Fermilab sounds debut in “Alternative Energy”

January 31, 2012 | 9:33 am

Composer Mason Bates performs a previous symphony, "Mothership," with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

This story appeared today in Fermilab Today.

Most Fermilab personnel have learned to ignore the ubiquitous booms, hums, growls and crackles of Fermilab machinery. But composer Mason Bates places these sounds center stage in his new piece “Alternative Energy.”

“Alternative Energy” is an imaginative musical narrative that follows the evolution of energy and technology. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra will perform the piece at 8 p.m. from Feb. 2 through 4 and Feb. 7.

“The idea was that each movement would be separated by a hundred years, starting with old energy and moving to present and future energy,” Bates said about his newest symphony. The first movement in the show uses scrap metal to evoke a junkyard.

Bates came to Fermilab last spring seeking inspiration for the present-day movement of his piece. He was not disappointed. Bates found a variety of sounds to give a modern-twist to his dynamic orchestral symphony.

“Fermilab exists at the intersection of technological power and human curiosity, and I wanted the symphony to include an example of massive energy used in a positive way. When we hear a surround-sound recreation of the Tevatron booting up — a massive machine spins around the orchestra — it is as if the crank on an old Model T suddenly grew to be several acres in size,” Bates said.

Physicist Todd Johnson gave Bates a behind-the-scenes tour of Fermilab and revved different machinery while Bates eagerly listened and recorded.

“He was very enthusiastic and asked a lot of questions. He was obviously really happy to be here,” Johnson said.

Bates not only enjoyed his visit to Fermilab, but found exactly what he was looking for sonically.

“I was blown away by the beautiful architecture of the main building and the sculptures scattered around. On a sonic level, I was astounded at the variety of noises that jostle out of this huge facility. I had hoped to find the sounds of massive machines, and I found that in one of the refrigeration units,” Bates said. “And when Todd told me about the mysterious, capricious ‘quench,’ I told him that we needed to find a way to capture that. He contacted Derek Plant who, unbelievably, was able to set up various recording devices in just the right places. We got it!”

Bates features the sounds he recorded at Fermilab in the present day movement of his symphony. He called “Alternative Energy” his biggest piece to date. For tickets, visit the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s website.

Sarah Charley

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A new book plays on the mystery of physics machines

December 9, 2011 | 10:53 am

Underground and closed off from visitors, experiments in particle physics often hide, rather than flaunt, the exotic and intricate machines that seem more at home in a science fiction blockbuster. No space shuttles, rockets or rovers wow visitors at today’s physics laboratories. The tried and true conduit from the underground to the outside world remains in most part the camera.

Polarized electron source, Bates Linear Accelerator Center, MIT, Massachusetts, 2007. Photo: Stanley Greenberg

In his new book, “Time Machines,” New York-based photographer Stanley Greenberg immersed himself within physics machinery to capture the cannon-like CMS detector before installation at the LHC, the frigid lifelessness surrounding the ICECUBE Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica and the Frankenstein mystique of Fermilab’s Cockroft-Walton accelerator. Greenberg’s book assembles 80 rich, black-and-white photos that distill from the complex machines a space-age style and individual personalities – preserving a romanticism free of scientific overload.

“Their massive cement blocks, multi-story electronics, and miles of circumference dwarf their human makers as intestines of tubes and wires converge Leviathan-like into the ultimate probe of the tiniest and the most hidden secrets of the vast universe,” writes David Cassidy in his imaginative, yet informative, introduction to “Time Machines.”

In his previous works, Greenberg, who is no stranger to towering structures, delved into sub-city tunnels, toured waterfront shipyards and scaled the skeletons of burgeoning buildings. He then left his home in New York City on a five-year quest to photograph the infrastructure and equipment of the most advanced high-energy and nuclear physics laboratories.

“It’s an almost completely hidden kind of world,” Greenberg said. “That’s always been an attraction to me – the places people can’t go.”

Assuming access to laboratories to be a challenge, Greenberg instead discovered open doors and smiling scientists, who often invited him before he asked.

