort that could result in cutting edge technologies for other applications. Fermilab’s development and construction of the first reliable superconducting accelerator magnets for the Tevatron approximately 30 years ago led to industrial fabrication that resulted in such applications as medical MRI systems.

“Superconducting magnets have been one of the main keys for enabling technology,” Tollestrup said. “There is no doubt that there are uses both in high-energy physics and areas of industry and medicine that will require high-field magnets.”

Elizabeth Clements

No Comments »