Try lecturing the excitement of subatomic particle discovery to physics students, and you might inspire several future physicists. Lecture physics to a layperson, and you might get a completely different response. Not everyone is excited about particle physics by listening to lectures alone. Sometimes video games can help. 

Exographer, the brainchild of Raphael Granier de Cassagnac (CERN Courier March/April 2025 p48), puts you in the shoes of an investigator in a world where scientists are fascinated by what their planet is made of, and have made a barrage of apparatus to investigate it. Your role is to traverse through this beautiful realm and solve puzzles that may lead to future discoveries, encountering frustration and excitement along the way.

The puzzles are neither nerve-racking nor too difficult, but solving each one brings immense satisfaction, much like the joy of discoveries in particle physics. These eureka moments make up for the hundreds of times when you fell to your death because you forgot to use the item that could have saved you.

The most important part of the game is taking pictures, particularly inside particle detectors. These reveal the tracks of particles, reminiscent of Feynman diagrams. It’s your job to figure out what particles leave these tracks. Is it a known particle? Is it new? Can we add it to our collection?

I am sure that the readers of CERN Courier will be familiar with particle discoveries throughout the past century, but as a particle physicist I still found awe and joy in rediscovering them whilst playing the game. It feels like walking through a museum, with each apparatus you encounter more sophisticated than the last. The game also hides an immensely intriguing lore of scientists from our own world. Curious gamers who spend extra time unravelling these stories are rewarded with various achievements.

All in all, this game is a nice introduction to the world of particle-physics discovery – an enjoyable puzzle/platformer game you should try, regardless of whether or not you are a physicist. 

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“ELISA gives people who visit CERN a chance to really see how the LHC works,” says Science Gateway’s project leader Patrick Geeraert. “This gives visitors a unique experience: they can actually see a proton beam in real time. It then means they can begin to conceptualise the experiments we do at CERN.”

The model accelerator is inspired by a component of LINAC 4 – the first stage in the chain of accelerators used to prepare beams of protons for experiments at the LHC. Hydrogen is injected into a low-pressure chamber and ionised; a one-metre-long RF cavity accelerates the protons to 2 MeV, which then pass through a thin vacuum-sealed window. In dim light, the protons in the air ionise the gas molecules, producing visible light, allowing members of the public to see the beam’s progress before their very eyes (see “Accelerating education” figure).

ELISA – the Experimental Linac for Surface Analysis – will also be used to analyse the composition of cultural artefacts, geological samples and objects brought in by members of the public. This is an established application of low-energy proton accelerators: for example, a particle accelerator is hidden 15 m below the famous glass pyramids of the Louvre in Paris, though it is almost 40 m long and not freely accessible to the public.

“The proton-beam technique is very effective because it has higher sensitivity and lower backgrounds than electron beams,” explains applied physicist and lead designer Serge Mathot. “You can also perform the analysis in the ambient air, instead of in a vacuum, making it more flexible and better suited to fragile objects.”

For ELISA’s first experiment, researchers from the Australian Nuclear Science Technology Organisation and from Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum have proposed a joint research project about the optimisation of ELISA’s analysis of paint samples designed to mimic ancient cave art. The ultimate goal is to work towards a portable accelerator that can be taken to regions of the world that don’t have access to proton beams.

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Space Oddities takes readers on a journey through the mysteries of modern physics, from the smallest subatomic particles to the vast expanse of stars and space. Harry Cliff – an experimental particle physicist at Cambridge University – unravels some of the most perplexing anomalies challenging the Standard Model (SM), with behind-the-scenes scoops from eight different experiments. The most intriguing stories concern lepton universality and the magnetic moment of the muon.

Theoretical predictions have demonstrated an extremely precise value for the muon’s magnetic moment, experimentally verified to an astonishing 11 significant figures. Over the last few years, however, experimental measurements have suggested a slight discrepancy – the devil lying in the 12th digit. 2021 measurements at Fermilab disagreed with theory predictions at 4σ. Not enough to cause a “scientific earthquake”, as Cliff puts it, but enough to suggest that new physics might be at play.

Just as everything seemed to be edging towards a new discovery, Cliff introduces the “villains” of the piece. Groundbreaking lattice–QCD predictions from the Budapest–Marseille–Wuppertal collaboration were published on the same day as a new measurement from Fermilab. If correct, these would destroy the anomaly by contradicting the data-driven theory consensus. (“Yeah, bullshit,” said one experimentalist to Cliff when put to him that the timing wasn’t intended to steal the experiment’s thunder.) The situation is still unresolved, though many new theoretical predictions have been made and a new theoretical consensus is imminent (see “Do muons wobble faster than expected“). Regardless of the outcome, Cliff emphasises that this research will pave the way for future discoveries, and none of it should be taken for granted – even if the anomaly disappears.

“One of the challenging aspects of being part of a large international project is that your colleagues are both collaborators and competitors,” Cliff notes. “When it comes to analysing the data with the ultimate goal of making discoveries, each research group will fight to claim ownership of the most interesting topics.”

This spirit of spurring collaborator- competitors on to greater heights of precision is echoed throughout Cliff’s own experience of working in the LHCb collaboration, where he studies “lepton universality”. All three lepton flavours – electron, muon and tau – should interact almost identically, except for small differences due to their masses. However, over the past decade several experimental results suggested that this theory might not hold in B-meson decays, where muons seemed to be appearing less frequently than electrons. If confirmed, this would point to physics beyond the SM.

Having been involved himself in a complementary but less sensitive analy­sis of B-meson decay channels involving strange quarks, Cliff recalls the emotional rollercoaster experienced by some of the key protagonists: the “RK” team from Imperial College London. After a year of rigorous testing, RK unblinded a sanity check of their new computational toolkit: a reanalysis of the prior measurement that yielded a perfectly consistent R value of 0.72 with an uncertainty of about 0.08, upholding a 3σ discrepancy. Now was the time to put the data collected since then through the same pasta machine: if it agreed, the tension between the SM and their overall measurement would cross the 5σ threshold. After an anxious wait while the numbers were crunched, the team received the results for the new data: 0.93 with an uncertainty of 0.09.

“Dreams of a major discovery evaporated in an instant,” recalls Cliff. “Anyone who saw the RK team in the CERN cafeteria that day could read the result from their faces.” The lead on the RK team, Mitesh Patel, told Cliff that they felt “emotionally train wrecked”.

One day we might make the right mistake and escape the claustrophobic clutches of the SM

With both results combined, the ratio averaged out to 0.85 ± 0.06, just shy of 3σ away from unity. While the experimentalists were deflated, Cliff notes that for theorists this result may have been more exciting than the initial anomaly, as it was easier to explain using new particles or forces. “It was as if we were spying the footprints of a great, unknown beast as it crashed about in a dark jungle,” writes Cliff.

Space Oddities is a great defence of irrepressible experimentation. Even “failed” anomalies are far from useless: if they evaporate, the effort required to investigate them pushes the boundaries of experimental precision, enhances collaboration between scientists across the world, and refines theoretical frameworks. Through retellings and interviews, Cliff helps the public experience the excitement of near breakthroughs, the heartbreak of failed experiments, and the dynamic interactions between theoretical and experimental physicists. Thwarting myths that physicists are cold, calculating figures working in isolation, Cliff sheds light on a community driven by curiosity, ambition and (healthy) competition. His book is a story of hope that one day we might make the right mistake and escape the claustrophobic clutches of the SM.

“I’ve learned so much from my mistakes,” read a poster above Cliff’s undergraduate tutor’s desk. “I think I’ll make another.”

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Schwinger lined us up in his office, and spent several hours assigning thesis subjects. It was a remarkable performance. I was the last in line. Having run out of well-defined thesis problems, he explained to me that weak and electromagnetic interactions share two remarkable features: both are vectorial and both display aspects of universality. Schwinger suggested that I create a unified theory of the two interactions – an electroweak synthesis. How I was to do this he did not say, aside from slyly hinting at the Yang–Mills gauge theory.

By the summer of 1958, I had convinced myself that weak and electromagnetic interactions might be described by a badly broken gauge theory, and Schwinger that I deserved a PhD. I had hoped to partly spend a postdoctoral fellowship in Moscow at the invitation of the recent Russian Nobel laureate Igor Tamm, and sought to visit Niels Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen while awaiting my Soviet visa. With Bohr’s enthusiastic consent, I boarded the SS Île de France with my friend Jack Schnepps. Following a memorable and luxurious crossing – one of the great ship’s last – Jack drove south to Padova to work with Milla Baldo-Ceolin’s emulsion group in Padova, and I took the slow train north to Copenhagen. Thankfully, my Soviet visa never arrived. I found the SU(2) × U(1) structure of the electroweak model in the spring of 1960 at Bohr’s famous institute at Blegsdamvej 19, and wrote the paper that would earn my share of the 1979 Nobel Prize.

We called the new quark flavour “charm”, completing two weak doublets of quarks to match two weak doublets of leptons, and establishing lepton–quark symmetry, which holds to this day

A year earlier, in 1959, Augusto Gamba, Bob Marshak and Susumo Okubo had proposed lepton–hadron symmetry, which regarded protons, neutrons and lambda hyperons as the building blocks of all hadrons, to match the three known leptons at the time: neutrinos, electrons and muons. The idea was falsified by the discovery of a second neutrino in 1962, and superseded in 1964 by the invention of fractionally charged hadron constituents, first by George Zweig and André Petermann, and then decisively by Murray Gell-Mann with his three flavours of quarks. Later in 1964, while on sabbatical in Copenhagen, James Bjorken and I realised that lepton–hadron symmetry could be revived simply by adding a fourth quark flavour to Gell-Mann’s three. We called the new quark flavour “charm”, completing two weak doublets of quarks to match two weak doublets of leptons, and establishing lepton–quark symmetry, which holds to this day.

Annus mirabilis

1964 was a remarkable year. In addition to the invention of quarks, Nick Samios spotted the triply strange Ω^– baryon, and Oscar Greenberg devised what became the critical notion of colour. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson stumbled on the cosmic microwave background radiation. James Cronin, Val Fitch and others discovered CP violation. Robert Brout, François Englert, Peter Higgs and others invented spontaneously broken non-Abelian gauge theories. And to top off the year, Abdus Salam rediscovered and published my SU(2) × U(1) model, after I had more-or-less abandoned electroweak thoughts due to four seemingly intractable problems.

Much to my surprise and delight, all of them would be solved within just a few years, with the last theoretical obstacle removed by Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa in 1973 (see “Four intractable problems” panel). A few months later, Paul Musset announced that CERN’s Gargamelle detector had won the race to detect weak neutral-current interactions, giving the electroweak model the status of a predictive theory. Remarkably, the year had begun with Gell-Mann, Harald Fritzsch and Heinrich Leutwyler proposing QCD, and David Gross, Frank Wilczek and David Politzer showing it to be asymptotically free. The Standard Model of particle physics was born.

Charmed findings

But where were the charmed quarks? Early on Monday morning on 11 November, 1974, I was awakened by a phone call from Sam Ting, who asked me to come to his MIT office as soon as possible. He and Ulrich Becker were waiting for me impatiently. They showed me an amazingly sharp resonance. Could it be a vector meson like the ρ or ω and be so narrow, or was it something quite different? I hopped in my car and drove to Harvard, where my colleagues Alvaro de Rújula and Howard Georgi excitedly regaled me about the Californian side of the story. A few days later, experimenters in Frascati confirmed the BNL–SLAC discovery, and de Rújula and I submitted our paper “Is Bound Charm Found?” – one of two papers on the J/ψ discovery printed in Physical Review Letters on 5 July 1965 that would prove to be correct. Among five false papers was one written by my beloved mentor, Julian Schwinger.

The second correct paper was by Tom Appelquist and David Politzer. Well before that November, they had realised (without publishing) that bound states of a charmed quark and its antiquark lying below the charm threshold would be exceptionally narrow due the asymptotic freedom of QCD. De Rújula suggested to them that such a system be called charmonium in an analogy with positronium. His term made it into the dictionary. Shortly afterward, the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics was jointly awarded to Burton Richter and Sam Ting for “their pioneering work in the discovery of a heavy elementary particle of a new kind” – evidence that charm was not yet a universally accepted explanation. Over the next few years, experimenters worked hard to confirm the predictions of theorists at Harvard and Cornell by detecting and measuring the masses, spins and transitions among the eight sub-threshold charmonium states. Later on, they would do the same for 14 relatively narrow states of bottomonium.

Other experimenters were searching for particles containing just one charmed quark or antiquark. In our 1975 paper “Hadron Masses in a Gauge Theory”, de Rújula, Georgi and I included predictions of the masses of several not-yet-discovered charmed mesons and baryons. The first claim to have detected charmed particles was made in 1975 by Robert Palmer and Nick Samios at Brookhaven, again with a bubble-chamber event. It seemed to show a cascade decay process in which one charmed baryon decays into another charmed baryon, which itself decays. The measured masses of both of the charmed baryons were in excellent agreement with our predictions. Though the claim was not widely accepted, I believe to this day that Samios and Palmer were the first to detect charmed particles.

The SLAC electron–positron collider, operating well above charm threshold, was certainly producing charmed particles copiously. Why were they not being detected? I recall attending a conference in Wisconsin that was largely dedicated to this question. On the flight home, I met my old friend Gerson Goldhaber, who had been struggling unsuccessfully to find them. I think I convinced him to try a bit harder. A couple of weeks later in 1976, Goldhaber and François Pierre succeeded. My role in charm physics had come to a happy ending. 

• This article is adapted from a presentation given at the Institute of High-Energy Physics in Beijing on 20 October 2024 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the J/ψ.

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Ten years ago, Zhang helped organise the first CERN Webfest, a hackathon that explores creative uses of technology for science and society. Webfest helped Zhang develop his coding skills and knowledge of physics by applying it to something beyond his own discipline. He also made long-lasting connections with teammates, who were from different academic backgrounds and all over the world. After participating in more hackathons, Zhang’s growing “hacker spirit” inspired him to start his own company. In 2024 Zhang returned to Webfest not as a participant, but as the CEO of DoraHacks.

Hackathons are social coding events often spanning multiple days. They are inclusive and open – no academic institution or corporate backing is required – making them accessible to a diverse range of talented individuals. Participants work in teams, pooling their skills to tackle technical problems through software, hardware or a business plan for a new product. Physicists, computer scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs all bring their strengths to the table. Young scientists can pursue work that may not fit within typical research structures, develop their skills, and build portfolios and professional networks.

“If you’re really passionate about some­thing, you should be able to jump on a project and work on it,” says Zhang. “You shouldn’t need to be associated with a university or have a PhD to pursue it.”

For early-career researchers, hackathons offer more than just technical challenges. They provide an alternative entry point into research and industry, bridging the gap between academia and real-world applications. University-run hackathons often attract corporate sponsors, giving them the budget to rent out stadiums with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of attendees.

“These large-scale hackathons really capture the attention of headhunters and mentors from industry,” explains Zhang. “They see the events as a recruitment pool. It can be a really effective way to advance careers and speak to representatives of big companies, as well as enhancing your coding skills.”

In the 2010s, weekend hackathons served as Zhang’s stepping stone into entrepreneurship. “I used to sit in the computer-science common room and work on my hacks. That’s how I met most of my friends,” recalled Zhang. “But later I realised that to build something great, I had to effectively organise people and capital. So I started to skip my computer-science classes and sneak into the business classrooms.” Zhang would hide in the back row of the business lectures, plotting his plan towards entrepreneurship. He networked with peers to evaluate different business models each day. “It was fun to combine our knowledge of engineering and business theory,” he added. “It made the journey a lot less stressful.”

But the transition from science to entrepreneurship was hard. “At the start you must learn and do everything yourself. The good thing is you’re exposed to lots of new skills and new people, but you also have to force yourself to do things you’re not usually good at.”

This is a dilemma many entrepreneurs face: whether to learn new skills from scratch, or to find business partners and delegate tasks. But finding trustworthy business partners is not always easy, and making the wrong decision can hinder the start up’s progress. That’s why planning the company’s vision and mission from the start is so important.

“The solution is actually pretty straight forward,” says Zhang. “You need to spend more time completing the important milestones yourself, to ensure you have a feasible product. Once you make the business plan and vision clear, you get support from everywhere.”

Decentralised community governance

Rather than hackathon participants competing for a week before abandoning their code, Zhang started DoraHacks to give teams from all over the world a chance to turn their ideas into fully developed products. “I want hackathons to be more than a recruitment tool,” he explains. “They should foster open-source development and decentralised community governance. Today, a hacker from Tanzania can collaborate virtually with a team in the US, and teams gain support to develop real products. This helps make tech fields much more diverse and accessible.”

Zhang’s company enables this by reducing logistical costs for organisers and providing funding mechanisms for participants, making hackathons accessible to aspiring researchers beyond academic institutions. As the community expands, new doors open for young scientists at the start of their careers.

“The business model is changing,” says Zhang. Hackathons are becoming fundamental to emerging technologies, particularly in areas like quantum computing, blockchain and AI, which often start out open source. “There will be a major shift in the process of product creation. Instead of building products in isolation, new technologies rely on platforms and infrastructure where hackers can contribute.”

Today, hackathons aren’t just about coding or networking – they’re about pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, creating meaningful solutions and launching new career paths. They act as incubators for ideas with lasting impact. Zhang wants to help these ideas become reality. “The future of innovation is collaborative and open source,” he says. “The old world relies on corporations building moats around closed-source technology, which is inefficient and inaccessible. The new world is centred around open platform technology, where people can build on top of old projects. This collaborative spirit is what makes the hacker movement so important.”

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The longer I work in science, and the more people I talk to about science, the more I become convinced that everyone is interested in science whether they realise it or not. Many have emerged from their school education with a belief that science is hard and not for them, but they nevertheless ask the very same questions that those at the cutting edge of fundamental physics research ask, and that people have been asking since time immemorial: what is the universe made of, where did we come from and where are we going? Such curiosity is part of what it is to be human. On a more prosaic level, science and technology play an ever-growing role in modern society, and it is incumbent on all of us to understand its consequences and engage on the debate about its uses.

The power to inspire

When I tell people about CERN, more often than not their eyes light up with excitement and they want to know more. Experiences like this show that the scientific community needs to do all it can to engage with society at large in a fast-changing world. We need to bring people closer to an understanding of science, of how science works and why critical evidence-based thinking is vital in every walk of life, not only in science.

Laboratories like CERN are extraordinary places where people from all over the world come together to explore nature’s mysteries. I believe that when we come together like this, we have the power to inspire and an obligation to use this power to address the critical challenge of public engagement in science and technology. CERN has always taken this responsibility seriously. Ten years ago, it added a new string to its bow in the form of the CERN & Society Foundation. Through philanthropy, the foundation spreads CERN’s spirit of scientific curiosity.

The CERN & Society Foundation helps the laboratory to deepen its impact beyond the core mission of fundamental physics research. Projects supported by the foundation encourage talented young people from around the globe to follow STEM careers, catalyse innovation for the benefit of all, and inspire wide and diverse audiences. From training high-school teachers to producing medical isotopes, donors’ generosity brings research excellence to all corners of society.

The foundation’s work rests on three pillars: education and outreach, innovation and knowledge exchange, and culture and creativity. Allow me to highlight one example from each pillar that I particularly like.

One of the flagships of the education and outreach pillar is the Beamline for Schools (BL4S) competition. Launched in 2014, BL4S invites groups of high-school students from around the world to submit a proposal for an experiment at CERN. The winning teams are invited to come to CERN to carry out their experiment under expert supervision from CERN scientists. More recently, the DESY laboratory has joined the programme and also welcomes high-school groups to work on a beamline there. Project proposals have ranged from fundamental physics to projects aimed at enabling cosmic-ray tomography of the pyramids by measuring muon transmission through limestone (see “Inside pyramids, underneath glaciers“). To date, some 20,000 students have taken part in the competition, with 25 winning teams coming to CERN or DESY to carry out their experiments (see “From blackboard to beamline“).

Zenodo is a great example of the innovation and knowledge-exchange pillar. It provides a repository for free and easy access to research results, data and analy­sis code, thereby promoting the ideal of open science, which is at the very heart of scientific progress. Zenodo taps into CERN’s long-standing tradition and know-how in sharing and preserving scientific knowledge for the benefit of all. The scientific community can now store data in a non-commercial environment, freely available for society at large. Zenodo goes far beyond high-energy physics and played an important role during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mutual inspiration

Our flagship culture-and-creativity initiative is the world-leading Arts at CERN programme, which recognises the creativity inherent in both the arts and the sciences, and harnesses them to generate benefits for both. Participating artists and scientists find mutual inspiration, going on to inspire audiences around the world.

“In an era where society needs science more than ever, inspiring new generations to believe in their dreams and giving them the tools and space to change the world is essential,” said one donor recently. It is encouraging to hear such sentiments, and there’s no doubt that the CERN & Society Foundation should feel satisfied with its first decade. Through the examples I have cited above, and many more that I have not mentioned, the foundation has made a tangible difference. It is, however, but one voice. Scientists and scientific organisations in prominent positions should take inspiration from the foundation: the world needs more ambassadors for science. On that note, all that remains is for me to say happy birthday, CERN & Society Foundation.

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High-school physics curricula don’t include much particle physics. The Beamline for Schools (BL4S) competition seeks to remedy this by offering high-school students the chance to turn CERN or DESY into their own laboratory. Since 2014, more than 20,000 students from 2750 teams in 108 countries have competed in BL4S, with 25 winning teams coming to the labs to perform experiments they planned from blackboard to beamline. Though, at 10 years old, the competition is still young, multiple career trajectories have already been influenced, with the impact radiating out into participants’ communities of origin.

For Hiroki Kozuki, a member of a winning team from Switzerland in 2020, learning the fundamentals of particle physics while constructing his team’s project proposal was what first sparked his interest in the subject.

“Our mentor gave us after-school classes on particle physics, fundamentals, quantum mechanics and special relativity,” says Kozuki. “I really felt as though there was so much more depth to physics. I still remember this one lecture where he taught us about the fundamental forces and quarks… It’s like he just pulled the tablecloth out from under my feet. I thought: nature is so much more beautiful when I see all these mechanisms underneath it that I didn’t know existed. That’s the moment where I got hooked on particle physics.” Kozuki will soon graduate from Imperial College London, and hopes to pursue a career in research.

Sabrina Giorgetti, from an Italian team, tells a similar story. “I can say confidently that the reason I chose physics for my bachelor’s, master’s and PhD was because of this experience.” One of the competition’s earliest winners from back in 2015, Giorgetti is now working on the CMS experiment for her PhD. One of her most memorable experiences from BL4S was getting to know the other winning team, who were from South Africa. This solidified her decision to pursue a career in academia.

“You really feel like you can reach out and collaborate with people all over the world, which is something I find truly amazing,” she says. “Now it’s even more international than it was nine years ago. I learnt at BL4S that if you’re interested in research at a place like CERN, it’s not only about physics. It may look like that from the outside, but it’s also engineering, IT and science communication – it’s a very broad world.”