Drawn by sweeping patterns that slice across his lens and massive structures that hemorrhage off the pages of his book, Greenberg has, for the most part, let the reader’s mind simply admire the machinery and wander what roles these strange instruments would fill.

“There are parts you see that will hopefully become metaphors for the whole,” Greenberg said.

While the book does briefly explain the experiments in the introduction and appendix, this is not a science book – it is a celebration of science.

What’s left out of the book are hundreds of old negatives from an era when bubble chambers were ubiquitous in the field. Greenberg collected and borrowed these abstract portraits of particles in the hope of one day displaying them in a gallery.

The collection in this book is simply one selection of weird and complex experiments from across physics history. Yet each otherworldly machine by being framed within a photograph is frozen in its own unique and immutable time.

All travel for the book was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the NSF Artists and Writers Program funded Greenberg’s trip to the South Pole.

Brad Hooker

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Digital artist wins first CERN, Ars Electronica joint-residency competition

December 6, 2011 | 9:49 am

Artist Julius von Bismarck with an early version of his invention, the Fulgerator. Image courtesy of Julius von Bismarck

CERN and international cyberarts organization Ars Electronica declared Julius von Bismarck the winner of their first digital arts joint-residency program today. The 28-year-old German artist will spend two months at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, and a third month at Ars Electronica in Austria, collaborating with scientists and digital experts to create a physics-inspired artwork as part of the Collide@CERN program.

Von Bismarck wasn’t sure as a student whether he wanted to pursue physics or art. Now he is excited for the opportunity to combine them. “The root reason as to why I am an artist is the same as it would be for being a scientist: finding out what there is out in the world and how I can contribute to our understanding of it,” he said in the CERN press release.

The bearded Berliner is most famous for his invention of the Fulgurator, an apparatus that looks like a camera but actually projects a secret image that shows up only in other peoples’ photos. He used the device when President Barack Obama spoke in Berlin, projecting a cross onto his podium that appeared in press photos, as well as at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, where tourists found their photos contained the image of a white dove over Mao Zedong’s face in a prominently hanging portrait.

Von Bismarck is cautious about the device’s potential for misuse. He’s turned down numerous offers from advertisement agencies looking to exploit its function. As he says in a video for the arts and media initiative the Creators Project:

“I believe that all technology that’s invented should also be questioned. I believe that an invention is also a political statement. If I build a machine that can change the world, then I have to back it up as the creator. That’s why every technician and every engineer also acts as a politician and as someone who is responsible for our future.”

He will visit CERN for a week in January to choose his science-inspiration partner, a physics mentor who will co-blog and present work with von Bismarck throughout the program. His residency in Geneva will likely start in March.

For more on the artist residency program, see this symmetry story.

Amy Dusto

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Tabletop ATLAS assembly, no hardhat required

November 22, 2011 | 4:00 pm

Physicist Sascha Mehlhase may have missed the actual construction of the ATLAS detector at CERN, but he found another way to experience the joy of building it – a way reminiscent of his childhood and the contents of a particularly good toy box he once had. He made the detector out of Legos.

Two colleagues at Mehlhase’s office at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen put forward the idea of building the detector out of Legos for a public event last year, but they never got around to doing it themselves. Last month as a similar event approached, Mehlhase decided to go for it. To the displeasure of his wife, he spent an entire weekend using the free digital designer software on Lego.com to translate photos and 3D renderings from the ATLAS website into a plan for plastic.

He scaled the model to a Lego man, a few centimeters in height, corresponding to a two-meter tall human, which made the finished masterpiece nearly a half-meter in height. The fixed selection of blocks, however, meant that everything didn’t scale with exactly 100 percent accuracy.

“Sometimes in LEGO you get these pieces in lengths of two, four, six or eight when a seven would be perfect,” Mehlhase said.

He convinced the head of his group to buy the 10,000 pieces his design called for, which arrived in a huge package with about two-thirds of its contents in need of sorting. Mehlhase and a few students started doing this by color and then by type – a task he estimates took about a quarter of the total time.

