In his first few months on the job, CERN Director-General Rolf-Dieter Heuer opens new lines of communication, oversees repairs to the Large Hadron Collider, and promotes a worldwide strategy for particle physics based on a strong mix of global, regional, and national projects.
Particle physics feels like a different enterprise compared with one year ago. Rapid scientific progress and a new budget scenario have enlivened the field.
"When questions arise about how the Higgs boson connects to buying another bag of groceries, we need to pay attention, because our fellow tax-paying citizens are the ones who pay the bills for US particle physics. They have a right to know what they are getting."
The real world of Angels & Demons; CMS digs Roman history; sand and silence in Morocco; carpenters carve an ATLAS; battle of the buzzer at SLAC; what's in your office?
A summary of recent stories, published weekdays, in symmetry breaking, www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/
American scientists are flocking to the Beijing Electron Positron Collider, whose recent upgrades make it the premier place to study charm quarks and their kin.
In the swirling sea of thousands of people who contribute to a major particle physics experiment, how can a young physicist pop to the surface and get noticed? An international committee offers ideas.
A physicist sketches science in the style of Leonardo da Vinci.
Sixteen elementary types of particles form the basis for the theoretical framework known as the Standard Model of fundamental particles and forces. Here is a brief summary of 15 Nobel Prize-winning discoveries closely connected to the development of that model.
"In August 2008 I built my summer vacation around a trip to CERN, the European high-energy physics laboratory near Geneva."
James Van Allen barely had time to savor the launch of America's first satellite, Explorer I, on January 31, 1958, when NASA scientists told him the Geiger tube cosmic-ray detector his team had built for the mission wasn't working.
The charm quark is one of six quarks that, along with leptons, form the basic building blocks of ordinary matter. It is hundreds of times more massive than the up and down quarks that make up protons and neutrons.
Scientists can feel like they are swimming in a sea of names in modern
collaborations of more than 1000 physicists, where you're just one on a
very long A-to-Z list of authors on published results. So how can individuals
be recognized for their efforts and distinguished from others when
it comes to promotion and tenure decisions? See story.
Photo-illustration: Sandbox Studio;
Photos: Reidar Hahn, Fermilab
May 2007
A 1169-page treatise documents the development and design of the two-mile-long accelerator operated by Stanford University....
Mar 2007
Dark matter is, mildly speaking, a very strange form of matter. Although it has mass, it does not interact with everyday objects and it passes straight through our bodies...