The power of collaboration

As well as getting hands-on with the equipment, one of the primary aims of BL4S is to encourage students to collaborate in a way they wouldn’t in a typical high-school context. While physics experiments in school are usually conducted in pairs, BL4S allows students to work in larger teams, as is common in professional and research environments. The competition provides the chance to explore uncharted territory, rather than repeating timeworn experiments in school.

2023 winner Isabella Vesely from the US is now majoring in physics, electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Alongside trying to fix their experiment prior to running it on the beamline, her most impactful memories involve collaborating with the other winning team from Pakistan. “We overcame so many challenges with collaboration,” explains Vesely. “They were from a completely different background to us, and it was very cool to talk to them about the experiment, our shared interest in physics and get to know each other personally. I’m still in touch with them now.”

One fellow 2023 winner is just down the road at Harvard. Zohaib Abbas, a member of the winning Pakistan team that year, is now majoring in physics. “In Pakistan, there weren’t any physical laboratories, so nothing was hands-on and all the physics was theoretical,” he says, recalling his shock at the US team’s technical skills, which included 3D printing and coding. After his education, Abbas wants to bring some of this knowledge back to Pakistan in the hopes of growing the physics community in his hometown. “After I got into BL4S, there have been hundreds of people in Pakistan who have been reaching out to me because they didn’t know about this opportunity. I think that BL4S is doing a really great job at exposing people to particle physics.”

All of the students recalled the significant challenge of ensuring the functionality of their instruments across one of CERN’s or DESY’s beamlines. While the project seemed a daunting task at first, the participants enjoyed following the process from start to finish, from the initial idea through to the data collection and analysis.

“It was really exciting to see the whole process in such a short timescale,” said Vesely. “It’s pretty complicated seeing all the work that’s already been done at these experiments, so it’s really cool to contribute a small piece of data and integrate that with everything else.”

Kozuki concurs. Though only he went on to study physics, with teammates branching off into subjects ranging from mathematics to law and medicine, they still plan to get together and take another crack at the data they compiled in 2020. “We want to take another look and see if we find anything we didn’t see before. These projects go on far beyond those two weeks, and the team that you worked with are forever connected.”

For Kozuki, it’s all about collaboration. “I want to be in a field where everyone shares this fundamental desire to crack open some mysteries about the universe. I think that this incremental contribution to science is a very noble motivation. It’s one I really felt when working at CERN. Everyone is genuinely so excited to do their work, and it’s such an encouraging environment. I learnt so much about particle physics, the accelerators and the detectors, but I think those are somewhat secondary compared to the interpersonal connections I developed at BL4S. These are the sorts of international collaborations that accelerate science, and it’s something I want to be a part of.”

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Simone Ragoni is passionate about outreach. His Instagram page, quarktastic, has more than 10 thousand followers, and is one of the very few that successfully makes particle physics and academia relatable. He wrote Become a Particle Physicist in Eight Simple Moves while completing his PhD on the ALICE experiment. The first move is to sip his favourite beverage: coffee.

As a social-media manager and communicator, I’ve been following Ragoni for years. His main tool is humour. And I’m proof it works. I will always remember the basic structure of a proton, because life is indeed full of “ups” and “downs”.

Did I say gentle humour? Nah. Ragoni goes all the way. But he confesses that his humour can only be understood by a handful of people. Particle physics is esoteric – and readers will want to join the club. His book invites you into the world of a young particle physicist. Being a nerd is the new cool.

A highlight is when Ragoni describes how to keep those distributions fit. If you know, you know. There is a pun here and the author explains it very well. He next turns to the tedious work that goes into publishing a paper. “Monte Carlo simulations are our real playground,” he writes, “where we unleash all our fantasy, the perfect world where everything is nice.” But particle physicists are cautious. Five sigma is needed to claim a discovery – a one in 3.5 million chance of being wrong. The author concludes with encouragement to make your own measurements using CERN’s open data.

Ragoni’s book is a delightful gift for anyone whom you want to inspire to become a particle physicist of tomorrow or simply to convey the excitement of what you do, with a quirky bonus of being presented bilingually in English and Italian, should you be keen on improving your physics vocab in one of those languages. It is a gateway to the captivating world of particle physics, skilfully blending humour with profound insights, and inspiring readers to explore further and consider joining the ranks of future particle physicists.

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Some time ago, British Columbia removed provincial examinations, giving teachers a bit more freedom to make additions to their curricula. I chose to insert small one- or two-day units throughout the year, which give my students multiple exposure to modern physics topics. These short introductions over a two-year period mean that physics students don’t need to know all the fine details, which decreases their stress and concerns.

Knowledge sharing

Physics teachers are lucky to have access to high-quality professional development via workshops run by CERN, LIGO, the Perimeter Institute (which produces excellent resources for use in physics classes) and others. These often-week-long events give teachers an overview of how a given research facility works, in the hope that they will bring that knowledge back to their students. Along the way, the teachers attend lectures from leading researchers and see first-hand careers in the field that they can bring back to share with their class.

I have been fortunate enough to attend workshops at these facilities. I have also taken part in a research experience at SNOLAB, brought students on tours of TRIUMF and mentored my students as they conducted research at the Canadian Light Source. All these experiences have given me the knowledge and confidence to introduce the facilities and the work done at them to my students in a way that hopefully piques their curiosity.

The pieces provide a starting point for conversations around what these decommissioned parts were used for and the kind of science they supported

While at CERN for the 2019 international teacher programme, I had the opportunity to visit both the CMS and ALICE detectors and to attend lectures from renowned particle physicists. We spent time in S’Cool LAB and visited many of the behind-the-scenes parts of CERN. While all of these experiences left an imprint on my teaching, it was during quiet visits to what was then called the Microcosm garden – which hosts decommissioned pieces of accelerators and detectors as a form of art – that helped transform the physical space in my classroom.

In 2022 my school in British Columbia renovated a large, old classroom to become our new physics lab. Knowing that I had more space to work with than before, I was inspired to start building my own version of the Microcosm garden on my classroom walls. I soon connected with the outreach team at TRIUMF who were excited to help get my project started with a photomultiplier tube, a control panel from a xenon-gas handling system, a paddle scintillator and a light guide. Since then, I have added a Lucas cell from SNOLAB, a piece of the electron gun from the Canadian Light Source and, most recently, a small-strip half-gap prototype from the New Small Wheel upgrade of the ATLAS detector. The pieces provide a starting point for conversations with students around what these decommissioned parts were used for, and the kind of science they supported.

Equipped with some knowledge of what modern research in the field looks like, I have successfully built a system where I am able to inspire students to want to study physics. Since attending my first major workshop in 2018, I have seen an increase in the number of students entering physics majors. Some of them have already gone on to internships at CERN and TRIUMF, after getting their first exposure to these organisations in my classes. My hope is that by having pieces of the facilities I talk about displayed on my classroom walls, this will further inspire more of my students to want to learn about them, possibly setting them on paths to careers in physics.

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New Challenges and Opportunities in Physics Education presents itself as a guidebook for high-school physics educators who are navigating modern challenges in physics education. But whether you’re teaching the next generation of physicists, exploring the particles of the universe, or simply interested in the evolution of physics education, this book promises valuable insights. It doesn’t aim to cater to all equally, but rather to offer a spark of inspiration to a broad spectrum of readers.

The book is structured in two distinctive sections on modern physics topics and the latest information and communication technologies (ICTs) for classrooms. The editors bring together a diverse blend of expertise in modern physics, physics education and interdisciplinary approaches. Marilena Streit-Bianchi and Walter Bonivento are well known names in high-energy physics, with long and successful careers at CERN. In parallel, Marisa Michelini and Matteo Tuveri are pushing the limits of physics education with modern educational approaches and contemporary topics. All four are committed to making physics education engaging and relevant to today’s students.

The first part presents the core concepts of contemporary physics through a variety of narrative techniques, from historical recounting to imaginary dialogues, providing educators with a toolbox of resources to engage students in various learning scenarios. Does the teacher want to “flip the classroom” and assign some reading? They can read about the scientific contributions of Enrico Fermi by Salvatore Esposito. Does the teacher want to encourage discussions? Mariano Cadoni and Mauro Dorato have got their back with a unique piece “Gravity between Physics and Philosophy”, which can support interdisciplinary classroom discussions.

The second half of the book starts with an overview of ICT resources and classical physics examples on how to use them in a classroom setting. The authors then explore the skills that teachers and students need to effectively use ICTs. The transition to ICT feels a bit too long, and the book struggles to weave the two sections into a cohesive narrative, but the second half nevertheless captures the title of the book perfectly – ICTs are the epitome of new opportunities in physics education. While much has been said about them in other works, this book offers a cherry-picked but well rounded collection of ideas for enhancing educational experiences.

The authors not only emphasise modern physics and technology, but also another a very important characteristic of modern science: collaboration. This is an important message that we need to convey to students, as mere historical examples from classical physics sometimes show an elitist view of physics. Lone-genius narratives are often explicitly transitioned to a collaborative understanding of breakthroughs.

The book would not be complete without input from actual teachers. One notable contribution is by Michael Gregory, a particle-physics educator who shares his experiences with distance learning together with Steve Goldfarb, the former IPPOG co-chair. During the pandemic, he used online tools to convey physics concepts not only to his own students, but to students and teachers around the world. As such, his successful virtual science camps and online particle-physics courses reached frequently overlooked  audiences in remote locations.

Overall, New Challenges and Opportunities in Physics Education emerges as a valuable resource for a diverse audience. It is a guidebook for educators searching for innovative strategies to spice up their physics teachings or to better weave modern science into their lessons. Although it might fall short of flawlessly joining the modern-physics content with educational elements in the second half, its value is undeniable. The first part, in particular, serves as a treasure trove not only for educators but also for science communicators and even particle physicists seeking to engage with the public, using the common ground of high-school physics knowledge.

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This book provides a rich glimpse into written science communication throughout a century that introduced many new and abstract concepts in physics. It begins with Einstein’s 1905 paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”, in which he introduced special relativity. Atypically, the paper starts with a thought experiment that helps the reader follow a complex and novel physical mechanism. Authors Harmon and Gross analyse and explain the terminological text and bring further perspective by adding comments made by other scientists or science writers during that time. They follow this analysis style throughout the book, covering science from the smallest to the largest scales and addressing the controversies surrounding atomic weapons.

The only exception from written evaluations of scientific papers is the chapter “Astronomical value”, in which the authors revisit the times of great astronomers such as Galileo Galilei or the Herschel siblings William and Caroline. Even back then, researchers were in need of sponsors and supporters to fund their research. In Galilei’s case, he regularly presented his findings to the Medici family and fuelled fascination in his patrons so that he was able to continue his work.

While writing the book, Gross, a rhetoric and communications professor, died unexpectedly, leaving Harmon, a science writer and editor at Argonne National Laboratory in communications, to complete the work.

While somewhat repetitive in style, readers can pick a topic from the contents and see how scientists and communicators interacted with their audiences. While in-depth scientific knowledge is not required, the book is best targeted at those familiar with the basics of physics who want to gain new perspectives on some of the most important breakthroughs during the past century and beyond. Indeed, by casting well-known texts in a communication context, the book offers analogies and explanations that can be used by anyone involved in public engagement.

The post The Many Voices of Modern Physics appeared first on CERN Courier.

We look at the importance of reaching out as far and wide as possible

The following articles of expert exposition and opinion lift the lid on CERN Science Gateway. In addition to hearing from the teams behind its content, we explore the broader issues surrounding the theory and practice of education, communication and outreach in particle physics – beginning with what these three terms mean today (From the cosmos to the classroom). Exploring the Gateway’s exhibition spaces, authors reflect on four stunning art installations (Beautiful minds collide), the secrets of success for an interactive exhibit (Interactive exhibits: theory and practice) and the simple power of objects (The power of objects). Following a deep-dive into the new educational labs (Hands on, minds on, goggles on!), learn about CERN’s physics-education research (Why research education?), the impact of its hugely popular teacher programmes (Inspiring the inspirers), and how particle physics is or is not integrated in school curricula (Particle physics in school curricula). From empowering children to aspire to science (Empowering children to aspire to science) to taking physics to festivals (Going where the crowd is), and transcending physical and neurological boundaries (Expanding the senses), three articles emphasise the importance of reaching out as far and wide as possible. Last but certainly not least, we consider the invaluable role played by physicists (Physicists go direct and Time for an upgrade) and weave the rich experiences of CERN guides throughout these articles. Feel inspired? Your nifty red Science Gateway vest awaits!

The post Education and outreach in particle physics appeared first on CERN Courier.

This book provides a rich glimpse into written science communication throughout a century that introduced many new and abstract concepts in physics. It begins with Einstein’s 1905 paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”, in which he introduced special relativity. Atypically, the paper starts with a thought experiment that helps the reader to follow a complex and novel physical mechanism. Authors Harmon and Gross analyse and explain the terminological text and bring further perspective by adding comments made from other scientists or science writers during the time. They follow this analysis style throughout the book, covering science from the smallest to the largest scales and addressing the controversies surrounding atomic weapons.

The only exception from written evaluations of scientific papers is the chapter “Astronomical value”, in which the authors revisit the times of great astronomers such as Galileo Galilei or the Herschel siblings William and Caroline. The authors show that, even back then researchers were in need of sponsors and supporters to fund their research. In Galilei’s case, he regularly presented his findings to the Medici family and fuelled fascination in his patrons so that he was able to continue his work.

While writing the book, Gross, a rhetoric and communications professor, died unexpectedly, leaving Harmon, a science writer and editor at Argonne National Laboratory in communications, to complete the work.

While somewhat repetitive in style, readers can pick a topic of interest from the table of contents and see how scientists and communicators interacted with their audiences. While in-depth scientific knowledge is not required, the book is best targeted at readers who are familiar with the basics of physics and who want to gain new perspectives on some of the most important breakthroughs during the past century and beyond. Indeed, by casting well-known texts in a communication context, the book offers analogies and explanations that can be used by anyone involved in public engagement.

The post The Many Voices of Modern Physics: Written Communication Practices of Key Discoveries appeared first on CERN Courier.

Think of it as a collection of short stories, organised in 12 chapters covering all ground from underlying theories and technologies to the limits of the Standard Model and ideas beyond it. The book begins with a gentle introduction to the world of particles and finishes by linking the infinitely small to the infinitely large. Each double-page spread within these chapters features a different topic in particle physics, its players, rules of play, tools, concepts and mysteries. Turn a page, and you find a new topic.

Among these 150 spreads, which are referred to as “articles” by the diverse team of authors, the reader can learn about neutrinos, lattice QCD, plasma acceleration, Feynman diagrams, multi-messenger astronomy and much more. Each one manages to convey both the fascination of the subject as well as all the central ideas and open questions within the two allocated pages. This makes for a great way of reading: the article about antimatter, for example, cross-references to the article about baryogenesis, so flip from page 18 to page 304 to dig deeper into the antimatter mystery. Not sure what a baryon is? Check the glossary, then maybe jump on the article about matter and antimatter, CP violation or symmetries. There is no need to read this book from cover to cover. On the contrary, browsing is so deeply embedded in its concept that it even features a flip-book illustration of a particle collision on the bottom right-hand-side of each spread. With a bit more care for captivating illustrations and graphic design, it could pass as a Dorling Kindersley-style travel guide to particle physics.

The authors, who are based at different universities and labs in Germany, have backgrounds covering theoretical and experimental particle physics, astro­particle physics, accelerator and nuclear physics, and science communication.  They have obviously put as much thought into this publication as they put in hours, because they manage to write about each topic in a way that is easy to follow, even if it’s hard to digest. Puns, comparisons to everyday life and drawings to accompany the articles make for a full browsing experience, and the references within the text and at the bottom of each page show how everything is connected deep down.

When I received Faszinierende Teilchenphysik for review, one of the authors jokingly accompanied it with the words “this book is meant for retired engineers and for aunts looking for a present for their science-student-to-be nieces.” That may well be the case, but this book’s target audience is much wider. Physics fans and amateurs will enjoy sinking their teeth into a new world of interlinked topics; undergraduates will value it as a quick reference source that is less obscure and more fun to read than Wikipedia; and physics professionals will find it a useful refresher for topics beyond their expertise. The book even dedicates its final article to those questioning whether it is worth spending money and brain power on tiny particles, ending with a passionate case for the many benefits of fundamental research – not just spin-offs such as tumour therapy or artificial intelligence, but in pushing boundaries of knowledge outward.

And if you’re afraid that your school German might let you down, don’t worry: the English edition is already in the works and due to come out in 2024.

The post Bite-sized travels in particle physics appeared first on CERN Courier.

Science education, communication and outreach have developed from different origins, at different times, and in response to diverse public needs. The formation of science education as a proper discipline, for example, dates back to educational reform movements in the late 19th century. Science communication, on the other hand, is a relatively young field that only took a clear form in the second half of the 20th century in response to a growing awareness of the role and impact of scientific progress.

While it is true that practitioners often cross the disciplinary boundaries of these fields, education, communication and outreach today represent distinct professions, each with its own identity, methods and target groups. Whereas science educators tend to focus on individual learners, often in school settings, public-outreach professionals aim to inspire interest in and engagement with science among the general public in out-of-school settings. Besides, the differences go beyond variations in target groups and domains. After all, the distinction between education and communication is substantial: many science journalists resist the suggestion that they serve a role in education, arguing that their primary goal is to provide information.

Questions then arise: how do these disciplines overlap, diverge and interact, and how have their practices evolved over time? And how do these evolutions affect our understanding of science and its place in society? As two academics whose career trajectories have spanned science, education and communication, we have experienced intersections and interactions between these fields up close and see exciting opportunities for the future of science engagement.

Magdalena: farewell to the deficit model

What stands out to me is the parallel development that science education and communication have undergone over the past decades. Despite their different origins, traditions, ideas, models and theories, all have seen a move away from simple one-way knowledge transmission to genuine and meaningful engagement with their respective target groups, whether that’s in a classroom, a public lecture or at a science festival.

In classrooms, there has been a noticeable shift from teacher-centred to student-centred instructional practices. In the past, science teachers used to be active (talking and explaining), while students were passive (listening). Today, the focus is the students and how to engage them actively in the learning process. A popular approach to engaging students is enquiry-based science education, where students take the lead (asking questions, formulating hypotheses, running experiments and drawing conclusions) and teachers act as facilitators.

Collaboration between science education researchers and practitioners is critical to improving science education

One excellent example of such an enquiry-based approach is Mission Gravity, an immersive virtual-reality (VR) programme for lower- and upper-secondary students (see “Mission gravity” image). Developed by the education and public outreach team at OzGrav, the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery, the programme aims to teach stellar evolution and scientific modelling by inviting students on a virtual field trip to nearby stars. The VR environment enables students to interact with stars, make measurements and investigate stellar remnants. By collecting data, forming hypotheses and trying to figure out how stars change over time, the students discover the laws of physics instead of merely hearing about them.

The shift towards student-centric education has been accompanied by an evolution in our understanding of student learning. Early-learning theories used to lean heavily on ideas of conditioning, treating learning as a predictable process that teachers could control through repetition and reinforcement. Contemporary models consider cognitive functions, including perception, problem-solving and imagination, and recognise the crucial role of social and cultural contexts in learning science. Nowadays, we acknowledge that education is most meaningful when students take responsibility for their learning and connect the subject matter to their own lives.

For instance, my PhD project on general-relativity education leveraged sociocultural learning theory to design an interactive learning environment, incorporating collaborative activities that encourage students to articulate and discuss physics concepts. This “talking physics” approach is great for fostering conceptual understanding in modern physics, and we refined the approach further through iterative trials with physics teachers to ensure an authentic learning experience. Again, collaboration between science education researchers and practitioners (in this case, physics teachers) is critical to improving science education.

Similarly, science communication has transitioned from deficit models to more dialogic and participatory ones. The earlier deficit models perceived society as lacking scientific understanding and envisaged a one-way flow of information from expert scientists to a passive audience – quite similar to the behaviourist approach prevalent in the early days of science education. Modern science communication practices foster a dialogue where scientists and the public engage in meaningful discussions. In particular, the participatory model positions scientists and the public as equal participants in an open conversation about science. Here, the interaction is as critical as the outcomes of the discussions. This places emphasis on the quality of communication and meaning-making, similar to what many consider the goals of good science education (see “Increasing interaction” figure).

To illustrate a participatory approach to science communication, consider the City-Lab: Galileo initiative in Zurich. This initiative integrates theatre, podcasts and direct interactions between scientists, actors and citizens to foster dynamic conversations about the role of science in society. A range of media and formats were employed to engage the public beyond traditional forms, ranging from audio-visual exhibits to experiences where the public could attend a play and then engage in a post-show discussion with scientists. By directly involving scientists and the public in such exchanges, City-Lab: Galileo invites everyone to shape a dialogue about science and society, underlining the shifting paradigms in science communication.

Urban: the power of semiotics

For me, a ground-breaking moment in how we communicate disciplinary knowledge came when I saw two astronomers in a coffee room discussing the evolution of a stellar cluster. They were using their hands to sign the so-called turn-off point in a Hertzsprung–Russell diagram in mid-air, indicating their individual perspective on the age of the cluster. These hand-wavings would most likely not mean anything to anyone outside the discipline and I was intrigued by how powerful communication using such semiotic resources can be. The conclusion is that communicating science does not just involve speech or text.

Particularly intriguing are the challenges students and others have with visualising the world in 3D and 4D from 2D input, for example in astronomical images, which I started to notice while teaching astronomy. How hard can it be to “see”, in one’s head, the 3D structure of a nebula (see “Nebulous” image) a galaxy or even the Sun–Earth–Moon system when looking at a 2D representation of it? It turns out to be very hard for most people. This led to an investigation of the ability of people to extrapolate 3D in their mind, which immediately raised another question: what do people actually “see” or discern when engaged in disciplinary communication, or when looking at the stunning images from the Hubble or Webb space telescopes? Nowadays this is referred to as disciplinary discernment in the literature.

Researching such questions relies on methods that are quite different from those used in the natural sciences. Often data exists in the form of transcripts of interviews, which are then read, coded and characterised for categories of discernment. In the case of spatial perception, this inductive process led to an anatomy of multidimensional discernment describing the different ways that the participants experience three-dimensionality in particular and disciplinary discernment in general. It also identified a deeper underlying challenge that all science learning depends upon: large and small spacetime scales. Spatial and temporal scales, in particular large and small, are identified as threshold concepts in science. As a result, the success of any teaching activity in schools, science centres and other outreach activities depends on how well students come to understand these scales. With very little currently known, there is much to explore.