Soon Mehlhase discovered that the project was more formidable than he’d foreseen. An instruction manual created by the Lego software yielded “4,500 pages of almost useless material,” Mehlhase said. Because the detector is a symmetrical machine, inside-out assembly makes more sense than bottom-to-top, which the computer didn’t realize.

So he abandoned the manual. Instead, over the course of a few weeks, he spent 33 hours comparing the digital Lego design he’d made with his bins of sorted pieces, figuring out by sight where things should go.

“So far I’ve managed everything without glue,” he said.

The public event passed, but Mehlhase was on a mission. Brick by primary-colored brick he toiled. A few challenges scientists faced in creating the real ATLAS detector proved challenging in the LEGO model as well. For example, the outer magnets in both structures are much heavier than some internal pieces, yet they need to support themselves without breaking.

Mehlhase finished the mini-detector, complete with tiny technicians and red block “ATLAS” sign, in early November. His group at Copenhagen plans to use it for outreach. A few other institutions have emailed him about the designs, and he said he’d gladly share. He says he’d like to see his Lego ATLAS design at CERN one day.

For now Mehlhase plans to display the model in a glass case in the hallway outside his office. The real ATLAS detector may belong to the thousands of physicists who built and run it, but this one is all Copenhagen’s.

All images courtesy of Sascha Mehlhase.

Amy Dusto

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CERN announces competition for dance and performance arts residency

November 4, 2011 | 9:19 am

Performance at CERN by dancers from the Rudra-Béjart Ballet School of Lausanne. Image: CERN

Today the Collide@CERN residency program begins accepting submissions for artists working in dance or performance arts to come learn and create in the laboratory.

Unlike the program’s other residency in digital arts, which was announced at September’s Ars Electronica Festival, this competition is funded by the state and city of Geneva, Switzerland, and is limited to artists who were either born in the area or are currently living or working there.

“This shows how CERN is really connecting to the city,” the program’s leader Ariane Koek said, adding that it also fits into Geneva’s strategy for refocusing itself as a city of arts and sciences.

Collide@CERN will host two residencies each year for three years, starting with the digital arts and the dance and performance arts competitions. The latter residency may change art forms every year, though the digital arts residency will remain in place.

Each selected artist is given a cash prize, three months of housing, board and living stipends and a science partner from the laboratory with whom he or she will meet regularly. Throughout their program, both partners will keep a blog, and the artist will have an open meeting with other scientists over lunch fortnightly in a CERN cafeteria. At the beginning and end of the residency, the artist-scientist pair will also hold joint lectures, which will be open to the public and available to watch online.

“It’s creating a lab of the imagination here, which will lead to unexpected innovations in the arts and sciences,” Koek said. “I see this as a great experiment.”

Since dance and performance arts are such laborious undertakings, often requiring many elements to produce — mainly people and money  – Koek said completing a finished piece by the end of three months is unlikely. Instead, the goal of this residency is to create a work in progress that will hopefully be realized in the future with outside funding.

“Dance and performance are really the art forms most directly connected with time and space, which are the domain of particle physics,” Koek said.

Ballet by the Rudra-Béjart ballet school, Lausanne. Image: CERN

According to Koek, Collide@CERN residencies are designed to put art and science on the same level. Just as CERN physicists are meticulously selected for their expertise, artists will be selected with the same degree of consideration. A panel of five judges, including two members of the CERN cultural board, two dance and performance specialists from the region and one person from the Swiss arts council, Pro Helvetica, will make the final decision. “It’s to bring mutual respect and understanding across arts and science,” Koek said. “That’s what’s so radical about this program, and it is at such a high international level.”

The closing date for dance and performance arts submissions is Dec. 20. A selection will be announced in early January, with the residency to begin a few months later.

