symmetry - Archive: Logbook

Archive: Logbook


2010

	Strong Focusing Aug 2010 In the summer of 1952, physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory began brainstorming ways to improve accelerator design. Ernest Courant came up with the idea of “strong focusing,” which dramatically increased accelerator power and put today’s enormous machines within practical reach...	CERN Touch Screen Jun 2010 On March 11, 1972, CERN engineer Bent Stumpe proposed a new type of interactive computer display for controlling the lab’s new Super Proton Synchrotron accelerator. It was apparently the world’s first capacitive touch screen, a technology now widely used in ticket machines and smart phones...

	Nobel Meeting Apr 2010 At the 12th annual Nobel Laureate Meeting at Lindau in June 1962, journalist Friedrich Katscher collected a trove of autographs from physics luminaries, some of whom were meeting each other for the first time. It was a giddy experience...	Neutrino Oscillation Feb 2010 In June 1998, the Super-Kamiokande collaboration revealed its eagerly anticipated results on neutrino interactions at the Neutrino '98 conference in Japan. They presented strong evidence that three known types of neutrinos apparently transform into each other, a phenomenon known as oscillation...
2009

	The Shortest Report Dec 2009 On April 28, 1947, Stanford Linear Accelerator Project Report No. 7 announced the realization of a dream 15 years in the making: the linear acceleration of electrons. The report was four words long...	Antiproton Discovery Oct 2009 Anticipating Twitter by five decades, physicist Clyde Wiegand placed a blackboard near the Bevatron’s entrance and posted daily updates on the group’s progress...

	Weak Neutral Current Aug 2009 The Gargamelle collaboration at the European laboratory CERN began operating its bubble chamber in the early 1970s. This picture, taken in 1972, caught the attention of scientists of the analysis group in Aachen, Germany...	Pierre Auger Observatory Jul 2009 In 1991, James Cronin traveled to Leeds, England, to visit Alan Watson, an expert on cosmic-ray physics. Cronin, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, was eager to see the construction of a large array of detectors...

	Earth's Radiation Belts May 2009 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...	Violating Parity Mar 2009 This doodle pad was used by Columbia researcher Tsung-Dao (T.D.) Lee during twice-weekly meetings with Chen Ning (Frank) Yang in 1956. The two theoretical physicists wanted...
2008

	Superconducting Magnets Dec 2008 Today’s particle accelerators and MRI machines wouldn’t exist without superconducting electromagnets. The road to the first patent for this technology took nearly six decades...	LHC startup Nov 2008 On September 10, 2008, scientists at the European laboratory CERN attempted for the first time to send a beam of particles around a new particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider...

	Contraterrene Matter Sep 2008 "Collision Orbit," published in July 1942, was among the first science fiction stories to explore contraterrene matter, today better known as antimatter...	Z Boson Aug 2008 In May 1983, physicists working on the UA1 detector for the Super Proton Synchrotron accelerator at CERN made the first definitive observations of the Z boson...

	The Nuclear Force Mar/Apr 2008 On November 1, 1934, at the age of 27, Hideki Yukawa began to write the first draft of an article that would earn him the 1949 Nobel Prize in Physics...	W Boson Jan/Feb 2008 In August 1982, Margaret Thatcher, then prime minister of the United Kingdom, paid a private visit to the European laboratory CERN. Four months later...
2007

	CMS cosmic challenge Dec 2007 Scientists working on the Compact Muon Solenoid test the detector using particles that rain down from space.	Dark Energy Oct/Nov 2007 In fall 1997, the High-z Supernova Search Team calculated the mass of the universe and discovered that the universe was expanding faster and faster. How could that be?

	HERA Start-up Sep 2007 On October 19, 1991, at 6:50 p.m., Bjørn Wiik logged the first collisions in the new electron-proton particle collider at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron in Hamburg.	Plutonium Aug 2007 By March 1941, Glenn Seaborg’s group had isolated one form of plutonium and was going after another—Pu-239...