As an educational researcher in physics, one has to be humbled by the great diversity of ideas about what it means and entails to teach and learn physics. However, I’ve come to appreciate a particular theoretical framework based on studies of the disciplinary communication in a special group in society: physicists. This, and indeed any group with the same interests, develops and shares a special way of communicating knowledge. In addition to highly specialised language, they use a whole setup of representations, tools and activities. These are often referred to as semiotic resources and are studied in a theoretical framework called social semiotics.

Social semiotics turns out to be a powerful way to study and analyse the disciplinary communication in physics and astronomy departments. I usually describe the framework as a jigsaw puzzle that we are still building. We have identified, and described in detail, certain pieces in this theory but there are more to explore. One such piece is embodiment and what the use of gestures means for communicating disciplinary knowledge, such as the hand-waving astronomers in the coffee room. It is similar to the theory-building processes in physics, where through empirical investigations physicists try to construct a solid theory for how nature works.

Joint conclusion

Understanding how we think about and communicate physics is as interesting and challenging as physics itself. We believe that they are inseparable, and as we explore the landscape of physics to understand the universe we are also exploring the human mind and how we can understand the universe. Physicists too have to be able to communicate with and engage other physicists. The scientific process of publishing research is an excellent example of how challenging this can be: researchers must convince their colleagues around the world that what they have found is correct, or else they fail. The history of science is full of such examples. For example, in the 1920s Swedish astronomer Knut Lundmark made observations of stars in distant galaxies and found that these galaxies seem to move away from us – in essence he had discovered the expansion of the universe. However, he was unable to convince (read: communicate this to) his colleagues, and a few years later Edwin Hubble did the same thing and made a more convincing case.

Finally, this article tries to shed light on the challenges in communicating physics to not just physicists but also students, and the public. The challenges are similar but at different levels, depending on the persons involved and engaged in this interchange of knowledge. What the physicist tries to communicate and what the audience discerns and ultimately learns about the universe are often two different things.

The post From the cosmos to the classroom appeared first on CERN Courier.

Like many of my colleagues, I have always devoted a significant fraction of my time to share my passion for the field with diverse audiences. Society funds our research, so we have a fundamental duty to report back about our discoveries, act as an advocate for science in general, and educate and inspire the next generation. Doing outreach is not only enjoyable but also a valuable exercise that forces you to look at your own work from an outside perspective and to adapt your story for different audiences. Given the collective responsibility of particle physicists for garnering societal support for fundamental science, one might expect the entire field to support individuals involved in outreach activities. Regrettably, this is not always the case.

A new programme at the Leiden Institute of Physics, in collaboration with colleagues from the science communication research group, is investigating how we approach physics communication. When studying our attitudes, certain “points of attention” become rapidly apparent.

Critical points

One concerns cultural appreciation and the role of the scientist. Outreach is often still perceived as something someone does in their spare time and not a valuable activity for “serious” scientists. Many young researchers are all too aware of this attitude, and given the limited number of permanent positions and the emphasis on leadership roles and scientific output for career advancement, outreach often gets reduced priority. This means we’re missing out on an enormous potential of energy and ideas to connect with society. It is important that scientists realise that good communication skills are indispensable for an academic career, which, after all, includes teaching and grant writing. While professional communicators do great work, it’s crucial that more physicists are directly involved as they inherently radiate their passion and drive.

A second point is public relations versus the role of science in society. While every country can simultaneously benefit from new discoveries, communication departments within universities and research institutes – including CERN – often struggle to move beyond the frame of public relations and the latest scientific breakthroughs. In doing so, there is an increasing tendency to project a polished image and to be too self-focused while neglecting opportunities to provide insights into laboratory life – including failure, which is an inevitable aspect of the scientific process – and the stories behind the publications.

Impact assessment is a third factor where we could do better. Despite the increasing encouragement from funding agencies to make societal engagement an integral component of research proposals, we frequently fall short when it comes to conducting impact assessments. While researchers invest years in writing academic papers and scrutinise collaborators for failing to cite the most recent articles, we seem perfectly happy to ignore the literature on science-communication research and input from experts when developing outreach initiatives. Moreover, owing to our lack of collective memory, we do not have a systematic way to learn from good and bad practices.

Last but not least, developing effective communication skills is also critical in peer-to-peer interactions. We don’t often talk about it openly, but it is remarkable how physicists perpetuate the poor quality of presentations and seemingly endless meetings, and how increasingly challenging it is to understand developments in other sub-fields. With proper attention given to our internal communication, we would all stand to benefit significantly.

A change in culture does not happen overnight. Nevertheless, given the ongoing discussions about the future of the field, for example about a future collider at CERN, it is vital that we develop a stronger, broader and especially more open science communication strategy. It should be centred around curiosity and the amazing people in our field, as that is how we can connect with society to start a dialogue, while at the same time finding ways to support and acknowledge the work of colleagues who engage in outreach activities. Particle physics is a wonderful adventure. Let’s make sure the world knows about it.

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Within the naturally lit expanse of the Exploring the Unknown exhibition at CERN Science Gateway, an artwork both intrigues and challenges: Julius von Bismarck’s Round About Four Dimensions, commonly referred to as the “tesseract”. As light interacts with its surfaces, the tesseract – a 3D representation of a 4D cube – unfolds and refolds, turning inside out in a hypnotic sequence that draws viewers into its rhythm (see “Round About Four Dimensions” image). This kinetic piece not only captivates with movement but also signifies the deep-rooted relationship between art and science.

Organised around themes of space and time, dark matter, and the quantum vacuum, the Exploring the Unknown exhibition becomes a meeting point, inviting spectators to dive into the collective curiosity of both artists and scientists. In particular it channels the imaginative spirit of CERN’s theoretical physicists, including Joachim Kopp, who remarked during an encounter with a visiting artist: “I try to visualise the maths. So, whenever I work on something, I need to have some pictures in my head, even when it’s mathematical concepts.” This sentiment illuminates the profound visual connection artists and scientists alike experience when confronted with complex ideas.

Rich dialogue

Born from the collaborative efforts between the Arts at CERN programme and the CERN exhibitions section, this display vividly encapsulates the synergy between art and science. By championing artist residencies, commissioning distinct art pieces and curating exhibitions, a rich dialogue is fostered between two seemingly distinct worlds. For the first time, Science Gateway will spotlight works born from residencies and commissions, proudly featuring creations from celebrated resident artists including Yunchul Kim, Chloé Delarue, Ryoji Ikeda and Julius von Bismarck.

Within CERN’s corridors, serendipitous dialogues emerge. An artist might gain fresh inspiration from a casual chat about the universe, looking at their work through a new lens. On the other hand, physicists can discover a fresh perspective on their familiar theories through the artist’s interpretation. As former CERN theorist Tevong You insightfully shared during one such discussion, “In the quantum world of particles and waves, there’s a beauty that artists instinctively grasp. They bring to life the equations we scribble on paper.”

The dialogue between diverse minds takes centre-stage at Science Gateway. Yunchul Kim harnesses the intricacies of fluid dynamics (see “Chroma VII” image), capturing space and time and the elusive nature of dark matter in his sculptures. Chloé Delarue crafts tangible experiences around the mystery and the uncertainty of the unknown (see “TAFAA” image), while the avant-garde audiovisual installations of Ryoji Ikeda breathe life into the elusive quantum vacuum (see “data.gram [n°4]” image). As artists immerse in these scientific domains, they unearth fresh inspiration and, in return, challenge scientists to see their own work through a different prism. This unconventional collaboration amplifies both fields: artists distill vast, abstract concepts into evocative forms, and scientists, inspired by this artistic partnership, discover enriched avenues through which to communicate their research.

Navigating the confluence of art and science is no straightforward journey. For every moment of synergy, there are hurdles to clear – terminology gaps, differing methodologies and the occasional skepticism from both sides. However, through the many interactions we’ve experienced between scientists and artists, it’s clear that these challenges can be overcome. Artists, through their residencies at CERN, have cultivated an understanding of complex scientific narratives. Conversely, CERN scientists have come to appreciate the evocative power of art, expanding beyond their traditional vocabulary. This endeavour is about building bridges, recognising the need for compromise, and ultimately celebrating the beauty that emerges when diverse worlds collide.

Finding equilibrium between artistic liberty and scientific truthfulness is also a delicate dance. In the vast realm of creativity, an artist might sometimes venture far from the core scientific concepts in their pursuit of artistic expression. In Exploring the Unknown, such balances are impressively maintained by von Bismarck’s tesseract and Ikeda’s audiovisual installation data.gram [n°4]. The exhibition shows that neither art’s freedom nor science’s precision need to be sacrificed; when approached with mutual respect, they can coexist, each enhancing the other’s message.

The post Beautiful minds collide appeared first on CERN Courier.

The 2020 update of the European strategy for particle physics couldn’t have put it better: “The particle-physics community should work with educators and relevant authorities to explore the adoption of basic knowledge of elementary particles and their interactions in the regular school curriculum”. The past decades have witnessed a heightened interest in introducing particle physics to high-school students. On top of the growing number of educational activities proposed in physics-education research literature, more and more high-school curricula explicitly include particle-physics topics. Yet, a big question lingers: what is the true extent of particle-physics representation in current high-school curricula?

In 2021, CERN physics-education researchers undertook a review encompassing 27 high-school physics curricula, spanning both CERN member and non-member states, to address this question. Each curriculum was analysed by at least two teachers from the CERN teacher programmes alumni network who are well acquainted with their respective curricula and the 28 particle-physics concepts on which the review was based (see “Standard Model” image). The review sought to identify existing trends and chart a roadmap for future curricular developments while also providing a benchmark for CERN’s outreach and educational initiatives.

Two types

The curricula included in the review can be split into two types depending on whether they contain any chapters that explicitly focus on particle-physics content. For the curricula with an explicit emphasis on particle physics (International Baccalaureate, Austria, Australia [Queensland], Croatia, Germany [Brandenburg], Israel, Russia, Switzerland [Nidwalden], Serbia, South Africa, Spain and the UK), the results show that more than half contain the following 10 particle-physics concepts (out of 28 included in the review): the Standard Model, electromagnetic interaction, strong interaction, weak interaction, quarks, leptons, interaction particles, antimatter research, general particle accelerators and open questions in particle physics.

For the curricula without any focus on particle physics (Brazil [São Paolo], Canada [Manitoba], Germany [Baden-Württemberg; Saxony], France, Ghana, Greece, Italy, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden and the US), only four particle-physics concepts (out of 28 included in the review) were found in more than half of them: the Big Bang, electromagnetic interaction, electric charge and leptons.

The great majority of the concepts that appeared in more than half of the reviewed curricula were classified as theoretical particle-physics concepts. On the other hand, experimental concepts were generally lacking. Indeed, only particle accelerators appeared in a notable number of curricula with a dedicated particle-physics chapter. Even then, particle accelerators mostly appeared as context within electromagnetism without being explicitly connected to particle physics. Particle detectors appeared even less often in the curricula. Some historical particle detectors, such as the Geiger–Müller counter, were occasionally featured within the context of radiation. However, state-of-the-art detectors such as the LHC experiments were conspicuously absent from all reviewed curricula.

Emphasising real-world experimental contexts, such as modern particle detectors and their applications across domains such as medicine and art, could enrich student learning and interest

This lack of the experimental aspects of physics in high-school physics curricula is not limited to particle physics. Excplicit examples of the importance and value of experiments in science is often absent in high-school curricula, showing physics as a set of solidified facts. Ultimately, this can lead to gaps in students’ understanding of the role of experiments in science. Indeed, the contemporary relevance and the blend of theory and experiments within particle physics can offer students a unique opportunity to learn about how real modern science is done and what is the nature of science. Furthermore, emphasising real-world experimental contexts, such as modern particle detectors and their applications across domains such as medicine and art, could enrich student learning and interest.

The connection between particle interactions and the charges that govern them represents another noticeable gap. While the idea of an electric charge is relatively common within discussions on electromagnetism, concepts such as strong and weak charge are conspicuously absent. This is intriguing, especially since the strong and weak interactions are mentioned in several curricula either within the particle-physics or the nuclear-physics chapters. Moreover, electric charge remains referred to merely as charge, which can lead to difficulties in understanding different types of charge down the line. Hence, introducing strong and weak charge can provide a more rounded understanding, even without delving into unnecessary mathematical interpretations. Such introductions could form foundational pillars for students aiming to move further into particle physics and its related domains.

What next?

Particle physics has unequivocally made its mark in high-school education. The consistent presence of certain foundational concepts – electromagnetic interaction, leptons and electric charge – across curricula signals a universal baseline. However, the road to a meaningful introduction of particle-physics concepts in high-school classrooms is still long.

The glaring gap in experimental particle physics underscores that there is an immediate area of focus for our outreach efforts. Bridging this gap will ensure that students gain a more well-rounded understanding, synergising theoretical knowledge with cutting-edge experimental practices.

In addition, a review of particle-physics vocabulary, both in the context of charges and beyond, could improve students’ overall understanding of particle physics. By using clear and consistent language, communicators and educators can help reduce possible misunderstandings in the future.

Finally, the narrative around particle physics can serve as more than just a lesson on subatomic particles. It can be a lens, magnifying the very process of science: its challenges, its dynamism and its unparalleled ability to shape and reshape our understanding of the universe. As curricula designers ponder the next iteration, one hopes that particle physics finds a more holistic representation. The next generation of physicists, scientists and curious minds deserve nothing less

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Irrespective of the topic, there is a basic recipe for making an interactive exhibit. Once the clear message the exhibit aims to convey has been identified, developers write a draft that sets up a scenario of visitor interaction and sketches how the exhibit may look. What will visitors see when they approach the exhibit? What can they do? Are there several ways in which it is possible to interact with the exhibit?

Model making

The next step is to make a prototype. Depending on the nature of the exhibit, it may be a “quick and dirty” mockup, a simple 3D model, a paper prototype, or even just a verbal description. Then, the prototype is tested with at least several members of the target audience. What do they conclude from their interaction with the exhibit and why? How enjoyable and interesting do they find it? How well does the exhibit convey its key message? Afterwards comes the design and building of the exhibit. This stage often involves a lot of technical testing – for example, when choosing the materials or trying to keep within the available budget. In addition, texts that accompany the exhibit need to be written and translated. When the (nearly) final version of the exhibit is ready, it is evaluated again with the target audience. How clear are the instructions and the gameplay? What needs to be changed in the exhibit and how exactly? The final step, if necessary, is to reiterate.

Visitors discover the phenomenon by going through the stages of the scientific method

In reality, however, the development process rarely turns out to be simply moving from one step to the next. Sometimes, the results of testing a prototype with the public show that the scenario needs to be rewritten completely, bringing developers back to where they started. In other cases, time or budgetary constraints force the team to merge some steps or even skip them entirely. Two Science Gateway exhibits illustrate the twists and turns of developing a state-of-the-art science exhibit.

The starting point for the antimatter-trap exhibit (see “Trial and error” image) was a real antimatter trap – an eye-catching piece of scientific equipment that is well suited to an interactive exhibit. Following several brainstorms with antimatter scientists, a PhD student who specialised in the design of interactive science-communication experiences, and who developed the exhibit scenario further, made a paper prototype. In this version of the exhibit, visitors first had to slow an antiproton down in a decelerator, and only after that shoot the antiproton into the trap. The trap had several parameters (for example, a magnetic field that could be switched on and off) that visitors could play with before injecting the antiproton into the decelerator. Depending on how the parameters had been set, the antiproton would fly through the trap, annihilate or become captured.

We then tested this prototype with six small groups of visitors at the CERN Microcosm exhibition and six groups of CERN members of personnel who did not have a background in science or technology. Results from the testing led to many changes. For example, we learnt that many people were confused about deceleration. We therefore removed this stage from the gameplay but kept the speed of the antiproton coming into the trap as one of the parameters. A bigger problem was the fact that visitors, most of whom had heard nothing about antimatter prior to their interaction with the exhibit, still did not understand anything about it after successfully trapping the antiproton. We were faced with a dilemma: should the main message of the exhibit be about the antimatter itself, or should the exhibit still focus on how the antimatter trap works? After a difficult consideration, we decided to stick to the latter, whilst ensuring the former is included elsewhere in the exhibition.

An updated version of the exhibit scenario was handed over to the multimedia company that had been contracted to develop the exhibit, and further tests were conducted with two classes of Italian middle-school students. Apart from some minor usability issues, the exhibit proved to be challenging yet engaging: students yelled proudly and happily high-fived their team members after managing to trap the antiproton. The exhibit was then improved further, eventually taking its current shape in Science Gateway’s “Back to the Big Bang” exhibition. This was also the moment to come back to the antimatter scientists who helped ensure that all the texts and drawings in the exhibit were correct.

Keep the heat out

The goal here was to come up with a hands-on exhibit that would allow Science Gateway visitors to discover what keeps the LHC superconducting magnets cold. Similar to the experience with the antimatter exhibit, we again worked side-by-side with a CERN scientist. The original plan was to recreate a real situation: place a cold source at the centre and cover it with layers of different insulation materials. Visitors would be able to open and close these layers, as well as create a vacuum. They would observe that when the cold source was shielded from the environment, it required less power consumption to stay cool. This idea looked very promising on paper, especially given that the exhibit would be integrated into a full-scale mockup of the LHC.

However, calculations showed that the effect would only become visible after approximately half an hour. While this may not seem like a deal-breaker, in this context it certainly is: visitors at science exhibitions expect immediate feedback and typically do not spend more than just a few minutes at each exhibit. Moreover, having a surface that is sufficiently colder that the environment leads to condensation, which would create difficulties for the technical maintenance of the exhibit.

Alternative ideas were needed. To avoid reinventing the wheel, we explored which exhibits on the topic already existed in other science centres and museums. Eventually we decided to focus on a very basic idea: certain materials block heat, other materials conduct it. Communicating this message required a plate heated to 45 °C (not so hot that visitors risk burning themselves, but still warm enough to see the effect), a bunch of conducting and insulating materials that come in different shapes and thicknesses, and an infrared camera. Lots of technical prototyping and testing allowed us to determine how thick the materials should be to ensure that the effect was both visible and revealed itself quickly enough for the exhibit to be interesting. As the reflective metallic surfaces produce incorrect readings on the infrared camera, all metal materials were painted black. Finally, to keep the link between the exhibit and the actual LHC insulation, key elements such as mylar, vacuum and minimal surface contact were incorporated.

In its final form, the exhibit enables open-ended exploration, such that visitors discover the phenomenon by going through the stages of the scientific method. First, visitors face a challenge: in the instructions accompanying the exhibit, they are invited to try shielding the heated plate from the infrared camera. Then, by picking a certain type of material, visitors form a hypothesis – “maybe this piece made of copper will do the job?” – and test it by placing the material on the plate. As the copper piece quickly reaches the same temperature as the heated plate, visitors observe it with the help of the infrared camera and conclude that copper is not a good choice. This leads to a new hypothesis, another material… and so on. Visitors are free to explore the exhibit as long as they want, and we hope that for many Science Gateway visitors this open exploration will culminate in the magical “aha!” moment – the reason why we developed all these interactive exhibits in the first place.

The post Interactive exhibits: theory and practice appeared first on CERN Courier.

CERN is well known for outreach, most recently via the switch-on of the LHC and the search for and discovery of the Higgs boson. It also trains thousands of people through a variety of student and graduate programmes, ranging from internships, studentships and fellowships to professional training, such as at the CERN Accelerator School, the CERN School of Computing, and several physics and instrumentation Schools. Less well known, perhaps, is CERN’s influential work in science education.

Growth initiatives

CERN offers many professional-development programmes for teachers (see Inspiring the inspirers), as well as dedicated experiment sessions at the former “S’Cool LAB” (reincarnated in the Science Gateway educational labs, see Hands on, minds on, goggles on!) and the highly popular Beamline for Schools competition. These efforts are also underpinned by an education-research programme that has seen seven PhD theses produced during the past five years as well as 82 published articles since the programme began in 2009. This is made possible by the significant contributions of doctoral students, who make up much of the team, and cooperation with their almae matres in CERN’s member states. In addition, CERN is the publisher of the multilingual international journal Progress in Science Education.

The question “what is science education?” probably has more answers than the number of science educators in Europe. Nevertheless, the nature of science – the scientific method itself, without which we could not formulate science correctly, reproducibly and understandably – is a basic principle. Teaching the nature of science as the basis and conveying scientific results as examples is widely regarded as the best way to inspire learners young and old, although methods vary. A frequently asked question in this respect is: what to educate?

The traditional answer, which will be familiar to people who went to school in the 1970s or earlier, is “pure knowledge”. Later, it was realised that “skills” were important, too. While both remain core to science curricula, “competencies” are now seen as an effective way to advance society. In terms of physics, key topics in this regard are education for sustainable development, quantum physics and its applications, radiation and artificial intelligence.

Fulfilling its mission, CERN strives to reach everyone with its education programmes. The CERN Science Gateway offers exhibitions, large education labs, as well as educational science shows for audiences aged five and above. Education is key to sustainability, and thus to society, so let’s all work together. The CERN team is open to your proposals!

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Over the past quarter-century, CERN’s teacher programmes have played a vital role in bridging the gap between particle physics and educators from across the globe. What started originally in 1998, when the first International High School Teacher Programme took place with a small group of teachers, has grown into one of CERN’s many success stories. Today, CERN’s teacher programmes run on an almost weekly basis, welcoming about 1000 teachers from more than 60 countries every year, which makes them one of the largest and most successful professional development offers for in-service high-school science teachers worldwide.

The vast bulk are week-long programmes for teachers from one country or from one language group, predominantly targeting teachers from CERN’s member states, associate member states and the occasional non-member state. In addition, two international teacher programmes take place every year in the summer, significantly broadening the reach. Each international teacher programme lasts two weeks and hosts up to 48 teachers from around the world. So far, about 14,500 teachers from 106 countries have participated in CERN’s national and international teacher programmes, and every year another 1000 teachers travel to CERN to attend lectures, on-site visits, hands-on workshops, discussions and Q&A sessions.

Multifaceted

Teacher programmes at CERN serve multiple purposes. First and foremost, they are professional development programmes that enable high-school teachers to keep up to date with the latest developments in particle physics and related areas, and to experience a dynamic, international research environment. As such, they answer the call to bring more modern science into the classroom, which goes hand in hand with a slow yet steadily increasing change in curriculum development (see Particle physics in school curricula). Second, teacher programmes are an acknowledgement of the critical role that teachers play in preparing the future of humanity. They inspire and empower teachers and, through them, their students. Last but not least, teacher programmes showcase the importance of science diplomacy – colloquially referred to as a soft power in the world of international relations. For instance, before joining CERN as associate member states, several countries already brought high-school teachers to CERN for dedicated national teacher programmes; these, in turn served as door-openers in the respective ministries and supported the country’s application to join CERN. The same is true for distant countries, with which CERN has no other connections than teachers who took part in one of the international teacher programmes.