Amy Dusto

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Graffiti art reflects an experiment’s excitement on the walls

October 31, 2011 | 4:27 pm

The three concrete blocks CERN installed to contain waste at the CMS experiment were ugly and needed paint, according to Niels Dupont-Sagorin, who is in charge of safety at the site. But a quote from contractors for a basic white coat of paint turned out to be pricey. So, he thought, why not make the paint job an artistic investment? A few months later, the site now sports two physics-themed outdoor frescoes done by a local graffiti artist, with one design by a retired CMS researcher.

“My idea was to ask some graffiti artists because I’m from the suburbs of Paris and into street art,” Dupont-Sagorin said. But here on the Swiss-French border, “I didn’t actually know at which door to knock.”

Then one day, while driving from the Meyrin, Switzerland, campus over to the CMS site, Dupont-Sagorin saw something at a roundabout that made him stop. A man was spray painting a billboard with information about an upcoming event in a way Dupont-Sagorin quite liked. He stopped and asked if the man did this work for hire. Indeed, the painter was a freelance artist who goes by the street name Loodz [pictured above with Dupont-Sagorin]. They exchanged information, and Dupont-Sagorin went home to check out Loodz’s website.

“Immediately, I noticed he was good,” Dupont-Sagorin said. “But he’s paid, you know, not a graffiti terrorist.”

He sent Loodz a picture of the blank concrete blocks and also took the opportunity to send a shot of another long blank wall at the entrance to the CMS Control Room.

Loodz sent back some proposal sketches. Dupont-Sagorin was happy with one of them, a dark sketch of the universe dotted with tiny white stars. But the second design lacked something; he thought a more CERN-specific piece would be more fitting.

He asked for suggestions from Michael Hoch, a CMS physicist and himself a curator-creator of many an art project at the experimental site. Hoch knew just whom to ask about the wall: now-retired CMS researcher Sergio Cittolin.

In 1994, Cittolin made a design depicting the evolution of the universe after the Big Bang. This was first used for LHC outreach on a “magic box” toy, a Jacobs-ladder-like cube whose sides flap open never-endingly to reveal inner designs. Later he revamped the sketch into one long image that was adapted into a banner on the CMS website.

Hoch thought Sergio’s creation would work perfectly on the blank wall by the CMS control room. Dupont-Sagorin agreed, noting that its origins also connected to the experiment nicely. With Sergio’s permission, he sent high-definition photos of the banner to Loodz, who merged them with photos of the wall in order to plan the final piece.

Funding ultimately came from the CMS Outreach office and the Experiment Area Manager in the Engineering Department. Loodz did all the art himself, entirely in spray paint, and finished both the wall and then the concrete blocks of the waste area in just 10 days.

“I’m really happy with it,” Dupont-Sagorin said. “I’d like to have money to do it elsewhere.” He has a keen personal interest in outreach and even works as a CERN tour guide on the side. “The shape of your message, your presentations – everything you do is important,” he said.

At his worksite, the physics community clearly agrees.

Amy Dusto

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Developers create virtual CERN

September 19, 2011 | 9:45 am

Neng Xu sits in the cafeteria, where he was inspired to create a virtual CERN. Photo credit: Amy Dusto

Neng Xu, a software engineer for the University of Wisconsin-Madison working on the ATLAS experiment, sat drinking coffee in a sunny corner of CERN’s cafeteria when he thought of a challenge. Could he create a virtual version of what he saw out the window: a lawn with cafe tables and a building across the street?

He could, he found, and more. With the help of a colleague, Xu is now growing his virtual CERN into an interactive app that will work across multiple platforms and is slated for a public beta version sometime this fall. Fans of digital art got a preview of the tool at this month’s Ars Electronica festival.

For years Xu has been a video game enthusiast. He’d toyed with the idea of making his own but ultimately decided, “Whatever I do, I can’t make better games than game companies.” Then he realized he could use the same type of software to do something different.

Xu used a free online game development tool called Unity to begin construction of the virtual cafeteria lawn and the building across the street, where in reality many physicists working on the ATLAS and CMS detectors have offices. Completing the project took two months of after-hours work. He’d included so much detail that the final file was huge, about 200 megabytes, and took nearly an hour to open.