	First Users' Meeting Jun/Jul 2007 In 1967, 400 scientists met to discuss plans to build a new 200 GeV accelerator and a national laboratory to house it.	SLAC Bluebook May 2007 A 1169-page treatise documents the development and design of the two-mile-long accelerator operated by Stanford University.

	PET Mice Apr 2007 Thirty years ago, researchers illuminated mice from the inside out. Today the technique is a cornerstone of medical imaging.	Neutrino Invention Mar 2007 Wolfgang Pauli, at age 30, had a bold idea on how to solve a perplexing problem in nuclear physics...

	Single Top Production Jan/Feb 2007 In 1985, ten years before scientists at Fermilab discovered the top quark, Scott Willenbrock was a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin...
2006

	'Dirty Bubble Chamber' Dec 2006 ...a particle detector he'd developed and called a "bubble chamber." Glaser's detector was a small glass container...	Cosmic Microwave Background Oct/Nov 2006 John Mather and George Smoot shared the 2006 Nobel Prize for experiments on board of the COBE satellite. It took Mather’s experiment only nine minutes to record enough data to confirm the big-bang theory.

	Particle Data Book Sep 2006 This year, the Particle Data Group celebrates its 50th anniversary with a release of a 1230-page edition of the Review of Particle Physics.	First Thoughts of the LHC Aug 2006 The minutes of the CERN Scientific Policy Committee meeting held on June 18-19, 1979, are the CERN archives' first documented mention of the Large Hadron Collider.

	First Vertex Detector Jun/Jul 2006 The Mark II collaboration operated the first collider vertex detector in 1981. Today, these devices—now using silicon technology–are the centerpieces of high-energy collider experiments around the world.	K2K’s First Neutrinos May 2006 In 1999, scientists in Japan observed the first signal of a muon neutrino that traveled 250 kilometers from the KEK laboratory in Tsukuba to a neutrino detector in Kamioka.

	Tevatron Record Apr 2006 CERN’s director-general congratulated Fermilab by telex when the Tevatron accelerator set a world record for beam energy on July 3, 1983.	First Z at SLC Mar 2006 Roger Erickson kept a daily BITnet journal, documenting the first Z boson created by the Stanford Linear Collider.

	Supernova 1987A Feb 2006 The Kamiokande II experiment caught neutrinos from a supernova before telescopes first saw its light.

2005

	Cosmic Rays Dec 2005/Jan 2006 Enrico Fermi's notebook of December 1948 contains the genesis of his theory of cosmic rays.	Inventing the Web Nov 2005 In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a memo with the title "Information Management: A Proposal," the blueprint of the Web.

	Bottom Quark Oct 2005 A memo written at Fermilab in November 1976 hinted at the observation of a new particle. Six months later, the discovery was real.	J/Ψ particle Sep 2005 A sharp peak in the number of quark-composed particles observed in 1974 was evidence of the J/Ψ particle.

	Gluon Discovery Aug 2005 An internal note of the TASSO collaboration at DESY documents the first observation of the gluon in 1979.	Extra Dimensions Jun/Jul 2005 Groundbreaking papers by Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum reinvigorated theoretical exploration of extra dimensions.

	Solar Neutrinos May 2005 Ray Davis' experiments in a gold mine led him to solve the solar neutrino puzzle and win the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics.	Distant Quasar Apr 2005 Scientists of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey find evidence for the most distant quasar yet discovered.

	Top Quark Mar 2005 Fermilab's CDF and DZero collaborations discovered the top quark 10 years ago.	Special Relativity Feb 2005 A handwritten page from 1912 is the earliest known Albert Einstein manuscript on special relativity still to exist.

2004

	Inflation Dec 2004/Jan 2005 A page of Alan Guth's 1978 notebook documents what might have been one of the greatest Eureka moments in cosmology.	Tau Lepton Oct/Nov 2004 From the 1977 notebook of Martin Perl, handwritten evidence of one of the more elusive Standard Model particles.