High impact

But what about the impact of CERN’s teacher programmes? Is it possible to measure the effectiveness of such a variety of programmes and perform an evaluation that goes beyond documenting teachers’ feedback? Combined with anecdotal data from alumni teachers, who frequently return to CERN with their students or take part in other education activities such as the Beamline for Schools (BL4S) competition, and the fact that CERN’s teacher programmes are heavily overbooked, the overall picture is clear: teachers’ satisfaction with CERN’s teacher programmes is extremely high.

The overall picture is clear: teachers’ satisfaction with CERN’s teacher programmes is extremely high

To deepen the level of evaluation of CERN’s teacher programmes and to allow for further development in the future, in 2021 a multi-stakeholder study was performed to document and illustrate the goals of professional development programmes at particle-physics laboratories. This study led to a hierarchical list of the 10 most important learning goals, such as enhancing teachers’ knowledge of scientific concepts and models, and enhancing their knowledge of curricula, which now represent the baseline for future evaluations of teachers’ learning. Here, a large-scale study is currently ongoing to assess their knowledge in a pre-post setting by using concept maps. The aim of this approach is not only to study the learning progression throughout a teacher programme but also to support teachers in constructing meaningful mental models and knowledge structures, which are key indicators of successful educators. Indeed, CERN’s teacher programmes continue to serve as a prime testbed for the Organization’s physics-education research efforts, with one doctoral research project already successfully completed and a second on its way. Future research projects will aim to evaluate teachers’ use of their new knowledge and skills after their participation in CERN’s teacher programmes and consequently their students’ learning outcomes.

The most important dimension of CERN’s teacher programmes, however, is the social one. Over the past 25 years, teachers from different parts of the world have met at CERN, became friends and remained in touch with one another. This has led to several cross-border Erasmus projects, combined school events and even tri-national proposals for the BL4S competition.

Today, CERN’s teacher programmes are more popular than ever, with teachers from all around the world being more than eager to apply for one of the limited spots. One participant of this year’s International High School Teacher Programme even had to move his wedding date, which originally coincided with the programme dates. Luckily, his fiancée was understanding and not only agreed to the postponed date but also smiled when he put on his CERN helmet for the wedding picture.

The post Inspiring the inspirers appeared first on CERN Courier.

Opening the inauguration ceremony in the new 900-seat auditorium, CERN Director-General Fabiola Gianotti stressed the value of education and outreach: “Sharing CERN’s research and the beauty and utility of science with the public has always been a key objective and activity of CERN, and with Science Gateway we can expand significantly this component of our mission. We want to show the importance of fundamental research and its applications to society, infuse everyone who comes here with curiosity and a passion for science, and inspire young people to take up careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Science Gateway will be a place where scientists and the public can interact daily. For me, personally, it is a dream that has become a reality and I am deeply grateful to all the people who have contributed, starting with our generous donors.”

The overall cost of Science Gateway, about CHF 100 million, was funded exclusively through donations. Contributing CHF 45 million, the Stellantis Foundation is the largest single donor. The Fondation Hans Wilsdorf is also a major donor. The other donors are the LEGO Foundation, Loterie Romande, Ernst Göhner Stiftung, Rolex, Carla Fendi Foundation, Fondation Gelbert, Solvay, Fondation Meyrinoise du Casino and the town of Meyrin.

In his address, president of the Swiss Confederation Alain Berset said: “Those familiar with Venn diagrams will agree that this invisible circle puts CERN at the intersection between Switzerland, France and Europe, thus symbolising its commitment to shared scientific and political values. CERN truly is an exceptional facility and one that enables Switzerland and Geneva to shine on the world stage.”

Throughout the day, guided by CERN scientists and children of CERN personnel, visitors were able to experience first-hand the range of Science Gateway’s opportunities, from interactive exhibitions to laboratories for educational experiments and immersive spaces (see Education and outreach in particle physics). The new centre, which is free of charge and open six days a week (it is closed on Mondays), is expected to host up to 500,000 visitors a year from across the world. While the full project was launched in 2018, construction of the Science Gateway campus – designed by renowned architect Renzo Piano – took just over two years, with the first stone of the building being laid on 21 June 2021.

Speaking on behalf of CERN’s member and associate-member states, president of the CERN Council Eliezer Rabinovici said: “Today we celebrate the courage and passion to innovate that CERN has always demonstrated and the commitment to share the fruits of its research with people from all countries and of all ages. May the science leaders of tomorrow come from among the curious children who will fill this wonderful place with joy in the coming years.”

The post CERN Science Gateway inaugurated appeared first on CERN Courier.

September saw another important inauguration at CERN: that of the refurbished CERN library. Following 12 months of renovation work, on 28 September the library and bookshop welcomed users of the new spaces with a two-day event packed with activities and entertainment.

The library renovation project had two main goals. One was to lower the library’s carbon footprint using state-of-the-art cooling and ventilation, LED lights, the replacement of all windows and the renovation of the roof. The second aim was to improve the comfort of library users thanks to an optimised layout of the reading room, which is fitted out with modern, high-quality furniture and ergonomic workspaces. A first-stone ceremony was held in March during which a time capsule containing photos of the library through the years, personal messages from users and librarians, and a key holder that opened the old library desk, was sealed into the walls.

Designed by UK architects Bisset Adams, the new CERN library is accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Sixty new workplaces await users, and more than 16,000 books are available in open stacks with many more available upon request or as e-books. The library desk and bookshop are open from 09:00 to 18:00 during weekdays, and books can be borrowed outside these hours by emailing library.desk@cern.ch.

The post Open doors for open science appeared first on CERN Courier.

Guide since: October 2022
Position: Masters student for VITO at ISOLDE (User, University of Oldenburg)
Languages: German, English

One thing that makes being a CERN guide so interesting and exciting is the diversity of our visitors. You might have a super-interested 10 year-old, for whom the visit to CERN is his birthday present, or you could find yourself discussing the connection between Buddhism and the Higgs boson with a monk.

One visit that I remember vividly was with a group of Swiss–German retirees. All of the visitors were hard of hearing, with the majority of them being deaf. To facilitate communication they brought two sign-language translators with them. Before the start of the tour some of the visitors were concerned that their cochlear implants, which can restore some hearing, might be influenced by CERN’s equipment. Luckily, I studied medical physics and audiology before coming to CERN, so I was able to reassure them that everything will be fine. On that day we were showing the group the Synchrocyclotron and the ATLAS Visitor Centre. Communicating via the translators was something that was completely new for me, as I am sure terms such as muon spectrometer or superconducting magnet were to them. Due to the translation, it naturally took a few seconds longer than usual to see the audience’s reaction. In most cases, however, it was full of excitement and often more effusive than with a group of hearing visitors. Many questions were asked and a lot of photos were taken, later to be shown to their grandchildren.

Although the tour took much longer than planned, I do not regret a single second I got to spend with them. When the group finally left CERN, there was not only a bright smile on their faces but on mine as well. Engaging people in our research and making it accessible to everybody regardless of their background, age or impairments is something which to me is a vital part of CERN’s mission.

Imtiaz Ahmed

Guide since: 2013
Position: Electronics engineer at CMS (User, NCIP Estonia)
Languages: English

I’ve been guiding for nearly a decade, and during this time have had plenty of exciting tours. When I first started, I helped my supervisor as a translator. I joined her at the virtual CMS visits for Pakistani prisoners in a jail in Athens.

For in-person tours I like to take visitors to the Synchrocyclotron, ATLAS Visitor Centre, CERN Control Centre, SM18 (currently under renovation) and CMS. There they get a good overview of how accelerators and detectors work. One of the typical questions I get is about the power consumption of CERN.

Weekends are busy times. The visitors are always curious and come with many questions. Besides power consumption, they want to know about quantum computers, how data gets stored and handled, and the technologies that are used for electronics, vacuum, magnets and cryogenic cooling. Of course, the Higgs boson as well as future goals are always of interest, too. As we give guided tours in radiation surveillance areas, people also have questions about safety risks.

I like guiding very much. It is very rewarding to represent CERN in this way, especially when the visitors appreciate it with their compliments and applauds. The loveliest I heard was when a girl told me that she had taken a tour with me a few years before and that it had motivated her to become a CERN technical student.

David Amorim

Guide since: 2017
Position: Senior fellow for the Muon Collider study
Languages: French, English

In 2008, I had the great opportunity to undertake a one-week middle-school internship at CERN, during which I discovered the contagious passion for science and technology I saw in my supervisors. Today, it’s my turn to try and pass on that passion to everyone, especially young people.

Whether it’s showing visitors around the most iconic places at CERN or at events such as Science Night, I’ve been able to meet and talk to people of all ages and backgrounds. Many visitors initially feel that what is done at CERN and in physics research in general is too difficult to understand. However, after a few discussions and by making connections with everyday phenomena or objects, people become interested and grasp the value of such research, and often want to find out more or come back to CERN.

I also particularly enjoy guiding school classes and taking part in activities aimed at children. Whether it’s working with schools when their classes come to visit us, or taking part in science shows such as “Fun with Physics”, I always see a sense of wonder and a “wow” effect, not just in the children’s eyes but also those of the teachers and adults who accompany them.

Children are curious about everything and ask lots of questions about the world around them and how we study it. This requires that we, as guides, question ourselves and stay curious, because some questions, such as “How does the Higgs boson work?” are not easy to answer. This offers an opportunity to involve everyone: the group of children act as the Higgs field, their parents or teachers then try to make their way through while the kids can gently heckle the adults, giving the “particles” mass. Together they reconstruct the Higgs mechanism!

Being a guide at CERN brings a dimension to one’s work that I think is necessary to our profession: that of sparking curiosity. For example, I remember a 12-year-old girl from nearby Meyrin who told me that she wanted to understand the world around us by becoming a physicist and then go into politics to better protect it.

Hassnae El Jarrari

Guide since: October 2021
Position: CERN Research Fellow in Experimental Physics
Languages: English, French, Arabic

I became a CERN guide because I wanted to expand my knowledge beyond my research topic and to explore other experimental sites. Little did I know how much excitement and challenges await me each time I lead a group of visitors.

At CERN, the diverse range of visitors creates a unique cultural experience as people come from different backgrounds and with varying scientific interests. They are often curious to verify information they have heard about CERN in the media and elsewhere. However, language barriers can occasionally lead to amusing situations. For example, I once had a group of visitors who spoke neither English nor French, so I had to use my imagination to create a universal scientific language to guide them through the Synchrocyclotron and ATLAS Visitor Centre facilities.

Throughout my time as a CERN guide, I have had many unforgettable moments that have only deepened my appreciation for the work that we do. One experience that stands out is when I had the pleasure of meeting a five-year-old boy and his parents who were visiting for his birthday. Despite his young age, this child had an impressive understanding of particle physics and the activities taking place at CERN. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was one of those rare geniuses who start university at a young age. To my surprise, his parents informed me that they don’t have any physics books at home and that his knowledge has solely come from the internet. His enthusiasm for the subject was truly inspiring and I couldn’t help but think that I may have been in the presence of a future physicist.

Another vivid memory was when an American father approached me after his visit and asked if I could help him get in touch with his high-school daughter in the US. She was interested in physics but lacked a female role model to explore and pursue her passion. We are still exchanging emails whenever she needs guidance or information. Her father has even promised to bring her to CERN at the first opportunity.

I was also part of the ATLAS virtual visits and initiated a programme dedicated to Moroccan universities and high schools. These virtual visits proved to be an effective means of promoting not only the ATLAS experiment but also CERN’s overall activities to a wider audience, resulting in an increased number of Moroccan students and visitors at CERN.

Noemi Calace

Guide since: 2014
Position: ATLAS physicist (staff)
Languages: English, Italian, French

I have the honour of wearing two hats: that of a scientist and a guide. As a CERN physicist, I have long believed that one of my core missions is to contribute to raise awareness about the different activities and research projects carried out at CERN. By doing so, we dispel fear and create opportunities to educate people about the significance of scientific research.

Guiding young students, especially those from high school, is where my heart finds joy. When students interact with scientists at CERN, they often feel intimidated, perceiving them as superhuman figures. However, as their guide, I consistently receive comments expressing relief and surprise when they realise that scientists are just ordinary individuals like themselves. This relief often sparks a sense of confidence, which makes them realise that pursuing a career in science is within their reach – often at a crucial juncture in their education, having to decide which field of study to pursue. My impact may be just one jigsaw piece in their decision, yet, in some sense, I feel a certain level of responsibility for their future choices.

One heartfelt tale involved a girl who expressed her fear of pursuing research, believing it to be a field dominated by men. I told her stories of incredible women who have made significant contributions to science, and I shared with her my own experience: woman, mother, physicist. I saw her eyes glimmer with a fresh sense of hope and determination. Imagine my overwhelming joy when a few years later I received an email from her, revealing that she had started university in a scientific field and had a strong desire to pursue a PhD. She expressed how our conversation had ignited a fire within her, dispelling her doubts and fuelling her ambition.

These rich and fulfilling experiences as a guide at CERN not only underscore the significance of outreach but also serve as a rewarding testament to the impact of our efforts in nurturing young minds.

Dominique Bertola

Guide since: 1999
Position: Visits service operations manager (staff)
Languages: French, English

In 2015 I was contacted by the president of a local association, Les Enfants de la lune (“Moon children”), which helps families and children who suffer from a rare but serious and restrictive disease that forbids them from exposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation under risk of developing skin or eye cancer. The president wanted to organise a visit to CERN to show them science in a fun way if possible. I immediately responded, taking care to check with the medical service and colleagues from HSE that the site we were visiting offered no or very little UV light, and measuring UV levels in the main auditorium. Together with the visits service we were able to invite about 40 children accompanied by adults to the afternoon event. They arrived by bus, with windows protected by an anti-UV film, equipped with anti-UV suits, resembling astronaut masks and gloves. As soon as they disembarked, they were accompanied to the auditorium in which they were able to remove their suits and helmets in complete safety. I performed several demonstrations that delighted the youngest visitors (from age five) and their parents alike – especially when they were able to taste a few marshmallows immersed in liquid nitrogen! After being re-equipped, they toured the Synchrocyclotron, which is safe from UV exposure. When the visit was over, I met looks, smiles and the sparkling eyes of all these children.

During the following weeks I organised a meeting with physicists and engineers from CERN who proposed a hackathon to improve the daily lives of the children. This resulted in more efficient, lighter and better ventilated helmets at a much lower cost than existed on the market. The group also worked on a more sensitive and cheaper UV detector to help children know if they can safely remove their protective gear.

I received a message from the group soon after: “We would like to thank you again for this magnificent visit. We were able to feel your passion and enthusiasm for CERN. Very happy to visit CERN with such young children, discovering some aspects allowed us to understand how fantastic this place is. I can say the children of the Moon left with lots of stars in their eyes.”

The post Tales from CERN guides appeared first on CERN Courier.

Whether it is grasping the intricate workings of the Higgs mechanism, catching a glimpse of how gravitational waves propagate or contemplating the profound interconnectedness of these phenomena, fundamental physics awakes excitement in scientists and non-scientists alike. Curiosity and the endeavour to fulfil it transcends the constraints of physical, neurological and cultural boundaries, uniting us all in the pursuit of knowledge.

Yet, physics is inherently abstract, and the complex series of interconnected cause-and-effect reasoning is often not straightforward to grasp. The challenge becomes even more daunting when the audience does not share the visual or neurological setup typical to the majority. The main bottleneck is the traditional mode of visual physics communication, which relies mostly on 2D descriptions. We are all familiar with such examples: screens or slides full of overwhelming text with occasional images and graphs. Clearly, such descriptions are not accessible to the visually impaired. Moreover, they usually fall short of creating intuitive understanding, even in people with regular visual perception.

Tangible representations

The key to unlock accessibility is to broaden the number of dimensions and directions through which physics is communicated. Tactile models are the foremost example. They transform abstract concepts into tangible representations, offering a hands-on, immersive and engaging learning experience. The structures of complex entities such as an atom, a gravitational wave, an LHC detector and how particles interact with it are best “visualised” by “feeling” their 3D models. Yet, these are relatively concrete concepts that are straightforward to model. Much more fascinating is to extend this idea and build models to represent the workings of more abstract phenomena. For example: how are the LHC magnets cooled? How does wakefield acceleration work? How are particles reconstructed in a detector? And how does a data analysis searching for new particles progress? 

Designing models for these concepts requires more than simply adding an extra dimension to a visual representation. It involves discerning the core aspects of the physical concept that hold the most significance, simplifying them without diluting their essence, and weaving them into a tangible story – a story that takes into account the perception spectrum of the intended audience and aligns with their lived experiences. We can all share a part in this process: physicists, educators, accessibility experts and the target audience itself. Thanks to amazing improvements in 3D printing, realising the models is now much easier, which gives us the freedom to imagine and build with boundless creativity. 

Fresh perspectives

It is highly worthwhile for all of us to attempt this expansion of expression in what we are experts at. In the realm of accessibility initiatives, what proves beneficial for one audience usually translates into advantages for all. For instance, tactile content originally tailored for the visually impaired resonates with children who possess an innate curiosity for tactile experiences. Enhancing access to captivating physics, as is done by the informal science-learning encounters at CERN Science Gateway, can make a great impact. Another pioneering example, specifically designed for the visually impaired, is Tactile Collider, an immersive workshop developed by particle physicists in the UK that allows participants to explore the science of particle accelerators and the Higgs boson through touch, sound and embodied learning techniques (CERN Courier January/February 2020 p33).

The thorough internalisation and fresh perspectives brought whilst sculpting a tangible 3D story out of a physics theme and seeking connections to familiar daily concepts can also amplify our own intuition. Most rewarding would be to share our models in festivals of 3D learning wherever curiosity dwells, from classrooms to exhibitions and public scientific discussions, to inspire and encourage brilliant ideas born through “feeling physics”.

The post Expanding the senses appeared first on CERN Courier.

One of the key challenges of communicating particle physics – particularly when preserving and presenting tangible artefacts – is the sheer scale of the endeavour. The infrastructure of particle physics has frequently been likened to cathedrals: great vaulted caverns built by the hands of many in search of truths about our universe. And even the major facilities are only one part in the international network of particle physics. Museums, which are also often likened to cathedrals, weren’t typically designed with gigantic and internationally distributed artefacts in mind. And that’s before we consider the objects of study: you can’t display a particle in a glass case. So how can we find tangible ways to represent abstract physical phenomena? What does it mean to represent the work of the thousands of people involved in today’s particle-physics projects? And is it possible to capture a fleeting moment of discovery for posterity?

Sometimes, those fleeting moments are best captured by ephemeral objects. Something that might seem mundane or throwaway can provide eloquent insights into the real life of physics. The announcement of the discovery of the Higgs Boson at CERN on 4 July 2012 was recorded in several formats, notably the film footage of Peter Higgs wiping away a tear in CERN’s main auditorium as the ATLAS and CMS teams announced the discovery of the particle whose existence he, François Englert and Robert Brout had predicted decades before.

A material memorial of the Higgs-boson discovery is the champagne bottle emptied by Higgs and John Ellis the night before the announcement. In fact, the quiet and modest Higgs usually prefers London Pride beer; unfortunately, the can that he drank on his flight home from Geneva after the announcement was not saved for posterity. But the champagne bottle also speaks to a common practice at CERN: around the site, particularly in the CERN Control Centre, there are arrays of empty bottles, opened in celebration of events including the LHC start-up, first physics collisions, major publications and other milestones.

Familiar yet unexpected objects such as the champagne bottle in the context of a display about physics can pique visitors’ interest and encourage them to move on to more complex-looking displays that they might otherwise pass by. As such, Higgs’ champagne bottle featured in the Collider exhibition (see above picture) produced by the London Science Museum in 2013 and another bottle is part of CERN’s heritage collection – a curated assortment of more than 200 objects that encapsulate CERN’s history.

Magic moments

Connecting to newsworthy moments or well-known people is usually a successful draw for visitors. Capitalising on the global success of the movie Oppenheimer, this year the Bradbury Science Museum at Los Alamos developed  an exhibition of Oppenheimer-related artefacts, including his own copy of the Bhagavad Gita. At CERN Science Gateway, Tim Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer – used to host the first website – creates an immediate talking point for visitors who can barely imagine life without the web, despite the object itself being literally a black box.

That said, it is rare for a scientific or technological artefact to be a “show piece” that would attract visitors in its own right, in the same way that they would queue to see a famous artwork. The Antikythera mechanism at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Galileo’s telescopes at the Museo Galileo in Florence, or the Apollo 11 command module at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington are not representative of the types of material generally found in science heritage collections. Most science-related objects are not that easy for non-specialists to engage with; to the uninitiated eye the tools of particle physics mostly look like wiring and plumbing. Exhibition developers therefore usually adopt the “key pieces” approach advocated by Dutch curator Ad Maas: setting objects in the context of an overall narrative and a rich array of materials including photographs, documents, film, audio and personal testimony brings them to life and allows developers to layer information for different audience tastes and interest levels. Thanks to CERN’s archives and heritage collection, there is a wide range of material to draw from.

Using the key-pieces approach, a single small part can be revealing of a much larger whole: for example, by following the “life story” of a lead tungstate crystal used in the CMS electromagnetic calorimeter – which was also featured at the Collider exhibition – we gain insights into the decades-long design and planning process for the CMS detector, and an adventure in production and testing that takes us on a journey via Moscow, Shanghai and Rome (with a detour to the UBS bank vaults in Zurich). The physical nature of the object itself reflects its design and production history, while also illustrating the phenomena of particle decay and scintillation. At CERN, you’ll find displays of crystals like these around the site, in public and private spaces.

Much of the scientific heritage of the 20th and 21st centuries was originally preserved by practitioners with a sixth sense of “this might be useful someday” rather than by professional curators. Today, CERN has detailed archival and heritage collection policies that offer guidance as to what kinds of material might be worth keeping for posterity. Of course it’s impossible to keep everything; we can’t predict for certain what avenues future historians might be interested in exploring, or what kinds of objects will be used to popularise science. But by preserving storehouses of memories, we might be keeping some building blocks for the cathedrals of a future age.

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In 2019, four Science Pavilions were held in four different music and culture festivals in four different countries: the Big Bang Stage at the Ostrava festival in the Czech Republic, produced in partnership with Charles University and the Czech Technical University; the Magical Science Pavilion at the Pohoda Festival in Slovakia – an incredible space produced with Comenius University; the World of Physics at WOMAD in the UK, going strong year after year thanks to an enduring collaboration with Roger Jones of Lancaster University; and the Science Pavilion at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark, a highly successful relationship with Jørgen Beck Hansen at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. More than 20,000 people came to the four spaces in 2019!