When he moved on to his next idea, making a virtual model of the ATLAS detector, Xu cut down on the amount of information he included. That project took only half of a month to complete. After finishing it, Xu planted the virtual detector on the virtual lawn in front of the cafeteria to give a sense of the experiment’s enormity.

The ATLAS detector, parked in an usual spot. Image courtesy of Neng Xu

The resources coordinator for ATLAS saw the model. He asked Xu to make something similar that people outside of CERN could access online. Xu agreed. Although he was still working on this project beyond his day job, ATLAS began to provide him with some support. Besides software supplies, perhaps the most valuable asset Xu received was his introduction to fellow modeling innovator Joao Pequenao.

For the last decade, Pequenao has been working on multimedia, images and simulations for the ATLAS outreach office. While an undergraduate physics student in Lisbon, Portugal, he passionately pursued a hobby in graphic design. As the autodidact said, “Some kids play soccer, some kids go home to study [graphics] tools.”

Over the years, Pequenao’s work has gained worldwide attention. The logo for this year’s Ars Electronica festival was his 2006 visualization of a proton collision forming a microscopic black hole.

“There was a niche in the market,” he said. ”I’m at the intersection of physicist, computer scientist and designer.”

Xu and Pequenao realized they could help one another. Along with Pequanao’s student, Henrique Carvalho, they teamed up to become the first ATLAS group working on interactive multimedia.

Their new project, the ATLAS Virtual Interactive Online Navigator, or AVION, is a Web-based application that will soon be accessible to anyone with a laptop, smartphone, game console or other device connected to the Internet. Still in the alpha phase, AVION allows explorers to take guided tours of the experiment that start in the parking lot and delve underground into the LHC where collisions are occurring, or to examine individual pieces of the detector. Keeping up with Hollywood, the whole thing takes on an extra dimension with a pair of 3D glasses.

AVION takes the tour of CERN underground. Image courtesy of Neng Xu

AVION is designed to operate in a Web browser from any part of the world. Xu and Pequenao have visions of interactive games in the future in which players can build ATLAS and do their own physics analysis. And since the Unity engine is free online, the source files will be available to anyone who wants to download them, allowing users to modify AVION and create their own virtual CERN world.

“Add dinosaurs if you want,” said Xu.

Both he and Pequenao see AVION as a potentially valuable education tool for students and the public. “If you really have to build ATLAS, you will learn a lot,” Xu said.

The team expects AVION will be revealed to the world in the coming months via the ATLAS website.

Amy Dusto

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CERN, Ars Electronica introduce artist-in-residency program

September 8, 2011 | 2:22 pm

Ars Electronica Center. Image: Nicolas Ferrando, Lois Lammerhuber

Scientists from dozens of countries and cultures mingle at CERN, home to the Large Hadron Collider. Last weekend, the laboratory announced plans to introduce a new element into the mix: artists.

CERN and international cyberarts organization Ars Electronica will partner for the next three years to offer one part of CERN’s new multidisciplinary artist-in-residency program, Collide@CERN. They announced Collide@CERN at the ceremony for the Prix Ars Electronica, the Oscars of the digital media arts world, held this year in Brucknerhaus Concert Hall in Linz, Austria.

The digital artist who wins the Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN prize will spend two months at CERN developing a project and one month working with the Ars Electronica Futurelab team to realize it. A committee of judges will choose one artist per year for three years.

Each artist will pair with a scientist at CERN. The two will meet every week and will document their experiences in a blog hosted on the Ars Electronica website. Ars Electronica will provide the prize money, while two private individual donors will fund the grant for the residency including travel and subsistence. UNIQA Assurances SA Switzerland will provide insurance.

The program is the brainchild of Ariane Koek, winner of a Clore Fellowship for cultural leadership. Koek, a former BBC producer, was serving as director of The Arvon Foundation for Creative Writing, which runs 140 residencies a year in the UK, when the award from the Clore Leadership Program gave her the chance to develop a new project. She was offered positions in New York, London and Canada, but she turned them down in favor of forging a new path.