Workshops give people a chance to interact in a direct way with science and technology, as well as with physicists working on different experiments at CERN. They often can’t believe that these people who work for CERN have actually come to the festival to talk to them. A variety of topics are covered ranging from what’s new in physics to technological and scientific advances in the news that touch on people’s everyday lives, such as artificial intelligence. For 2023 we introduced a successful “scientific speed dating” with the young audience at Roskilde. A talk from CERN’s director for accelerators and technology Mike Lamont on physics and medicine and an informal “Chat with the AI experts” in the sunshine also proved incredibly popular at WOMAD this year. Between 4000 and 6000 people come to each Science Pavilion in each festival every year. Requests for new collaborations in other countries are coming in, and as a result there are currently ongoing discussions for Pavilions at festivals in the Netherlands and Spain. Physicists love the idea and their students are always an important asset to the event, with the most forward-thinking institutes keen to be part of the programme.

The feedback from visitors is clear: people love finding science at a music festival. The fact that the science is taken to them, where they are at their most comfortable, relaxed and receptive to new things, is key to the programme’s success. Comments range from “It’s a welcome break to sit in a cool space and learn something interesting and talk about stuff other than drinking and partying” to “I never liked science at school, I found it so boring and complicated, but here you make it fun and I’ve come back every year, I love it!”.

Recently, the Festival Programme was approved to be part of the CERN and Society Foundation. This means that an individual wishing to support this fantastic form of outreach and communication, or a company that understands the benefit of the programme and would like to have their logo at the festival next to ours, can now do so. It’s a great opportunity to reach new audiences, and especially to engage in those countries whose people are actually funding CERN.

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Reaching out to the world

Workshops and hands-on activities have multiplied in recent years. Cloud-chamber building is one of the most popular, and is used by a growing number of institutes when they host students for a day. Created in 2005, the International Masterclasses programme brings another level of activity, offering guests the chance to analyse data from contemporary experiments with direct help from the physicists involved. Each year, more than 10,000 teachers and 15–19-year-old students have been given this opportunity. Initially organised in the EU time zone with a scientist at CERN, the programme now also runs in US and Japanese time zones. The range of analyses offered encompasses the four LHC experiments, Belle II, particle therapy, the Pierre Auger cosmic-ray detector and neutrino experiments in the US. During the pandemic, masterclasses were made available online, and the tools developed now help to reach people in countries and regions that do not yet have any high-energy physics institutes.

The large number of CERN visitors is proof of public interest in face-to-face interactions. But what about those who can’t come in person? What about teachers who want to inspire their students by inviting a scientist into their classrooms? Or institutes that would like to show a detector their teams have built and where the data come from? Pioneered by ATLAS in 2010, the LHC experiments virtual-visit programme breaks down geographical barriers. Thanks to a video conference tool, a scientist working on an experiment can walk audiences through underground installations or control rooms, the diversity of international-collaboration members offering a wide range of languages to let the public meet and engage with “one of theirs”. The most important part of the event is a lengthy Q&A session, which has allowed tens of thousands of children and adults to share the scientific experience.

Coming together

Organised by interactions.org, a network that groups the communications activities of the world’s particle-physics labs, Dark Matter Day offers a scientific twist to Halloween. Since 2017, more than 350 global, regional and local events have been held on and around 31 October. Institutions and individuals engage the public in discussions about what is known and what mysteries experiments are seeking to solve. International Cosmic Day, where students, teachers and scientists come together to talk and learn about cosmic rays, follows each November. Activities range from the construction of a detector to data analysis, and the coordination of such events is kept light, to let the primary actors – the scientists who proposed and built the 17 presently listed activities – be as creative and engaged as they are in everyday life. As with all community-driven outreach activities, that authenticity is hard to beat.

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CERN has traditionally tailored education and outreach material predominantly towards high-school students, in particular those already expressing an interest in science.  For this age group, it is relatively easy to find overlaps between school curricula and work at CERN. Such visitors will continue to find engaging content in our exhibitions. However, if CERN is to connect to a broader section of the public and attract a more diverse cohort of future scientists, it needs to reach out beyond existing science fans, attracting younger audiences before stereotypes set in.

Positive contacts

Over the decades, communication best-practice has evolved from the idea that to inspire children to choose a career in science, you just need to make it sound interesting. Now, it is recognised that there are multiple factors influencing choice. The Aspires research project at University College London, for example, has highlighted the importance of “science capital”, a notion based on the variety of positive contacts with science that children experience. This includes knowing people who work in science, talking with family and friends, doing science-based activities outside school and there being a generally positive attitude towards science within the family setting.

At schools, careers information often comes once choices to drop science subjects have already been made. And without role models to identify with, or contact with science or science-related professions through family and friends, it can be extremely difficult for some students to imagine themselves as future scientists. Hence the drop in pupils expressing such aspirations from the end of primary education onwards that occurs in many countries. By offering younger students the opportunity to experiment and play in a scientific environment, Science Gateway seeks to counter this drop. In addition to the existing science-fan visitors, it aims to reach those with less science capital at home, so that children can discover new opportunities.

There is a slogan in the exhibitions world: “hands on, minds on”. A good exhibit creates memorable experiences that empower visitors to explore and engage, rather than simply transmitting knowledge in a unidirectional way. Science Gateway offers activities – such as designing a detector or collaborating to lower equipment into a cavern – where children are encouraged to think logically, and exhibits that encourage them to make their own deductions, helping them to become more confident that science is for them. Here the exhibition guides play a key role in encouraging interaction and play.

Sometimes in a hands-on science centre, one can have the impression that children are having so much fun racing from exhibit to exhibit that there is no valid experience. This is countered by research which shows that learning comes in a broad variety of forms. Informal learning experiences, such as those at Science Gateway, can have just as much impact as in-school learning.

The exhibitions offer a variety of different environments – playful areas and beautiful spaces, including artworks, that can be enjoyed by simply sitting back and reflecting.  The exhibitions team has also collaborated with community groups to develop tactile content and ensure the exhibits are accessible to wheelchair users. Not all exhibits will be accessible for younger children, or for the visually impaired, but throughout there is a spread of different experiences that give something for everyone to enjoy.

The ambition is for CERN to become a popular destination for a fun day out, attracting a broad section of the public, both those who might one day become scientists themselves and those who might never choose that path, but who are curious to explore the new buildings that have popped up in their local area. Successful outcomes can be as simple as visitors having fun in a scientific environment. This is a first step towards being open to scientific ideas and methods – a valid goal in today’s world of misinformation and distrust, where science is sometimes talked of as something you might or might not choose to believe in.

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Consequently, it was long overdue for CERN to offer opportunities for visiting high-school students to get hands-on with particle physics. In 2014, CERN inaugurated its first particle-physics learning laboratory for high-school students. During its eight years of operations, “S’Cool LAB” gave nearly 40,000 visitors a unique opportunity to make discoveries independently, work scientifically and gain insight into modern science in the making.

A major factor in S’Cool LAB’s success was its connection to the latest thinking in physics education research. Interestingly, learning from hands-on experiments is (still) one of the central problems of physics education research. Even though students often enjoy doing experiments, various factors influence what and how much students learn from the exercise. To address this research gap, educational activities at S’Cool LAB were continually developed and improved through accompanying physics education research projects. For example, experimental tasks were designed to challenge scientifically inaccurate mental models (such as bar magnets having electrically charged poles) by allowing students to compare their predictions with surprising observations and thus foster conceptual understanding. Moreover, empirical research carried out based on questionnaires from students before and after taking part in lab workshops confirmed significant positive effects on high-school students’ interest in physics and their beliefs in their physics-related capabilities, and a surprisingly high correlation between these affective outcomes and students’ perceived level of cognitive activation. Remarkably, girls benefited more from S’Cool LAB with respect to their interest and self-beliefs. Consequently, the initial gender gap (with girls reporting slightly lower interest and self-beliefs than boys) was closed.

New incarnation

On 12 January 2023, excavators arrived to dismantle S’Cool LAB to make space for the new educational labs at CERN Science Gateway. Several considerations went into the design of the new labs. Firstly, they have a broader scope, catering not only to high-school students and their teachers but also to school students as young as five, as well as the general public. Indeed, Science Gateway offers regular workshops open to individual visitors, tourists and families. Moreover, workshops are adapted to different age groups and cover many different topics such as engineering challenges, different technologies, detection principles, or medical applications of particle physics. This diversity allows for better adaptation to the needs of students and teachers, who often prefer workshops that can be easily integrated into their science curriculum.

When designing labs for young learners, a critical choice involves balancing the level of openness and guidance. While open exploration is considered to be the ideal form of experimentation, young students can feel overwhelmed by the choices involved in developing research questions, experiment design and the interpretation of evidence. At the same time, giving students a choice in their learning can foster a sense of ownership and autonomy, leading to increased engagement and motivation to explore topics of personal interest. Providing the right level of guidance and support is therefore crucial to meaningful experimentation and a key element of the education labs at Science Gateway. It helps students enjoy hands-on activities while freeing up mental capacity to process new information effectively. To help teachers prepare their students for the new lab workshops, they now receive detailed information about its planned content and suggestions on how to integrate their experience at CERN into their classroom practice.

The impact of volunteers on students’ interest and self-beliefs was a striking result from physics education research at S’Cool LAB

Despite the variety of lab workshops offered, all activities are anchored in authentic CERN contexts and can even be linked to real objects and authentic equipment in the interactive exhibitions at Science Gateway. This approach helps foster students’ interest in science and provides them with an accurate image of science and scientists. For instance, one lab workshop for students aged 8–15 – the “Power of Air” – allows students to use 3D-printed components and toy balloons to investigate balloon hovercrafts on different surfaces, drawing connections with how engineers at CERN move massive slices of the LHC detectors via air pads.

Community input

To enhance the authenticity of lab workshops, volunteers from CERN’s scientific community accompany students during their learning process and engage in discussions about their findings. The impact of volunteers on students’ interest and self-beliefs was a striking result from physics education research at S’Cool LAB. Students were inspired by the enthusiasm displayed by their guides and appreciated the opportunity to ask questions in an enjoyable learning atmosphere. Therefore, the education labs at Science Gateway will continue to rely on volunteers to facilitate workshops and inspire the next generation of engineers and scientists. To address new challenges related to groups of very young learners, heterogeneous audiences, the diverse collection of lab workshops and the high volume of workshops held each year, a team of professional science educators provides continuous support and guidance to volunteers.

In conclusion, the educational labs at CERN Science Gateway have been designed to provide a wide range of hands-on learning experiences for learners of all ages. These labs aim to not only promote scientific understanding but also foster curiosity, interest and positive self-beliefs in students, empowering them to explore the world of science by demonstrating that science is for everyone.

The post Hands on, minds on, goggles on! appeared first on CERN Courier.

Being of the same vintage as the BBC’s Dr Who, I was pleased to discover that the first story was penned by one of the programme’s most successful showrunners, Steven Moffat. Although I found myself doubting the direction of travel after the opening paragraphs, I enjoyed the destination. It was a good start, and it established a standard that the book maintains to the very last word.

In Adam Marek’s story, I found myself listening along to protagonist Brody Maitland’s selection of music for his appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Disks, something of a national institution in the UK. This story also contains the wonderful line: “we live in a world where it is more impressive to have millions of followers than to lift the stone of the universe and reveal the deep mysteries scurrying beneath it.”  How true that is in a world of diminishing attentions spans.

Broadcaster and journalist Bidisha Mamata provides a welcome commentary on contemporary global politics. An unscrupulous leader manipulates an ambitious individual in a bid to undermine the global order. Sound familiar? In this case, the individual concerned is a CERN scientist, the reputation at stake, CERN’s, and the tool to achieving that goal the creation of a locally apocalyptic event. Politically spot on. Scientifically wide of the mark.

Post-apocalyptic scenarios make other appearances, though in these cases it’s what happens next that’s important. Stephen Baxter’s AI protagonist guides us through millennia of human stupidity, while Lillian Weezer imagines what might happen if people unearthed the LHC in some post-apocalyptic world.

Prometheus and Frankenstein make their appearances in Margaret Drabble’s wonderfully erudite tale set at CERN in the 2050s. Desiree Reynolds imagines a delicious encounter that never happened between CERN’s first Director General, Felix Bloch, and the American writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin. Would they have gelled? I’d like to think so. There’s a cautionary tale from Courttia Newland about AI, which draws the conclusion that whatever form intelligence may take, life, of a kind, will go on and the laws of the universe will remain the same. Ian Watson’s joyous facility with words puts a smile on your face from the first line of his galaxy-skipping parable. You’ll have to read it for yourself to find out whether he leaves you smiling at the end.

A recurring theme is the parallel between life and physics: Poet Lisa luxx, for example, entwines forces at work in nature with those between people, while Lucy Caldwell examines notions of uncertainty in life and physics in a story set in her native city Belfast. Peter Kalu applies a similar principle to computer security, with a cautionary yet warming tale about a side-channel attack of sorts.

Enough of the stories, what about the afterwords? Peter Dong’s comment leaves you wanting to sit in on his physics classes, while Jens Vigen gives a thoughtful account of the origins of CERN. Kirstin Lohwasser does a fine job of bringing Bidisha’s science back to the realms of reality. Tessa Charles is bullish about the FCC, currently at the feasibility stage. Michael Davis gives a glimpse of the vast industry that is modern day computer security.

Anyone that has juggled particle physics and parenting will identify with Luan Goldie’s story, which is accompanied by a heartfelt paean to CERN by one who has done just that. “Life is work and work is life,” says Carole Weydert, concluding with the words: “CERN. Grey. But sparkling.”

Andrea Bersani introduces us to the speculations that distorted spacetime allow, while Andrea Giammanco does a similar job for the dark sector. Daniel Cervenkov discusses CP violation, while Joe Haley ponders the development of ideas over time: Newton subsumed by Einstein, the Standard Model by something yet to be found. Gino Isidori, for his part, takes us on a brief guided tour of a metastable universe. John Ellis’s pairing with Stephen Baxter is particularly successful. The writer’s central story, which spans millennia and civilisations resonates well with the theoretical physicist’s daily work of examining Gauguin’s questions: “D’où venons nous, Que sommes nous, Où allons nous.”

All in all, the book makes for a varied, thought provoking and engaging read. As with the Arts at CERN programme, it demonstrates that creativity is not the preserve of the arts or of science, and that great things can happen when the two collide.

If you enjoy the book, then you might also like to explore some of the history of CERN’s engagement with the arts, from James Lee Byars’s visit to the lab in the 1970s to the Signatures of the Invisible project in 1999, or poetry produced for the European Researchers’ night in 2014.

The post Collision – Stories from the Science of CERN appeared first on CERN Courier.

What got you into physics?

I have always been interested in what one might call existential questions: those that were originally theological or philosophical, but are now science, such as “why are things the way they are?” When I was young, for me it was a toss-up: do I go into particle physics or cosmology? At the time, experimental cosmology was less developed, so it made sense to go towards particle physics.

What has been your research focus?

When I was a graduate student in college, I was intrigued by the idea of quantum mechanical spin. I didn’t understand spin and I still don’t. It’s a perplexing and non-intuitive concept. It turned out the university I went to was working on it. When I got there, however, I ended up doing a fixed-target jet-photoproduction experiment. My thesis experiment was small, but it was a wonderful training ground because I was able to do everything. I built the experiment, wrote the data acquisition and all of the analysis software. Then I got back on track with the big questions, so colliders with the highest energies were the way to go. Back then it was the Tevatron and I joined DØ. When the LHC came online it was an opportunity to transition to CMS.

Why and when did you decide to get into communication?

It has to do with my family background. Many physicists come from families where one or both parents are already from the field. But I come from an academically impoverished, blue-collar background, so I had no direct mentors for physics. However, I was able to read popular books from the generation before me, by figures such as Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov or George Gamow. They guided me into science. I’m essentially paying that back. I feel it’s sort of my duty because I have some skill at it and because I expect that there is some young person in some small town who is in a similar position as I was in, who doesn’t know that they want to be a scientist. And, frankly, I enjoy it. I am also worried about the antiscience sentiment I see in society, from the antivaccine movement to climate-change denial to 5G radiation fears. If scientists do not speak up, the antiscience voices are the only ones that will be heard. And if public policy is based on these false narratives, the damage to society can be severe. 

Scientists doing outreach create goodwill, which can lead to better funding for research-focused scientists

How did you start doing YouTube videos?

I had got to a point in my career where I was fairly established, and I could credibly think of other things. When you’re young, you are urged to focus entirely on research, because if you don’t, it could harm your research career. I had already been writing for Fermilab Today and I kept suggesting doing videos, as YouTube was becoming a thing. After a couple of years one of the videographers said, “You know, Don, you’re actually pretty good at explaining this stuff. We should do a video.” My first video came out a year before the Higgs discovery, in July 2011. It was on the Higgs boson. When the video came out, a few of the bigger science outlets picked it up and during the build-up to the Higgs excitement it got more and more views. By now it has more than three million clicks, which for a science channel is a lot. We do serious science in our videos, but there is also some light-heartedness in them.

Do you try to make the videos funny? 

This has more to do with me not taking anything seriously. I have found that irreverent humour can be disarming. People like to be entertained when they are learning. For example, one video was about “What was the real origin of mass?” Most people think that the Higgs boson is giving mass, but it’s really QCD. It’s the energy stored inside nucleons. In any event, in this video I start out with a joke about going into a Catholic church. The Higgs boson tries to say “I’m losing my faith,” and the priest replies: “You can’t leave the church. Without you how can we have mass?” For a lot of YouTube channels, viewership is not just about the material. It’s about the viewer liking the presenter. I’d say people who like our channel appreciate the combination of reliable science facts, but also subscribe for the humour. If a viewer doesn’t like a guy who does terrible dad jokes, they just go to another channel.

During the Covid-19 pandemic your videos switched to “Subatomic stories”. How do they differ?

Most of my videos are done in a studio on green screen so that we can put visuals in the background, but that was not possible during the lockdown. We then did a set up in my living room. I had an old DSLR camera and a recorder, and would record the video and the audio, then send the files to my videographer, Ian Krass, who does all the magic. Our usual videos don’t have a real story arc; they are just a series of topics. With “Subatomic stories” we began with a plan. I organised it as a sort of self-contained course, beginning with basic things, like the Standard Model, weak force, strong force, etc. Towards the end, we introduced more diverse, current research topics and a few esoteric theoretical ideas. Later, after Subatomic stories, I continued to film in my basement in a green-screen studio I built. We’ve returned to the Fermilab studio, but the basement one is waiting should the need arise. 

You are quite the public face of Fermilab. How does this relationship work?

It’s working wonderfully. I have no complaints. I can’t say that was always true in the past, because, when you’re young, you’re advised to focus on your research; it was like that for me. At the time there was some hostility towards science communicators. If you did outreach, you weren’t really considered a serious scientist, and that’s still true to a degree, although it is getting better. For me, it got to the point where people were just used to me doing it, and they tolerated it. As long as it didn’t bother my research, I could do this on my time. Some people bowl, some people knit, some people hike. I made videos. As I started becoming more successful, the laboratory started embracing the effort and even encouraged me to spend some of my work day on it. I was glad because in the same way that we encourage certain scientists to specialise in AI or computational skills or detector skills, I think that we as a field need to cultivate and encourage those scientists who are good at communicating our work. The bottom line is that I am very happy with the lab. I would like to see other laboratories encourage at least a small subset of scientists, those who are enthusiastic about outreach, to give them the time and the resources to do it, because there’s a huge payoff.

What are your favourite and least favourite things about doing outreach?

I think I’m making an impact. For instance, I’ve had graduate students or even postdocs ask me to autograph a book saying, “I went into physics because I read this book.” Occasionally I’m recognised in public, but the viewership numbers tell the story. If a video does poorly, it will get 50,000 viewers. And a good video, or maybe just a lucky one, can get millions. The message is getting out. As for the least favourite part, lately it is coming up with ideas. I’ve covered nearly every (hot) topic, so now I am thinking of revisiting early topics in a new way.

What would be your message to physicists who don’t have time or see the need for science communication?

Let’s start with the second type, who don’t see the value of it. I would like to remind them that essentially, in any country, if you want to do research, your funding comes from taxpayers. They work hard for their money and they certainly don’t want to pay taxes, so if you want to ask them to support this thing that you’re interested in, you need to convince them that it’s important and interesting. For those who don’t have time, I’m empathetic. Depending on your supervisor, doing science communication can harm a young career. However, in that case I think that the community should at least support a small group of people who do outreach. If nothing else, the scientists doing outreach create goodwill, which can lead to better funding for research-focused scientists.

Where do you see particle physics headed and the role of outreach?

The problem is that the Standard Model works well, but not perfectly. Consequently, we need to look for anomalies both at the LHC and with other precision experiments. I imagine that the next decade will resemble what we are doing now. I think it would be of very high value if we could spend some money on thinking about how to make stronger magnets and advanced acceleration technologies, because that’s the only way we’re going to get a very large increase in energy. The scientists know what to do. We are developing the techniques and technologies needed to move forward. On the communication side, we just need to remind the public that the questions particle physicists and cosmologists are trying to answer are timeless. They’re the questions many children ask. It’s a fascinating universe out there and a good science story can rekindle anyone’s sense of child-like wonder.

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The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: space, time, and motion, the first in a three-part series by Sean Carroll, goes against this trend. Written for “…people who have no mathematical experience than high-school algebra, but are willing to look at an equation and think about what it means”, there is no point in the book at which things are muddied because the maths becomes too advanced.

Concepts and theories

The first part of the book covers nine topics including conservation, space–time, geometry, gravity and black holes. Carroll spends the first few chapters introducing the reader to the thought process of a theoretical physicist: how to develop a sense for symmetries, the conservation of charges and expansions in small parameters. It also gives readers a fast introduction to calculus using geometric arguments to define derivatives and integrals. By the end of the third chapter, the concepts of differential equations, phase space and the principle of least action have been introduced.

The centre part of the book focusses on geometry. A discussion of the meaning of space and time in physics is followed by the introduction of Minkowski spacetime, with considerable effort given to the philosophical meaning of these concepts. The third part is the most technical. It covers differential geometry, a beautiful derivation of Einstein’s equation of general relativity and the final chapter uses the Schwarzschild solution to discuss black holes.

It is a welcome development that publishers and authors such as Carroll are confident that books like this will find a sizeable readership (another good, recent example of advanced popular physics texts is Leonard Susskind’s “A Theoretical Minimum” series). Many topics in physics can only be fully appreciated if the equations are explained and if chapters go beyond the limitations of typical popular science books. Carroll’s writing style and the structure of the book help to make this case: all concepts are carefully introduced and even though the book is very dense and covers a lot of material, everything is interconnected and readers won’t feel lost while reading. Regular reference to the historical steps in discovering theo­ries and concepts loosen up the text. Two examples are the correspondence between Leibniz and Clarke about the nature of space and the interesting discussion of Einstein and Hilbert’s different approaches to general relativity. The whole series of books, of which two of the three parts will be published soon, is accompanied by recorded lectures that are freely available online and present the topic of every chapter, along with answers to questions on these topics.

It is difficult to find any weaknesses in this book. Figures are often labelled with symbols that readers not used to physics notation can find in the text, so more text in the figures would make them even more accessible. Strangely, the section introducing entropy is not supported by equations and, given the technical detail of all other parts of the book, Carroll could have taken advantage of the mathematical groundwork of the previous chapters here.

I want to emphasise that every topic discussed in The Biggest Ideas in the Universe is well established physics. No flashy but speculative theories or unbalanced focus on science-fiction ideas, which are often used to attract readers to theoretical physics, appear. It stands apart from similar titles by offering insights that can only be obtained if the underlying equations are explained and not just mentioned.

Anyone who is interested in fundamental physics is encouraged to read this book, especially young people interested in studying physics because they will get an excellent idea of the type of physical arguments they will encounter at university. Those who think their mathematical background isn’t sufficient will likely learn many new things, even though the later chapters are quite technical. And if you are at the other end of the spectrum, such as a working physicist, you will find the philosophical discussions of familiar concepts and the illuminating arguments included to elicit physical intuition most useful.

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How did the idea for Science Gateway come about?

I was on detachment at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Garching when I was called back to CERN in 2017. The idea for a flagship education and outreach project was already quite advanced, and since I had triggered the construction of ESO’s Supernova planetarium and visitor centre during my mandate as director of administration, the CERN Director-General (DG) thought I could build on this for CERN. There had been various projects for buildings based around the Globe in the past, but they never quite took off. However, the then-new directorate wanted to create a new space for education and outreach targeting the general public of all ages. The DG also made it clear that a large auditorium for CERN events should be part of any plan, and that the entire construction should be financed by donations. I started to work on the concept.

The Italian architect Renzo Piano had visited CERN independently and fell in love with our values. When he left, he said: “If one day I can do something for you, don’t hesitate.” A few months later he proposed to draw the building. In June 2018 he showed us his first mockup, the “space station” design you see today. It crossed the Route de Meyrin and encroached on land designated for agricultural use on the north side and the CERN kindergarten on the south side. The design complicated matters, but on the other hand it was really inspiring. My first thought was that the budget I had will not be sufficient because what is expensive when you do construction are the facades, and here we had five buildings, complicated ones, with some parts suspended. But it was so original, so much in the DNA of CERN, that we thought, okay, let it be five. 

What will be in the buildings? 

There are three “pavilions” and two “tubes”. On the north side of the Science Gateway, we have a 900-seat auditorium where we can host large CERN meetings such as collaboration weeks, as well as hiring the venue out. It’s modular so we can split it in up to three different rooms and host independent events if needed. This element of the building caused most of the headaches. The second pavilion will house the reception, shop and restaurant. On the upper floor we have the two large lab spaces, where we will have two school groups at a time. Between the restaurant and the auditorium we have a natural amphitheatre where we can also hold events. 

Then we enter the two tubes straddling the Route de Meyrin, which are exhibition areas. The first is about CERN – engaging visitors with accelerators, detectors, data acquisition and IT, etc. In the second tube, one half is a journey back to the Big Bang and the other is about open questions such as dark matter, dark energy, extra dimensions and such topics, where we will have art pieces to engage visitors. The third pavilion is an exhibition about the quantum world. The bridge linking the buildings is 220 m long and you can walk from one side to the other unimpeded.

How was the construction managed, and when will the building be open to the public? 

The first problem was that the north side of the Science Gateway, previously a temporary car park, was on agricultural land. We had to reclassify that piece of land for it to be authorised to build on, which is extremely complicated in Geneva. The process usually takes at least 10 years if it is successful at all, and we got it done in one. We had a very constructive process with our host authorities, whom I would like to thank warmly for their support, and the Renzo Piano team had made a case with drawings and models to help communicate our vision. We got the building permit in September 2019 and launched a procurement process for the construction and for the scenographers regarding the exhibitions. In November 2020 we signed the contract with the construction companies and they started to erect the site barracks at the end of 2020. The construction is due to be completed this summer. It was an extremely aggressive schedule, made more difficult by the pandemic and factors relating to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The inauguration will very likely be in the first week of October, with first visitors in the next day. I would like to thank the competent and dedicated work of all CERN’s departments and services that have contributed to the success of this project.

Who is the Science Gateway for? 

The main objective is to inspire the next generation to engage in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) studies and careers. To do that, first you need to have a programme for different age ranges. Whereas traditionally we target 16 years and above, Science Gateway will start with workshops for visitors as young as five. The exhibitions are suited to all ages above eight. Ideally, we want to engage visitors before they reach high school because that’s typically when girls start to think that STEM subjects are not for them. Another important audience is parents, so Science Gateway is also geared towards families and to show adults what it means to be a scientist along with showing diverse role models. The exhibits and installations are developed by a mix of in-house and outside expertise. For the labs, we rely on our education team, which has the experience of S’Cool LAB, but now that we have extended the age range of our audiences, we will also work closely with, for instance, the LEGO foundation, one of our donors, who are very strong in education programmes for children aged 5 to 12. Finally, Science Gateway is an opportunity for us to engage with VIPs and decision makers, to bring support to fundamental research and explain its impact on society.

How many visitors do you expect?

A lot! Currently we have more than 300,000 demands for guided tours per year and we can only satisfy about half of them. From those 300,000, more than 70% are based more than 800 km away. The Science Gateway will allow us to welcome up to 500,000 people per year, which is more than 1000 per day on average. We will continue to attract schools and visitors from all CERN member states and beyond, that’s for sure, and increase capacity for hands-on lab activities in particular. We also expect many more local visitors. Entry will be free, and we will be open to visitors all year, every day except Mondays. The Science Gateway will only be closed on 24, 25 and 31 December, and 1 January. For groups of 12 or more, people have to book in advance. But individuals and families can just show up on the day and access the auditorium, exhibition tubes, restaurant and the quantum-world pavilion. On the campus, they will also find temporary exhibitions in the Globe, and Ideasquare will also propose activities. Visitors can book a guided tour in the morning for that same day. Guided tours will remain at the same level as today, and we are trying to reduce pressure on existing restaurants on the Meyrin site with the new Science Gateway restaurant.

How is the Science Gateway funded?

The construction, landscaping, exhibitions and everything you will see in the building on day one are all funded from donations, with the main ones comings from Stellantis Foundation and a private foundation in Geneva. CERN is very grateful to all donors for their generosity. It’s about CHF 90 million in total, with some donors sponsoring particular exhibits or spaces. For the operations, the cost is estimated at around CHF 4 million per year. This will be funded from a mix of income from the infrastructure (for example, the shop, restaurant, parking and auditorium) and some limited CERN budget. The operational costs are for staffing in addition to maintenance of the equipment, cleaning and maintaining the forest that surrounds the building. 

What is the operational model?

A Science Gateway operations group has been created from the former visits service. With the exception of a small increase in industrial services contracts and two fellows, there are basically no recruitments. We will heavily rely on volunteers, from members of the personnel to users and other people linked with CERN. We already have a pool of guides who provide on average 16,000 hours per year on guided tours and we need to double that amount to ensure the Science Gateway operates as required. We will encourage more people to become guides and start training in July. We want to emphasise that, in addition to the rewards of engaging visitors with CERN’s science, this experience will be useful to their professional lives. We are also considering giving certificates and possibly accreditations. Ideally we should have about 650 guides each giving 48 hours per year. 

What is the environmental philosophy behind Science Gateway?

We want to pass on the message that we’re sustainable. We’ll be carbon neutral when we are in the operations phase, and solar panels on the roof of the three pavilions will produce much more energy than we need, with 40% going back into the CERN grid. The use of geothermal probes was explored but had to be abandoned due to local geology. Heating and cooling will be provided by heat exchangers powered by our solar panels. In the restaurant we will avoid single-use plastics, and lights will be dimmed in the evening and switched off at night. There will also be a charge for parking to encourage visitors to come by public transport. We wanted to show the link between science and nature, and that’s why we have the forest, with 400 trees and 13,000 shrubs.

How does it feel to see the project coming to completion?

When we started discussions six or so years ago, I thought I had less than a 10% chance of success because the project was so ambitious and had to be completely funded by donations. . However, it was strongly supported by the directorate, which was also very active in raising funds. The fact that it was to be built on agricultural land was another factor. There were more reasons for it to fail than to succeed. But the challenge was worth it. The phase during which we were doing the design of the construction with the architects was really interesting. I think we had 50 different versions, trying to define a design that would fit both the architects’ vision and our programme. With the construction, things start to become less fun. But we are almost there now and the Science Gateway will be a game changer for CERN, so I’m pretty proud of it. I had planned to retire at the end of the construction, but now I’ve decided to stay a bit longer and see the first steps of CERN’s new big baby. 

The post A game changer for CERN appeared first on CERN Courier.

One thing is certain: AEPSHEP is not for the faint-hearted or the semi-committed. With 15 guest lecturers and six expert facilitators, the 12 days (and 13 nights) of the school are an exercise in total immersion, covering an expansive canvas at the frontiers of high-energy physics. The hot-house academic programme comprised 32 plenary lectures (each at 90 mins); nine afternoon breakout sessions for parallel discussion groups (each at 90 mins); an evening poster session (that lasted until almost midnight); and another evening session for student project presentations. Teaching also continued during the two weekends of the school, including a keynote video lecture by Takaaki Kajita (co-recipient of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of neutrino oscillations) and an online Q&A session with Fabiola Gianotti, director-general of CERN.

Learning together, working together

So how was it for you? Four PhD students talk to CERN Courier about the joys of in-person (rather than virtual) learning, networking and collaboration
at AEPSHEP 2022 in South Korea.

Vismaya V S, IIT Hyderabad, India. Home country: India. Area of research: Belle II experiment (Tsukuba, Japan)

“AEPSHEP 2022 proved to be a fantastic learning and development opportunity, allowing me to familiarise myself with the diverse experiments and research being carried out across the field of high-energy physics – and well beyond the immediate area of interest for my PhD studies. We also had the opportunity to interact with leading experts in this area, which in and of itself is motivating. The highlight of each day was the discussion group session, which helped all of us to understand core topics in greater detail and to overcome our public speaking anxieties and uncertainties. We were encouraged to pursue a career in high-energy physics by the coordinators, students and lecturers alike and will carry this knowledge with us for the remainder of our voyage.”

Aashwin Basnet, Ohio State University, US. Home country: Nepal. Area of research: CMS experiment

“AEPSHEP 2022 has been one of the highlights of my PhD experience, primarily because it’s the biggest in-person scientific event that I have attended post-COVID. One of the strongest aspects of the school was the perfect blend of lectures on conventional particle-physics topics – QCD, neutrinos, electroweak theory and the like – along with several higher-level workshops/talks focusing on the current status and future prospects for experiments in high-energy physics. It goes without saying that I learned a lot of new physics – not just from the lecturers and the discussion leaders, but also from my fellow students. I am certain that this will open up new avenues for potential research collaborations in the future. On top of all that, the opportunity to visit new places and immerse myself in the local culture of South Korea was outright refreshing.”

Juhee Song, Hanyang University, Seoul. Home country: South Korea. Area of research: CMS experiment

“As one of the local students participating in AEPSHEP 2022, the lecture programme opened my eyes to a much a broader view of the high-energy physics community. The discussion groups were especially useful, giving students a chance to ask questions and explore topics from the main lecture programme in more detail, and I also enjoyed the interactive aspects of the poster session and group project work. What I liked most, though, was meeting many new friends and potential future colleagues. My graduate studies started at the beginning of the pandemic, which has made it difficult to forge new relationships within the research community. After attending this school, many of us plan to stay in touch and are already looking forward to meeting up again at future conferences and workshops. I’m sure that AEPSHEP will be a turning point for my career because I’m super-motivated to study more.”

Henrikas Svidras, DESY, Germany. Home country: Lithuania. Area of research: Belle II experiment

“Owing to the pandemic restrictions of the past three years, AEPSHEP provided one of the few opportunities for me as a PhD student to socialise at a professional and personal level with colleagues from many different experiments – and multiple continents. The two weeks of lectures, discussion groups and social events created a real sense of kinship among students. We were able to laugh about the things we disliked, while appreciating the things we all enjoyed. I believe that the ability to reassess topics that many of us last studied in our undergraduate courses helped us to see how much we have learned through our subsequent research work. As I work towards finishing up my PhD thesis, I am very happy to have been able to attend AEPSHEP 2022.”

Building connections

Although mask-wearing indoors was mandatory owing to local COVID restrictions, “it was evident from very early on that the AEPSHEP 2022 students were eager, post-lockdown, to embrace the opportunity for face-to-face learning and interaction with their peers and their lecturers,” explains Martijn Mulders, head of the AEPSHEP international organising committee (and a CERN research physicist working on the CMS experiment). “The afternoon breakout groups, in particular, were a great way for students to really get to know each other,” he continues, “while also affording the opportunity to ask questions of the facilitators and explore the core lecture content in real depth.”

For Mulders, the strength of AEPSHEP lies in its self-organised, community-driven working model. As such, operational responsibilities are carved up between an international advisory board, an international organising committee and a local organising committee (co-chaired in this instance by TaeJeong Kim, a particle physicist at Hanyang University in Seoul and current spokesperson for all Korean research groups working on the CMS experiment). “AEPSHEP is a case study in international and inter-laboratory collaboration,” notes Mulders. “In addition to the major contribution from South Korea, as host country, there was international sponsorship from the likes of CERN, KEK (Japan), DESY (Germany), as well as CEA and IN2P3 in France.” 

That emphasis on international partnership is reinforced by the diversity of attendees at this year’s AEPSHEP, with 29 different nationalities represented across the student group (and 37 of them women). “The impact of AEPSHEP on students’ professional development is far-reaching,” claims Mulders. “The school brings together physicists from many countries who would not ordinarily get to collaborate with each other, while students from developing countries gain access to a unique and fast-track learning opportunity with the help of AEPSHEP travel grants and sponsorship.” 

Local knowledge

Those views are echoed by TaeJeong Kim and the AEPSHEP local organising committee, who worked closely with Mulders and his international colleagues to co-develop the lecture programme and schedule of guest lecturers. “The international nature of AEPSHEP – at all levels of the planning and delivery – reflects the inherently global nature of the high-energy physics community,” Kim explains. “In this way, the school helps early-career researchers to experience and understand different cultures, while giving them the skills and confidence to work with people from a wide range of backgrounds.”

Notwithstanding those longer-term outcomes, the local organising committee is also front-and-centre regarding the day-to-day coordination and smooth running of the event – a not inconsiderable undertaking given the two-week teaching programme. “Attention to detail is everything – transport, accommodation, special dietary requirements and helping students and lecturers alike with the language barrier,” explains Kim. The choice of venue was also key, with the Alpensia mountain resort (which hosted the 2018 Winter Olympics) providing an optimum environment for learning and student interaction. 

“Alpensia is isolated, but not too isolated,” notes Kim. “It’s important to get the balance right with the venue, allowing students the opportunity to experience Korean culture up close while also ensuring there are not too many distractions.” With this in mind, the local organising committee opened up space in the AEPSHEP schedule for two excursions: an afternoon trip to the nearby Woljeonsa Temple complex, including a contemporary autumn festival; also a full-day excursion to visit the Demilitarised Zone at the border with North Korea, followed by a few hours in the beach town of Gangneung. 

AEPSHEP, in many ways, provides a launchpad for early-career scientists intent on a future in high-energy physics. “The networking and learning opportunities for students attending the school are fundamental to the event’s sustained success,” argues Kim. “AEPSHEP creates connections and lifelong friendships between attendees, while simultaneously scaling the talent pipeline for the international high-energy physics community.” 

AEPSHEP is a case study in international and inter-laboratory collaboration

The next iteration of AEPSHEP will be held in 2024, with Mulders anticipating plenty of interest when the open call for proposals is issued to candidate countries in the Asia-Pacific region. “An important aspect of AEPSHEP is capacity-building in the host country,” he concludes. “With backing from the likes of CERN and KEK, the school attracts significant visibility and recognition for high-energy physics at the domestic level – raising awareness with politicians, funding agencies, national media and the scientific community.”

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What drives us to commit so much effort to outreach and public engagement when we are already deeply invested in a field that is both time and labour intensive? First of all, we love doing it. Particle physics is an active and exciting field that lies at the forefront of human understanding of the universe. The analysis methods and tools we employ are innovative, our machines and detectors are jaw-dropping in their size and complexity, and our international collaborations are the largest, most diverse ever assembled. It is a privilege to be part of this community and we love sharing that with those around us.

Secondly, we’ve learned that public engagement improves us as scientists. Learning how to distil complex scientific concepts into understandable descriptions, captivating stories and relatable analogies helps us to better comprehend the topics ourselves. It gives us a clearer picture in our own minds of where our work fits into the larger frame of society. It also significantly improves our communication skills, yielding capabilities that help us down the road as we apply for grants and propose new projects or analyses.

Thirdly, we also understand our moral obligation to share the results of our research with society. The endeavour to improve our understanding of the world around us is rooted in millennia of human evolution and culture. It is how we not only improve our own lives, but also how we provide the tools future generations need to survive. In more practical terms, we realise the importance of engaging those who support our research. That includes funding bodies, as well as the voters who select those bodies and prioritise the deployment of resources.

Finally, but equally as important, we realise the value to both our own field and society at large of encouraging our youth to pursue careers in science and technology. The next generation of experiments will include machines, detectors and collaborations that are even larger than the ones we have today. Given their projected lifetimes, the grandchildren of today’s students will be among those analysing the data. And we need to train that workforce today.

Birth and evolution

Dedicating time and resources to outreach efforts is not easy. As researchers, our days (and often nights) are taken up by analysis meetings, detector shifts, conference deadlines and institutional obligations. So, when we do make the effort it needs to be done in an effective manner, reaching as large and diverse an audience as possible, with messages that are clear and coherent.

Former CERN Director-General Chris Llewellyn Smith certainly had this in mind when he first proposed the establishment of the European particle physics outreach group (EPOG) in 1997. The group held its first meeting on 19 September that year, under the chairmanship of Frank Close. Its primary objectives were to exchange ideas and best practices in particle-physics education and outreach, to define common goals and activities, and to develop and share materials supporting the efforts.

The original members of EPOG were delegates from the CERN Member States, one each from the four major LHC experiments, one each from the CERN and DESY laboratories, and a chair and deputy chair assigned by the European Committee for Future Accelerators (ECFA) and the high-energy physics branch of the European Physical Society. Over the course of the following 25 years, EPOG has expanded beyond Europe (becoming IPPOG), developed major worldwide programmes, including International Masterclasses in Particle Physics and Global Cosmics, and established itself as an international collaboration, defined and supported by a memorandum of understanding (MoU).

Today, the IPPOG collaboration comprises 39 members (32 countries, six experiments and one international lab) and two associate members (national labs). Each member, by signing the MoU, commits to supporting particle-physics outreach worldwide. Members also provide modest funding, which is used to support IPPOG’s core team, its administration and communication platforms, thus facilitating the development and expansion of its global programmes and activities.

The Masterclasses programme now reaches tens of thousands of students in countries spread around the globe, and is engaging new students and training new physics mentors every year. The Global Cosmics portal, hosted on the IPPOG website, provides access to a wide variety of projects distributing cosmic-ray detectors and/or data into remote classrooms that would not normally have access to particle-physics research. And a modest project budget has helped the IPPOG collaboration to establish a presence at science, music and art festivals around the globe by supporting the efforts of local researchers.

Most recently, IPPOG launched a new website, featuring information about the collaboration, its programmes and activities, and giving access to a growing database of educational resources. The resource database serves teachers and students, as well as our own community, and includes searchable, high-quality materials, project descriptions and references to related resources procured and contributed by our colleagues.

Our projects and activities are reviewed and refined periodically during twice-annual collaboration meetings hosted by member countries and laboratories. They feature hands-on activities and presentations by working groups, members, partners and panels of world-renowned topical experts. We present and publish the progress of our activities each year during major physics and science-education conferences. Presentations are made in parallel and poster sessions, and plenary talks, to share developments with the greater community and offer opportunities for their own contributions.

The challenging road ahead

While these accomplishments are noteworthy and lay a strong basis for the development of particle-physics outreach, they are not enough to face the challenges of tomorrow. Or even today. The world has changed dramatically since the days we first advocated for the construction of our current accelerators and detectors. And we are partly to blame. The invention of the web at CERN more than 30 years ago greatly facilitated access to and propagation of scientific facts and publications. Unfortunately, it also became a tool for the development and even faster dissemination of lies and conspiracy theories.

Effective science education is crucial to stem the tide of disinformation. A student in a Masterclass, for example, learns quickly that truth is found in data: only by selecting events and plotting measurements is she/he able to discover what nature has in store. And it might not agree with her/his original hypothesis. It is what it is. This simple lesson teaches students how to extract signal from background, truth from fiction. Other important lessons include the value of international collaboration, the symmetries and beauty of nature and the applications of our technology to society. 

How do we, as scientists, make such opportunities available to a broader audience? First and foremost, we need more of us doing outreach. Many physicists do not make the effort because they perceive it as costly to their career. Taking time away from analysis and publication can be detrimental to our advancement, especially for students and junior faculty, unless there is sufficient support and recognition. Our community needs to recognise that outreach has become a key component of scientific research. It is as essential as hardware, computing and analysis. Without it, we won’t have the support we need to build future facilities. That means senior faculty must value experience in outreach on a par with other qualities when selecting new hires, and their institutions need to support outreach activities.

We also need to increase the diversity of our audience. While particle physics can boast of its international reach, our membership is still quite limited in social, economic and cultural scope. We are sorely missing women, people of diverse ethnicities and minorities. Communication strategies and educational methods can be adopted to address this, but they require resources and dedicated personnel.

That’s what IPPOG is striving for. Our expertise and capabilities increase with membership, which is continually on the rise. This past year we have been in discussion with Mexico, Nepal, Canada and the Baltic States, and more are planned for the near future. Some will sign up, others may need more time, but all are committed to maintaining and improving their investment in science education and public engagement. We invite Courier readers to join us in committing to build a brighter future for our field and our world. 

The post IPPOG celebrates 25 years of engagement appeared first on CERN Courier.

Do you remember the first time you heard about CERN? The first time someone told you about that magical place where bright minds from all over the world work together towards a common goal? Perhaps you saw a picture in a book, or had the chance to visit in person as a student? It is experiences like these that motivate many people to pursue a career in science, whether in particle physics or beyond.

In 2016 I had the pleasure of visiting CERN on a school trip. We toured the Synchrocyclotron and the SM18 magnet test facility. I was hooked. The tour guides talked with passion about the laboratory, the film presenting CERN’s first particle accelerator and the laboratory’s mission, and all those big magnets being tested in SM18. It was this experience that motivated me to study physics at university and to try to come back as soon as I could.