Koek said she found inspiration during the course of a bike ride to the British library. She was thinking about what made her stand out from others in the arts. “I said to myself, ‘What makes you weird?’” she said. “I’ve got a really nerdy interest in science.”

She knew CERN was performing cutting-edge research in particle physics. Where better to create a partnership with those doing cutting-edge work in the arts?

“I can’t think of anywhere more exciting on earth to come,” Koek said.

Members of CERN management supported Koek, voting unanimously in favor of her idea to create a new cultural policy at the laboratory. “Science underpins much of modern society and has an influence on the everyday lives of all of us,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “As such, it’s important for scientific organizations like CERN to engage with society on many levels, and for us, Collide@CERN is an important element of that engagement.”

To truly embed the arts program at CERN, Koek organized a board made up of renowned cultural leaders from across the CERN host states: Beatrix Ruf, director of the Kuntsthalle Zurich contemporary art exhibition center; Serge Dorny, director general of the Lyon Opera House; Franck Madlener, director of the IRCAM music institute in Paris. CERN scientist Michael Doser will represent the laboratory, and Christoph Bollman of art fair ArtbyGeneve will represent nearby Geneva. The board members will serve free of charge for three years.

For his part, Doser hopes to translate his experience evaluating scientific proposals to evaluating artistic ones. “Both endeavors [art and science] require a mix of creativity and hard-headedness,” he wrote in an email. “Gently encourage vague thoughts as they first start forming, and then, when they’ve had a chance to gel, subject them to the harsh light of intellect.”

The digital arts section of the Collide@CERN program will accept applications between Sept. 15 and Oct. 31 on the Ars Electronic website. Applicants are asked to submit a personal video testimony, to pitch an idea for a new project, and to turn in a production plan and a portfolio of work. A five-person jury including two representatives from both CERN and Ars Technica and one outside judge will choose the winner in November. That same month the next section of the Collide@CERN program will be announced — this one in dance and performance.

Kathryn Grim

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Physicist tapes together particle data

August 23, 2011 | 8:00 am

Magnetic tape, the transformative medium that made it possible for 1990s teenagers to commit carefully curated pop songs to cassettes and present them like audio billets-doux to their crushes, has long been superannuated by hard drives. Getting a mix from Pandora just isn’t the same.

Selex on exhibit at the Chicago Art Department. Selex is made from 400 data storage tapes from Fermilab’s charmed baryon experiment Selex. It’s part of the exhibit Tape: A Celebration. Image: Chicago Art Department

The difference in sensibility is just as true for physics experiments.

As homage to tape and physics, MIT postdoctoral associate Teppei Katori, who works at Fermilab, created the art piece Selex. Named for a fixed-target charmed baryon experiment that ran in Fermilab’s Tevatron from 1996-97, Selex is part of the exhibit Tape: A Celebration currently showing at the Chicago Art Department in the city’s Pilsen neighborhood.

“It’s the only digital tape piece in the exhibit,” Katori says, noting that the exhibit’s other dozen or so pieces are related to analog tape. “There are no analog tapes in particle physics. I’m a bit biracial.”

In Selex, Katori’s intent is to capture the sharpness and precision needed in science data, creating clean lines and stark contrast using 400 actual data storage tapes from the Selex experiment.

These black, 8-millimeter digital tape cassettes, affixed at their short sides to a white paper background, spell out the word ‘SELEX’. The background is photocopied pages of the 2005 Physical Review Letters paper on Selex’s most highly cited discovery. Suspended from the ceiling by chains, the piece also comprises more tapes lying flat on the floor beneath it, forming a rectangular carpet of cassettes.

In physics experiments today, data tapes are stored in and accessed at remote computing farms. Out of experimenters’ sight, they are also almost always out of mind. But in the bygone era recalled by Selex, tapes were at scientists’ fingertips. Katori’s piece is a nostalgic recollection of that immediacy.