Accreditation

That chance arrived in September 2021 when I started a one-year technical studentship as editorial assistant on the Courier. From the first day I was eager to see as much as I could. During the final months of Long Shutdown 2, my supervisor and I visited the ATLAS cavern. The experience motivated me to ask one of my newly made friends, also a technical student who had recently become a tour guide, how to apply. The process was positive and efficient. After completing all the required courses from the learning hub and shadowing experienced guides, I became a certified ATLAS underground guide in November 2021 and gave my first tour soon after. I was nervous and struggled with the iris scanner when accessing the cavern, but all ended well, and further tours were scheduled. Then, in mid-December, all in-person tours were cancelled due to COVID-19 restrictions. I needn’t have worried, as CERN was fully geared up to provide virtual visits. Among my first virtual audience members were students from the high school that brought me to CERN five years earlier and from my university, Nottingham Trent in the UK. 

The most satisfying thing is people’s enthusiasm and their desire to learn more about CERN and its mission

The virtual visits were quite challenging at first. It was harder to connect with the audience than during an in-person visit. But managing these difficulties helped me to improve my communication skills and to develop self-confidence. During this period, I conducted more than 10 virtual visits for different institutes, universities, family and friends, in both English and Spanish. 

At the beginning of March 2022, CERN moved into “level yellow” and in-person visits were resumed. Although only possible for a short period, I had the chance to guide visitors underground and had the honour of guiding the last in-person visit into the ATLAS cavern on 23 March before preparations for LHC Run 3 got under way. With the ATLAS cavern then off-limits, I signed up to present at as many CERN visit points as possible. At the time of writing, I am a guide for the Synchrocyclotron, the ATLAS Visitor Centre, Antimatter Factory, Data Centre, Low Energy Ion Ring and CERN Control Centre. 

Get involved

The CERN visits service always welcomes new guides and is working towards opening new visit points. Anyone working at CERN or registered as a user can take part by signing up for visit-point training on the tour-guide website: guides.web.cern.ch. General training for new guides is also available. All you need to show CERN to the public is passion and enthusiasm, and you can sign up for as many or as few as your day job allows. Diversity is encouraged and those who are multilingual are also highly valued.

Today, visits are handled by a dedicated section in the Education, Communications and Outreach group. The number of visitors has gradually increased over recent years, with 152,000 annual visitors before the pandemic started, excluding special events such as the CERN Open Days. The profile of visitors ranges from school pupils and university students to common-interest groups such as engineers and scientists, politicians and VIPs, and people with a wide range of interests and educational levels.

The benefits of becoming a CERN guide are immense. It gives you access to areas that would otherwise not be possible, the chance to experience important events in-person and to see your work at CERN, whatever it involves, from a fresh perspective. My personal highlight was watching test collisions at 13.6 TeV before the official start of Run 3 while showing Portuguese high-school students the ATLAS control room. The most satisfying thing is people’s enthusiasm and their desire to learn more about CERN and its mission. I particularly remember how a small child asked me a question about the matter–antimatter asymmetry of the universe, and how another young visitor ran from Entrance B at the end of a tour just to tell me how much she loved the visit.

The visits service makes it as easy as possible to get involved, and exciting times for guides lie ahead with the opening of the CERN Science Gateway next year, which will enable CERN to welcome even more visitors. If a technical student based at CERN for just one year can get involved, so can you!

The post Your guide to becoming a CERN guide appeared first on CERN Courier.

Every Nobel Prize comes with a story, and Leonard A Cole’s Chasing the Ghost offers a new perspective on that of Fred Reines, best known for discovering the electron neutrino with Clyde Cowan in 1956. While Cowan passed away in 1974, Reines went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery in 1995. Cole, Reines’s cousin, describes the life of Fred Reines – focusing on both his scientific career and extracurricular interests – in a personal way, showing obvious admiration for his elder cousin.

After participating in the Manhattan Project and assisting in developing nuclear weapons in the 1940s, Reines pivoted to study neutrinos, the fundamental particles emitted in nearly every nuclear reaction, which he describes as “the tiniest quantity of reality ever imagined by a human being”. While being tiny quantities, neutrinos are abundant, yet mysterious, and Reines’s work opened the door to better understand these particles. His research spanned the next five decades, and positions at universities and laboratories across the US, and the techniques that he developed to study neutrinos are used to this day.

Rainbows and Things

Throughout Chasing the Ghost, Cole splits his time between describing Reines’s career and his extracurricular pursuits. Even among his colleagues, Reines was known to be a prolific singer, performing with groups including the Los Alamos Light Opera Association and the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus. Time spent pondering these activities allowed Reines to connect better with non-science-major students when lecturing at universities. Reines famously taught his course “Rainbows and Things” to much acclaim at the University of California, Irvine, where he encouraged students to think deeply about the connection between classroom physics and the natural world. Cole explains that the course name, and much of its philosophy, stems from the play Finian’s Rainbow, which Reines performed in 1955.

Throughout his later life, it became apparent that Reines thought his accomplishments deserved more praise than they had received. In fact, it was only after he gave up hope of winning the Nobel Prize that he won it in 1995. Reines had been passed up on many occasions, including in 1988 when the team that discovered the second type of neutrinos was awarded the prize before him. Cole shares a humorous anecdote (in hindsight): at a CERN conference with both Reines and 1988 laureate Leon Lederman in attendance, a speaker suggested an experiment to search for the third type of neutrino, the tau neutrino. However, as the speaker lamented, it seemed as if no one would perform this type of experiment, “because evidently they only give a Nobel Prize for the detection of every other neutrino.” While the room may have burst into laughter, Fred Reines didn’t budge.

Regardless, Reines’s dedication to understand neutrinos persisted until the end of his life. Shortly before passing, when he heard of the ground-breaking news from Super-Kamiokande that neutrinos oscillate, he astutely asked “What’s the mass?”, understanding the implications of this result.

The work spearheaded by Reines and his contemporaries has made a lasting impact on the field of particle physics, that continues today. As Cole explains, the subfield of neutrino physics has blossomed to include large, international experimental collaborations, which have found even more unexpected results. Those results have spurred investigators to plan ambitious projects, such as the IceCube experiment in Antarctica, the DUNE experiment in the US, and Hyper-Kamiokande in Japan.

Inspiration

Today’s neutrino detectors are getting bigger and bigger. However, their forerunners can still serve a purpose: inspiration. Several detectors from Reines’s era are now exhibited, such as the Gargamelle detector at CERN. After discovering the electron neutrino, the race was on to build experiments to better understand neutrino properties, and Gargamelle was one such detector. Today, it is on display at the CERN Microcosm, perhaps inspiring a new generation of neutrino physicists.

Overall, Leonard A Cole’s Chasing the Ghost will inspire readers, especially those new to thinking about neutrino physics. Fred Reines’s work, with its focus on a deep understanding of these mysterious, abundant particles, continues to bear fruit to this day. There is no telling what the next neutrino experiments will uncover, but it’s a guarantee that sharp thinkers like Reines will be necessary in this field in the generations to come.

The post Capturing the intangible appeared first on CERN Courier.

This book by CERN’s Archana Sharma and her two students Robin Mathews and Ben Richardson merges the classic A-to-Z formula with CERN concepts, making it suitable for all audiences. Each letter is divided into four categories: physics, accelerator, computing and experiments, allowing the reader to get a good understanding of each area.

All concepts are described in a simple and understandable way, such as antimatter being the same particles of matter with opposite charge. More complex concepts are explained with fun facts to help the reader: the temperature of the quark–gluon plasma is 100,000 times hotter than the centre of the Sun, and the time it takes to record a video call of 1 exabyte is 237,823 years. Each description is accompanied by a photograph, logo or simulation representing the described concept, which makes the book visually attractive for the reader.

Born at the start of the global pandemic, the A-to-Z of CERN arose from the need to tell science and technology stories at CERN when internships and summer lectures were either limited or cancelled. Overall, it provides an informative and entertaining glossary of CERN and particle physics in general, peppered with some general physics and technology concepts, such as the SI-unit system and even some non-CERN experiments, such as the former ZEUS experiment at DESY. 

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On 4 July 2012, Sean Carroll was at CERN to witness the momentous announcements by ATLAS and CMS – but not in his usual capacity as a physicist. He was there as an accredited member of the media, sharing an overflow room with journalists to get first-hand footage for the final chapter of his book. The Particle at the End of the Universe ended up being the first big title on the discovery and went on to win the 2013 Royal Society Science Books Prize. “It got reviewed everywhere, so I am really grateful to the Higgs boson and CERN!”

Carroll’s publisher sensed an opportunity for a timely, expert-authored title in 2011, as excitement in ATLAS and CMS grew. He initially said “No” – it wasn’t his research area, and he preferred to present a particular point of view, as he did in his first popular work From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. “With the Higgs boson, there is no disagreement, he says. “Everyone knows what the boson is, what it does and why is it important.” After some negotiation, he received an offer he couldn’t refuse. It also delved into the LHC, the experiments and how it all works, with a dash of quantum field theory and particle physics more generally. “We were hoping the book would come out by the time they announced the discovery, but on the other hand at least I got to include the discovery in the book, and was there to see it.”

Show me the money

Books are not very lucrative, he says. “Back in the 1980s and 1990s, when the success of Hawking’s A Brief History of Time awoke the interest of publishers, if you had a good idea for a physics book you could make a million dollars. But it is very hard to earn enough to make a living. “It takes roughly a year, or more depending on how much you have to learn, and depends on luck, the book and the person writing it.” His next project is a series of three books aimed at explaining physics to the general reader. The first, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time and Motion, due out in September, covers Newtonian mechanics and relativity; the second covers quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, and the third complexity, emergence and large-scale phenomena. 

Meanwhile, Carroll’s podcast Mindscape, in which he invites experts from different fields to discuss a range of topics, has produced 200 episodes since it launched in 2018 and attracts around 100,000 listeners weekly. “I thought that it was a very fascinating idea, basically your personal radio show, but I quickly learned that I didn’t have that many things to say all by myself,” he explains. “Then I realised it would give me an excuse to talk to lot of interesting people and stretch my brain a lot, and that worked out really well.” 

Reaching out

As someone who fell in love with science at a young age and enjoyed speaking and writing, Carroll has clearly found his ideal career. But stepping outside the confines of research is not without its downsides. “Overall, I think it has been negative actually, as it’s hard for some scientists to think that somebody is both writing books and giving talks, and also doing research at the same time. There is a prejudice that if you are a really good researcher then that’s all you do, and anything else is a waste of time. But whatever it does to my career, it has been good in many ways, and I think for the field, because I have reached people who wouldn’t know about physics otherwise.”

We need to take seriously the responsibility to tell people what it is that we have learned about the universe, and why it’s exciting to explore further

Moreover, he says, scientists are obligated to communicate the results of their work. “When it comes to asking the public for lots of money you have to be able to explain why it’s needed, and if they understand some of the physics and they have been excited by other discoveries they are much more likely to appreciate that,” he says, citing the episode of the Superconducting Super Collider. “When we were trying to build the SSC, physicists were trying their best to explain why we needed it and it didn’t work. Big editorials in the New York Times clearly revealed that people did not understand the reasons why this was interesting, and furthermore thought that the kind of physics we do does not have any immediate or technological benefit. But they are all also curious like we are. And while we don’t all have to become pop-science writers or podcasters (just like I am not going to turn up on Tik Tok or do a demo in the street), as a field we really need to take seriously the responsibility to tell people what it is that we have learned about the universe, and why it’s exciting to explore further.”

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With this ambitious book, the authors have produced a unique and excellent account of particle physics that goes way beyond a description of the LHC project. Its 600 pages are a very pleasant, although tough in places, read. The book serves as a highly valuable refresher of modern concepts of particle physics, recalling theoretical ideas as well as explaining advanced detector technologies and analy­sis methods that set the stage for the LHC experiments and the Higgs-boson discovery. Even though the focus converges on the Higgs boson, the full LHC project and its rich physics playground are well covered, and furthermore embedded in the broader context of particle physics and cosmology, as the subtitle indicates.

In a way, it is a multi-layered book, which makes it appealing for the selective reader. Each layer is in itself of great value and highly recommendable. The overarching presentation is attractive, with great photos, nicely prepared graphics and diagrams, and a clear structure guiding readers through the many chapters. Quite unique are the more than 50 inserted text boxes, typically one to three pages long, which explain in a concise way the concepts used in the main text. Experts may wish to skip some of them, but they are very educational (at least as a refresher) for most readers, as they were for me. The text boxes are ideal for students and science enthusiasts of all ages, although some are more demanding than others. 

To start, the authors take the reader off into a substantial 170-page introduction to particle physics in general, and to the Standard Model (SM) in particular. Its theoretical ideas and their mathematical formulations, as well as its key experimental foundation, are clearly presented. The authors also explore with a broad view what the SM cannot explain. Some material in these introductory chapters are the most demanding parts of the book. The theoretical text boxes are a good opportunity for physics students to recall previously-acquired mathematical notions, but they are clearly not meant for non-experts, who can readily skip them and concentrate more on the very nicely documented historical accounts. A short and accessible chapter “Back to the Big Bang” concludes the introductions by embedding particle physics into the broader picture of cosmology.

Next, the LHC and the ATLAS and CMS experiments enter the stage. The LHC project and its history is introduced with a brief reminder of previous hadron colliders (ISR, Spp–S and Tevatron). The presentation of the two general-purpose detectors comes with a short refresher on particle detection and collider experiments. Salient technical features, and collaboration aspects including some historical anecdotes, are covered for ATLAS and CMS. The book continues with the start-up of the machine, including the scary episode of the September 2008 incident, followed by the breathtaking LHC performance after the restart in November 2009 with Runs 1 and 2, until Long Shutdown 2, which began in 2019.

The story of the Higgs-boson discovery is set within a comprehensive framework of the basics of modern analysis tools and methods, a chapter again of special value for students. Ten years later, it is a pleasure to read from insiders how the discovery unfolded, illustrated with plenty of original physics plots and photographs conveying the excitement of the 4 July 2012 announcement. A detailed description of the rich physics harvest testing the Higgs sector as well as challenging the SM in general provides an up-to-date collection of results from the LHC’s first 10 years of physics operations. 

A significant chapter “Quest for new physics” follows, giving the reader a good impression of the many searches hunting for physics beyond the SM. Their relations to, and motivations from, theoretical speculations and astroparticle-physics experiments are explained in an accessible and attractive way. 

A book about the LHC wouldn’t be complete without an excursion to the physics and detectors of flavour and hot and dense matter. With the dedicated experiments LHCb and ALICE, respectively, the LHC has opened exciting new frontiers for both fields. The authors cover these well in a lean chapter introducing the physics and commenting on the highlights so far. 

A look ahead and conclusion round off this impressive document about the LHC’s main mission, the search for the Higgs boson. Much more SM physics has since been extracted, as is amply documented. However, as the last chapter indicates, the journey to find directions to new physics beyond the SM must go on, first with the high-luminosity upgrades of the LHC and its experiments, and then preparing for future colliders reaching either much higher precision on the Higgs-boson properties or higher energies for exploring higher mass particles. Current ideas for such projects that could follow the LHC are briefly introduced. 

The authors are not science historians, but central actors as experimental physicists fully immersed in the LHC adventure. They deliver lively first-hand and personal accounts, all while carefully respecting the historical facts. Furthermore, the book is preceded by a bonus track: the reader can enjoy an inspiring and substantial foreword by Carlo Rubbia, founding father and tireless promoter for the LHC project in the 1980s and early 1990s.

I can only enthusiastically recommend this book, which expands significantly on the French version published in 2014, to all interested in the adventure of the LHC.

The post The LHC experience up close appeared first on CERN Courier.

“If you had to picture a scientist, what would it look like?” That is the question driving the documentary film Picture a Scientist, first released in April 2020 and screened on 10 February this year at the CERN Globe of Science and Innovation. Directed by Emmy-nominated Sharon Shattuck and Ian Cheney, whose previous productions include From This Day Forward (2016) and The Long Coast (2020), respectively, the 97 minute film tackles the difficulties faced by women in STEM careers. It is centered on the experiences of three US researchers – molecular biologist Nancy Hopkins (MIT), chemist Raychelle Burks (St. Edward’s University) and geologist Jane Willenbring (UC San Diego) – among others who have faced various forms of discrimination during their careers.

Hopkins talks about the difficulties she faced as a student in the 1950s and 1960s, when the education system didn’t offer many maths and science lessons to girls, and shares an experience of sexual harassment involving a famous biologist during a lab visit. Willenbring also experienced various mistreatments, including inappropriate nicknames and harassment from a colleague during a 1999 field trip in Antarctica. The film describes how these two anecdotes are just the tip of the iceberg of discrimination that has historically affected female scientists and is still present today. Less visible examples include being ignored in meetings, being treated as a trainee, receiving inappropriate emails and not getting proper credit for work.

Burks, who is Black, explains how the situation is even worse for women of different ethnic groups, as they are even more underrepresented in science. During her childhood, she recalls, most female Black scientists were fictional, such as Star Trek’s communications officer Nyota Uhura.

Being a scientist does not rely on race or gender but only on the love for science

The film highlights the importance of female scientists speaking out to help people see beyond the tip of the iceberg and allow them to act. Hopkins recounts how she once wrote a letter to the president of MIT in which she described systemic and invisible discrimination such as office space being larger for men than for women. Supported and encouraged by female colleagues, it led to a request to the dean of MIT for greater equality. Another example ultimately led the president of Boston University to dismiss the male researcher who had bullied Willenbring, after receiving many reports of gender harassment. 

However, even though progress has been made, the film makes it clear – for example through graphs showing the considerable underrepresentation of women in science – that there is still much to do. “By its own nature science itself should be always evolving,” says Burks: we should be able to identify the idea of a scientist as someone fascinated about research rather than based on its stereotype.

Videos recreating scenes of the bullying described and footage from old TV shows showing the historical mistreatment of women complement candid accounts from those who have experienced discrimination, allowing the viewer to understand their experiences in an impactful way. Some scenes are hard to watch, but are necessary to understand the problem and therefore take steps to increase the recognition of women in STEM careers.

This film raises the often silenced voice of female scientists who have been discriminated against, and makes it clear that being a scientist does not rely on race or gender but only on the love for science. “If you believe that passion and ability for science is evenly distributed among the sexes, then if you don’t have women, you have lost half of the best people,” states Hopkins. “Can we really afford to lose those top scientists?”

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Knowing that it will be his last, it is with a mixture of gratitude and sadness that we welcome the new monograph Foundations of Modern Physics, a textbook for undergraduate students and a source of reflection for teachers and researchers, by the late Steven Weinberg. If we exclude his works for the layperson such as The First Three Minutes or Dreams of a Final Theory, this is Weinberg’s first book for undergraduate students. The idea behind it is plausible but rarely stressed: the foundations of modern physics ultimately rest on the successful development of the notion of fundamental constituents. While common wisdom attributes the origin of modern physics to Galileo and Newton, the original corpuscular intuition goes back to Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius. Weinberg already suggested in To Explain the World: the Discovery of Modern Science that the existence of fundamental constituents, after nearly two millennia of relentless scrutiny, is the ultimate foundation of all the physical sciences.

With smooth language enriched by historical remarks, Weinberg describes the tortuous path that corroborated the corpuscular intuition of the Greek thinkers. The perfect gases, described in chapter 1, led to the Avogadro number, the first fragile bridge between the macroscopic and the corpuscular description of matter. In chapter 2, readers surf through the Maxwellian theory of transport phenomena that define the transition between hydrodynamics and the atomic (or molecular) hypothesis. This ends with three pivotal landmarks: the discreteness of the electric charge, the celebrated results of Einstein and Perrin on Brownian motion (allowing a direct measurement of the Avogadro number) and the black-body radiation puzzle. Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted to early quantum theory and the special theory of relativity. Quantum mechanics is introduced in chapter 5 and the physics of the atomic nucleus in chapter 6. The tenets of the corpuscular description of matter and radiation are combined in the framework of quantum field theory in the final chapter. 

By using the notion of fundamental constituents as the guiding historical and theoretical principle, Weinberg manages to lay the foundations of diverse disciplines (hydrodynamics, statistical mechanics, kinetic theory, thermodynamics, special relativity, quantum mechanics and even field theory) in less than 300 pages. 

The flamboyant imagination of Lucretius in De rerum natura could not have conceived of the possibility of human missions to Mars or the existence of colliders. Nonetheless, his corpuscular intuition was one of the essential seeds that eventually developed into the roots of modern physics. We must all admit, despite claims to the contrary, that modernity is not bound to coincide with recency because good ideas take an exceedingly long time to mature. Weinberg’s time capsule for students of future generations is that truly modern physicists are not always contemporaries.

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The first CERN South Asian High Energy Physics Instrumentation (SAHEPI) workshop, held in Kathmandu, Nepal, in 2017, came into place shortly after Pakistan (July 2015) and India (January 2017) became CERN Associate Member States and follows similar regional approaches in Latin America and South-east Asia. Also, within the South Asia region, CERN has signed bilateral international cooperation agreements with Bangladesh (2014), Nepal (2017) and Sri Lanka (2017). The second workshop took place in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 2019. SAHEPI’s third edition took place virtually on 21 October 2021, hosted by the University of Mauritius in collaboration with CERN. Its aim was to consolidate the dialogue from the first two workshops while strengthening the scientific cooperation between CERN and the South Asia region.

“SAHEPI has been very successful in strengthening the scientific cooperation between CERN and the South Asia region and reinforcing intra-regional links,” said Emmanuel Tsesmelis, head of relations with Associate Members and non-Member States at CERN. “SAHEPI provides the opportunity for countries to enhance their existing contacts and to establish new connections within the region, with the objective of initiating new intra-regional collaborations in particle physics and related technologies, including the promotion of exchange of researchers and students within the region and also with CERN.”

Rising participation

Despite its virtual mode, SAHEPI-3 witnessed the largest participation yet, with 210 registrants. Representatives from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Mauritius, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka attended, with at least one senior scientist and one student from each country. The workshop brought together physicists and policy makers from the South Asia region and neighbouring countries, together with representatives from CERN. Societal applications of technologies developed for particle physics were key highlights of SAHEPI-3, explained Archana Sharma, senior advisor for relations with international organisations at CERN:

“In this decade, disruptive innovation underpinning the importance of science and technology is making a huge impact towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. CERN plays its role at the forefront, whether it is advances in science and technology or dissemination of that knowledge with an emphasis on inclusive engagement. We see the percolation of this initiative with increasing engagement from the region in CERN programmes.”

Participants reviewed the status and operation of present facilities in particle physics, and the scientific experimental programme, including the LHC and its high-luminosity upgrade at CERN, while John Ellis captivated participants with his talk “Answering the Big Question: From the Higgs boson to the dark side of the Universe”.  Sanjaye Ramgoolam topped off the workshop with a public lecture on “the simple and the complex” in elementary particle physics.