It’s also a nod to early digitization, Katori says. Because the word SELEX is formed from discrete cassettes rather than, say, a continuous unreeled strip, it calls to mind the formation of lettering such as that from a dot matrix. And because these cassettes are jumbo-sized dots, it also recalls the style of a pastime that has come a long way over the decades:

“It’s like the classic video games where the graphics are made of huge dots, like Super Mario Bros.,” Katori says. “It’s like it’s made from a low number of bits.”

The Selex tapes, though, are anything but low-bit. Each small cassette contains 5 gigabytes of data, not too shabby considering how big your average 5-gig drive would have been in 1997. The Selex experiment required 3,000 of them to store its data.

Selex scientists were on the hunt for charmed baryons, particles made of three quarks and including at least one charm quark.

“These things are hard to make and hard to see – they’re heavier than two-quark mesons and you don’t get as many,” says Fermilab’s Peter Cooper, deputy spokesperson for Selex. With more than 120 scientists from 20 institutions in 10 different countries working on Selex, researchers gathered enough information over the two-year lifetime of Selex to describe the mass, lifetime, decay modes and other basic properties of charmed baryons such as _C and _C.

The cover of Physical Review Letters, volume 89, number 11, featured an event that demonstrated the discovery by Selex scientists of the double-charmed baryon.

“There’s a whole list of physics questions associated with the heavy family of the proton and neutron,” Cooper says. Protons and neutrons, themselves baryons, are available in nature. Other baryons have to be made in the laboratory. The Selex finding that made the cover of Physical Review Letters was the discovery of the double-charmed baryon _cc⁺.

“No one had ever seen it before,” he says.

And without tape, particles wouldn’t be seen at all.

With Selex, Katori celebrates an important experiment in particle physics history and the medium that made it and many other science discoveries possible.

As for any concern for the fate of data now enshrined in Selex, it all lives in a more permanent place. For older physics experiments such as Selex, once the data on outmoded storage materials is transferred to modern hardware, the usual life cycle of these materials concludes either at a recycling plant or in a neglected box. For the lives of Selex tapes, it was the latter. The particular tapes for Katori’s work were those that contained backup data, and were in Cooper’s possession when Katori set out to create Selex. As the tapes were the sole property of Selex, it was decided that they be recycled in an artistic matter rather than undergoing the unseemly and less artistic fate of a shredder.

If you’re in the Chicago area, you can visit the Chicago Art Department to view Katori’s Selex and other tributes to tape. View photos of works in the exhibit.

Leah Hesla

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Particle Physics Photowalk Exhibits Open Around the Globe

February 10, 2011 | 1:21 pm

First there was the Photowalk. Next up was the competition. Then came the calendar, and now there are the exhibits.

This image of the 8Pi nuclear-physics experiment at TRIUMF won first place in the global jury competition. The muted black and white image of the 8Pi experiment's inner detectors captures the symmetry of physics. (Photo: Mikey Enriquez)

Starting Feb. 11, photography exhibits will open in Asia, Europe and North America to showcase images from the first Global Particle Physics Photowalk. Exhibits will open on Feb. 11 at CERN in Switzerland, Fermilab in Illinois and KEK in Japan. Photowalk exhibits will also open in Canada at TRIUMF on Feb. 21 and in Germany, organized by DESY, within the next year.

The Photowalk took place on Aug. 7, 2010. More than 200 amateur photographers received special behind-the-scenes access to tour scientific facilities at CERN, DESY, Fermilab, KEK and TRIUMF.  The participating photographers submitted thousands of photos for local and global competitions. Each photowalk exhibit includes the local winners from that particular laboratory’s competition. All five Photowalk exhibits feature the two global winners, Mikey Enriquez’s photograph of the 8Pi experiment at TRIUMF and Hans-Peter Hildebrandt’s photograph of a wire chamber at DESY.

The InterAction Collaboration, whose members represent particle physics laboratories in Asia, North America and Europe, organized the Photowalk. The collaboration plans to host the next Photowalk in 2012.

To find a Photowalk exhibit near you, visit http://www.interactions.org/cms/?pid=1030491

View the press release

Elizabeth Clements

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