SAHEPI has been very successful in strengthening the scientific cooperation between CERN and the South Asia region and reinforcing intra-regional links

Emmanuel Tsesmelis

Country representatives presented several highlights of the ongoing experimental programmes in collaboration with CERN and other international projects. India’s contributions across the ALICE experiment (such as the development of the photon multiplicity detector), its plans to join the IPPOG outreach group, its activities for the Worldwide LHC computing grid, industrial involvement and contributions to CMS – where it is the seventh-largest country in terms of the number of members – were presented. For Afghanistan, representatives described the participation of the country’s first student in the CERN Summer Student School (2019) and the completion of master’s degrees by two faculty members based on measurements at ATLAS. The country hopes to team up with particle physicists outside Afghanistan to teach online courses at the physics faculty at Kabul University, provide postgraduate scholarships to students and involve more female faculty members at ICTP – the International Centre for Theoretical Physics.

Pakistan shared its contributions to the LHC experiments as well as accelerator projects such as CLIC/CTF3 and Linac4 and its role in the tracker alignment of CMS and Resistive Plate Chambers. Nepal representatives described the development of supercomputers at Kathmandu University (KU) and acknowledged the donation agreement between KU and CERN receiving servers and related hardware to set up a high-performance computing facility. In Sri Lanka, delegates highlighted a rising popularity of the CERN Summer Student Programme among university physics students following honours degrees. The country also mentioned its initiative of an island-wide online teacher training programme to promote particle physics. The representative from Bangladesh reported on the country’s long tradition in theoretical particle physics and plans for developing the experimental particle physics community in partnership with CERN. Maldives and Bhutan continue to be growing members from South Asia at CERN, with Bhutan preparing to host the second South Asia science education programme in a hybrid-mode this year.

Strengthening relations
Chief guest Leela Devi Dookun-Luchoomun, the Vice-Prime Minister and Minister of Education, Tertiary Education, Science and Technology of Mauritius, informed the audience about the formation of a research and development unit in her ministry and gave her strong support to a partnership between CERN and Mauritius. The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Mauritius, Dhanjay Jhurry, expressed his deep appreciation of SAHEPI and indicated his support for future initiatives via a partnership between CERN and the University of Mauritius.

The workshop and the initiative to reinforce particle-physics capacity in the region also form part of broader efforts for CERN to emphasise the role of fundamental research in development, notably to advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals agenda. In this regard, discussions took place for a follow-up on the first-of-its-kind professional development programme for high-school teachers of STEM subjects from South Asia, held in New Delhi in 2019, with Bhutan volunteering to host the next event in 2023 pandemic permitting. A poster competition engaged students from South Asia, and three prizes were announced to encourage further participation in big-science projects and towards capacity building in the local regions.

The motivation and enthusiasm of SAHEPI-participants was notable, and the efforts in support of research and education across the region were clear. Proceedings of the workshop will be presented to representatives of the governments from the participating countries to raise awareness at the highest political level of the growth of the community in the region and its value for broader societal development.

Discussions will follow in 2023 at SAHEPI-4, helping CERN continue to engage further with particle physics research and education across South Asia for the benefit of the field as a whole.

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At the time of my PhD, 30 years ago, Dodd’s book was revolutionary and helped me enormously. Over the years I have recommended it to countless students, to complement lectures and internet resources. But I had not looked at the updated versions until now. In keeping with the original, the new edition states explicitly that it is not a textbook: it contains no mathematical derivations, and no complicated formulae are written down. This is not at all to say that it is an easy read – it is not! But Dodd and Ben Gripaios, who joins the original author for this expanded fourth edition, convey the beauty of fundamental physics, and some of the phrases border on poetic: “Viewed picturesquely, it is as if the world of physical reality conducts itself while hovering over an unseen sea of negative-energy electrons.” 

Some of the phrases border on poetic

The second half of the updated book follows on from where the first edition left off. Precision measurements at LEP and the discovery of the gauge bosons and the top quark are all described with the same excitement and eye for beauty as the earlier discoveries. However, the LHC receives fewer words than the World Wide Web, with its almost five-decades-long journey reduced to a couple of milestones. The hunt for the Higgs boson is also glossed over and fails to capture the excitement of the past couple of decades. More problematically, the description of the role the Higgs boson plays in spontaneous symmetry breaking is muddled.

The latter chapters redeem the text by detailing many of the theories that have arisen over the past 30 to 40 years, and how they may address the many remaining questions in fundamental physics. Indeed, while the first edition perhaps gave the impression that there was not much more to learn about the universe, the fourth edition shows how little we understand, and gives good pointers to where we may find answers. 

As a tome on the evolutionary nature of particle physics, with concepts rather than mathematics at the forefront, The Ideas of Particle Physics remains an excellent book, predominantly aimed at graduate students, as a complement to courses and other reference works.

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Having set the scene, director Geneva Guerin, co-founder of Canadian production company Cinécoop, cuts to a wide expanse: a climber scaling a rock face near the French–Swiss border. Francesca Stocker, the star of the film and then a PhD student at the University of Bern, narrates, relating the scientific method to rock climbing. Stocker and her fellow protagonists are engaging, and the film vividly captures the human spirit surrounding the birth of a modern particle-physics detector.

I don’t think it is possible to explain a neutrino for a general audience

Geneva Guerin

But the viewer is not allowed to settle for long in any one location. After zipping to CERN, and a tour through its corridors accompanied by eerie cello music, we meet Stocker in her home kitchen, explaining how she got interested in science as a child. Next, we hop to Federico Sánchez, spokesperson of the T2K experiment in Japan, explaining the basics of the Standard Model. 

T2K, and its successor Hyper-Kamiokande, DUNE’s equal in ambition and scope, both feature in the one-hour-long film. But the focus is on the development of the prototype DUNE detector modules that have been designed, built and tested at the CERN Neutrino Platform – and here the film is at its best. Guerin had full access to protoDUNE activities, allowing her to immerse the viewer with the peculiar but oddly fitting accompaniment of a solo didgeridoo inside the protoDUNE cryostat. We gatecrash celebrations when the vessel was filled with liquid argon and the first test-beam tracks were recorded. The film focuses on detailed descriptions of the workings of TPCs and other parts of the apparatus rather than accessible explanations of the neutrino’s fascinating and mysterious nature. Unformatted plots and graphics are pulled from various sources. While authentic, this gives the film an unpolished, home-made feel.

Given the density of the exposition in some parts, beyond the most enthusiastic popular-science fans, Ghost Particle seems best tailored for physics students encountering experimental neutrino physics for the first time – a point that Guerin herself made during a live Q&A following the CineGlobe screening: “I was aiming at people like me – those who love science documentaries,” she told the capacity crowd. “Originally I envisaged a three-part series over a decade or more, but I realised that I don’t think it is possible to explain a neutrino for a general audience, so maybe it’s something for educational purposes, to help future generations get introduced to this exciting programme.”

The film ends as it began, with the rickety elevator continuing its 12-minute descent into the bowels of the Earth.

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Gato-Rivera sets out with a detailed exploration of the differences between atoms and antiatoms, as well as of matter–antimatter annihilation, motivating the reader to delve into a fairly complete introduction to particle physics: the concepts that underpin the Standard Model, and some that lie beyond. She then focuses on diverse aspects of antimatter science, beginning with the differences between antimatter, dark matter and dark energy, and the different roles they play in the universe. This touches upon the observed accelerating expansion of the universe. In particular, Gato-Rivera discusses dark-matter and dark-energy candidates, attempts to detect dark matter and its relation to the fate of the universe. She also carefully explains the distinction between primordial and secondary antimatter, and their roles in cosmology.

Next up, a historical chapter reviews the major landmarks of the discovery of antimatter particles, from elementary antiparticles to anti-hadrons, and anti-nuclei to antiatoms. In particular, the ground-breaking discovery of the first antiparticle, the positron, is described in excellent detail. In a separate appendix, Gato-Rivera passionately clears up a historical controversy about its discovery. The positron was first found in cosmic rays by Carl Anderson and later artificially produced en masse in particle accelerators. Gato-Rivera then turns to a detailed historical overview of cosmic-ray research, from balloon experiments to large-scale ground-based detectors, finally culminating in modern space-based detectors on board satellites and the ISS. The next chapter covers the production of antimatter by particle collisions in accelerators at high energies, including a brief history of the facilities at CERN.

The focus is then put on one of the most interesting and important conundrums in particle physics and astrophysics: the apparent huge asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the observed universe. This touches upon the processes of the primordial creation of matter and antimatter, and on the open question of whether anti-stars, or even anti-galaxies, could exist somewhere in the universe. 

Gato-Rivera returns to Earth to discuss current experiments in particle physics such as those at CERN’s Antimatter Factory, asking whether antiatoms really have the same properties as atoms, at least as far as their excitation spectra and gravitational pull is concerned. The author doesn’t shy away from popular questions such as whether antimatter anti-gravitates and would float up away from Earth. While the answers to these questions are firmly predicted in theory, there could be surprises, like the discovery of CP violation in the 1950s, so it is important to actually test these fundamental properties.

Sceptical words dash hopes of using antimatter as an energy source

The book finishes by exploring practical uses of antimatter in everyday life, such as the use of PET scanners to detect positrons emitted from short-lived radioactive substances administered to patients. The same principle is also used in material analysis, for example to test the mechanical integrity of turbine blades. But sceptical words dash any hopes of using antimatter as an energy source: the effort of artificially producing a single gram of antimatter would be prohibitive.

Gato-Rivera’s semi-popular text is comprehensive and well structured, with a minimum of mathematical expressions and technicalities. It will be most profitable for a scientifically educated audience with an interest in particle physics, however, experienced researchers who are interested in the history of the subject will also enjoy reading it.

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After being shown the app by her mother during lockdown, ATLAS physicist Clara Nellist downloaded TikTok and created her first two “shorts” in January this year. Jumping on a TikTok trend, the first saw her sing a CERN-themed sea shanty, while the second was an informal introduction to her page as she meandered around a park near the CERN site. Together, these two videos now total almost 600,000 views. Six months later, another ATLAS physicist, James Beacham, joined the platform, also with a quick introduction video explaining his work while using the ATLAS New Small Wheels as a backdrop. The video now has over 1.7 million views. With TikTok videos giving other social-media channels a run for their money, soon more of the high-energy physics community may want to join the rising media tide.

Surfing the wave

From blogs in the early 2000s through to Twitter and YouTube today, user-generated ‘Web 2.0’ platforms have allowed scientists to discuss their work and share their excitement directly. In the case of particle physics, researchers and their labs have never been within closer reach to the public, with a tour of the Large Hadron Collider always just a few clicks away. In 2005, as blogs were mushrooming, CERN and other players in particle physics joined forces to create Quantum Diaries. As the popularity of blogs began to dwindle towards the late noughties, CERN hopped on the next wave, joining YouTube in 2007 and Twitter in 2008 – at a time when public interest in the LHC was at its peak. CERN’s Twitter account currently boasts an impressive 2.5 million followers.

While joining later than some other laboratories, Fermilab caught onto a winning formula on YouTube, with physicist Don Lincoln fronting a long-standing educational series that began in 2011 and still runs today, attracting millions of views. Most major particle-physics laboratories also have a presence on Facebook and Instagram, with CERN joining the platforms in 2011 and 2014 respectively, not to mention LinkedIn, where CERN also possesses a significant following.

Particle physics laboratories are yet to launch themselves on TikTok. But that hasn’t stopped others from creating videos about particle physics, and not always “on message”. Type ‘CERN’ into the TikTok search bar and you are met with almost a 50/50 mix of informative videos and conspiracy theories – and even then, some of the former are merely debunking the latter. Is it time for institutions to get in on the trend?

Rising to the moment

Nellist, who has 123,000 followers on TikTok after less than nine months on the site, believes that it’s the human aspect and uniqueness of her content that has caused the quick success. “I started because I wanted to humanise science – people don’t realise that normal humans work at CERN. When I started there was nobody else at CERN doing it.” Beacham also uses CERN as a way of capturing attention, as illustrated in his weekly livestreams to his 230,000 followers. “If someone is scrolling and sees someone sitting in a DUNE cryostat discussing science, they’re going to stop and check it out,” he says. Beacham sees himself as a filmmaker, rather than a “TikTok-er”, and flexes his bachelor’s degree in film studies with longer form videos that take him across the CERN campus. “There is a desire on TikTok to know about CERN,” he says.

TikTok is different to other social-media platforms in several ways, one being  incompatibility. While a single piece of media such as a video can be shared across YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc., this same media would not work on TikTok. Videos can also only be a maximum of three minutes, although the majority are shorter. This encourages concise productions, with a lot of information put across in a short period of time. Arguably the biggest difference is that TikTok insists that every video is in portrait mode – creating a feeling of authenticity and an intimate environment. YouTube and Instagram are now following suit with their portrait-mode ‘YouTube Shorts’, and ‘Instagram Reels’ respectively, with CERN already using the latter to create quick and informative clips that have attracted large audiences.

Nellist and Beacham, both engaging physicists in their own right who the viewer feels they can trust, create a perfect blend for TikTok. While there are some topics that will always generate more interest, they have a core audience that consistently returns for all videos. This gives a strong sense of editorial freedom, says Nellist. “While it is important to be aware of views, I get to make what I want.”

Changing demographics

When CERN joined Twitter in 2008, says James Gillies, head of CERN communications at the time, young people were a key factor as CERN tried to maximise its digital footprint. But things have changed since then. It is estimated that there are over 1 billion active TikTok users per month, and according to data firm Statista, in the US almost 50% of them are aged 30 and under, with other reports stating that up to 32.5% of users are between the ages of 10 and 19. Statista also estimates that only 24% of today’s Twitter users are under 25 – the so-called ‘Gen-Z’ who will fund and possibly work on future colliders.

If you want to lead the conversation, you have to be part of it

James Gillies

Another reason for CERN to enter the Twitter-verse (and which facilitated the creation of Quantum Diaries), says Gillies, was to allow CERN to take their communication into their own hands. Although Nellist and Beacham are already encouraging this discussion on TikTok, they are not official CERN communication channels. Were they to decide to stop or talk about different topics, it would be hard to find any positive high-energy physics discussions on the most popular app on the planet.

Whilst Nellist believes CERN should be joining the platform, she urges that someone “who knows about it” should be dedicated to creating the content, as it is obvious to TikTok audiences when someone doesn’t understand it. Beacham states, “humans don’t respond to ideas as much as they respond to people.” Creators have their own unique styles and personalities that the viewers enjoy. So, if a large institution were to join, how would it create this personal environment?

The ATLAS experiment is currently the only particle-physics experiment to be found on the platform. The content is less face-to-face and more focused on showing the detector and how it works – similar in style to a CERN Instagram story. Despite being active for a similar amount of time as Nellist and Beacham, however, the account has significantly fewer followers. Nellist, who runs the ATLAS TikTok account, thinks there is room for both personal and institutional creators on the platform, though the content should be different. Beacham agrees, stating that it should show individual scientists expressing information in an off-the-cuff way. “There is a huge opportunity to do something great with it, there are thousands of things you could do. There are amazing visuals that CERN is capable of creating that can grab a viewer’s attention.”

Keeping up

There may be some who scoff at the idea of CERN joining a platform that has a public image of creating dance crazes rather than educational content. It is easy to forget that when first established, YouTube was seen as the place for funny cat videos, while Twitter was viewed as an unnecessary platform for people to tell others what they had for breakfast. Now these two platforms are the only reason some may know CERN exists, and unfortunately, not always for the right reasons.

Social media gives physicists and laboratories the opportunity to contact and influence audiences more directly than traditional channels. The challenge is to keep up with the pace of change. It’s clearly early days for a platform that only took off in 2018. Even NASA, which has the largest number of social-media followers of any scientific institution, is yet to launch an official TikTok channel. But, says Gillies, “If you want to lead the conversation, you have to be part of it.”

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On 21 June, officials and journalists gathered at CERN to mark “first stone” for Science Gateway, CERN’s new flagship project for science education and outreach. Due to open in 2023, Science Gateway will increase CERN’s capacity to welcome visitors of all ages from near and afar. Hundreds of thousands of people per year will have the opportunity to engage with CERN’s discoveries and technology, guided by the people who make it possible.

The project has environmental sustainability at its core. Designed by renowned architect Renzo Piano, the carbon-neutral building will bridge the Route de Meyrin and be surrounded by a freshly planted 400-tree forest. Its five linked pavilions will feature a 900-seat auditorium, immersive spaces, laboratories for hands-on activities for visitors from age five upwards, and many other interactive learning opportunities.

“I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the many partners in our Member and Associate Member States and beyond who are making the CERN Science Gateway possible, in particular to our generous donors,” said CERN Director-General Fabiola Gianotti during her opening speech. “We want the CERN Science Gateway to inspire all those who come to visit with the beauty and the values of science.”

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This short film focuses on mechanic turned physicist Rana Adhikari, who contributed to the 2016 discovery of gravitational waves with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). A laid-back, confident character, Adhikari takes us through the basics of LIGO, while touching upon the future of the field and the public’s view on fundamental research, all while directors Currimbhoy, McCarthy and Pedri facilitate the conversation, which runs at just over 12 minutes.

Following high-school, Adhikari spent time as a car mechanic. Upon reading Einstein’s Medium of Relativity during Hurricane Erin, however, he decided that he wanted to “test the speed of light.” Now, he is a professor at Caltech and a member of the LIGO collaboration, and was awarded a 2019 New Horizons in Physics Prize for his role in the gravitational-wave discovery.

In the film, recorded in 2018, Adhikari explains how fundamental research can be something everyone can get behind, in a world where it is “easy to think we’re all doomed,” and describes the power that rests on collaborations to show the importance of coming together, expressing, “It is a statement of collective willpower.” Through varying shots of him at a blackboard, in and around his experiment, and documentary-style face-to-face discussions, the audience quickly gets to know a positive thinker for whom work is clearly a passion, not a job.

The directors trust Adhikari to take centre stage and explain the world of gravitational waves through accurate metaphors that seem freestyled, yet concise. A sharp cut to a shot of turtles seems unnatural at first, before transforming into an analogy of Adhikari himself – the turtles going underwater and popping their heads up into different streams representing Adhikari’s curiosity, and how he got into the field in the first place.

The film is littered with references to music, most notably with comparisons between guitar strings and the vibrations that LIGO physicists are searching for. After playing a short, smooth riff, Adhikari states his unusual way of analysing data. “It is easier to do maths later – sometimes it’s better to just feel it.” He then plays us the “sound” file of two black holes colliding; a short chirp that is repeated as punchy statements about the long history of gravitational waves are overlayed onto the film.

We should be exploring fundamentals driven by curiosity

Towards the end, the focus takes a shift towards the public’s view on fundamental research. “Lasers weren’t created to scan items in supermarkets,” states Adhikari. “We should be exploring fundamentals driven by curiosity.” The film closes on Adhikari discussing the future of LIGO, tapping a glass to cause a lengthy ring representing the search for longer-wavelength gravitational waves.

Through Adhikari’s story, LIGO: The way the universe Is, I think will inspire anyone who feels alienated or intimidated by fundamental research.

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“What if scientists ruled the world?” — a somewhat sensational but thought-provoking title for a play — is an interactive theatre production by the Australian Academy of Science in partnership with Falling Walls Engage. Staged on 8 May at the Shine Dome in Canberra, Australia, a hybrid performance explored the ramifications of an ill-considered press release, and provided a welcome opportunity for scientists to reflect on how best to communicate their research. The dynamic exchange of ideas between science experts and laypeople in the audience highlighted the power of words, and how they are used to inform, persuade, deceive or confuse. 

After setting the scene, director Ali Clinch invited people participating remotely on Zoom and via a YouTube livestream to guide the actors’ actions, helping to advance and reframe the storyline with their ideas, questions and comments. Looking at the same story from different points of view invited the audience to think about the different stakeholders and their responsibility in communicating science. In the first part of the performance, for example, the science communicator talks excitedly about her job with students, but later has to face a crisis that the busy professor is unable or unwilling to deal with. At a critical point in the story, when a town-hall meeting is held to debate the future of a company that employs most of the people in the town, but which probably produced the same toxic chemical, everybody felt part of the performance. The audience could even take the place of an actor, or act in a new role.

The play highlighted the pleasures and tribulations of work at the interface between research and public engagement

The play highlighted the pleasures and tribulations of work at the interface between research and public engagement during euphoric discoveries and crisis moments alike, and has parallels both with the confusion encountered during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and misguided early fears that the LHC could generate a black hole. In an age of fake news, sensationalism and misinformation, the performance adeptly highlighted the complexities and vested interests inherent in science communication today.

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It is often said that “nobody understands quantum mechanics” – a phrase usually attributed to Richard Feynman. This statement may, however, be misleading to the uninitiated. There is certainly a high level of understanding of quantum mechanics. The point, moreover, is that there is more than one way to understand the theory, and each of these ways requires us to make some disturbing concessions.

Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland is therefore a welcome popular book – a well-written and easy-to-follow exploration of quantum mechanics and its interpretation. Rovelli is a theorist working mainly on quantum gravity and foundational aspects of physics. He is also a very successful popular author, distinguished by his erudition and his ability to illuminate the bigger picture. His latest book is no exception.

Helgoland is a barren German island of the North Sea where Heisenberg co-invented quantum mechanics in 1925 while on vacation. The extraordinary sequence of events between 1925 and 1926, when Heisenberg, Jordan, Born, Pauli, Dirac and Schrödinger formulated quantum mechanics, is the topic of the opening chapter of the book. 

Rovelli only devotes a short chapter to discuss interpretations in general. This is certainly understandable, since the author’s main target is to discuss his own brainchild: relational quantum mechanics. This approach, however, does not do justice to popular ideas among experts, such as the many-worlds interpretation. The reader may be surprised not to find anything about the Copenhagen (or, more appropriately, Bohr’s) interpretation. This is for very good reason, however, since it is not generally considered to be a coherent interpretation. Having mostly historical significance, it has served as inspiration to approaches that keep the spirit of Bohr’s ideas, like consistent histories (not mentioned in the book at all), or Rovelli’s relational quantum mechanics.

Relational quantum mechanics was introduced by Rovelli in an original technical article in 1996 (Int. J. Theor. Phys. 35 1637). Helgoland presents a simplified version of these ideas, explained in more detail in Rovelli’s article, and in a way suitable for a more general audience. The original article, however, can serve as very nice complementary reading for those with some physics background. Relational quantum mechanics claims to be compatible with several of Bohr’s ideas. In some ways it goes back to the original ideas of Heisenberg by formulating the theory without a reference to a wavefunction. The properties of a system are defined only when the system interacts with another system. There is no distinction between observer and observed system. Rovelli meticulously embeds these ideas in a more general historical and philosophical context, which he presents in a captivating manner. He even speculates whether this way of thinking can help us understand topics that, in his opinion, are unrelated to quantum mechanics, such as consciousness.

Helgoland’s potential audience is very diverse and manages to transcend the fact that it is written for the general public. Professionals from both the sciences and the humanities will certainly learn something, especially if they are not acquainted with the nuances of the interpretations of modern physics. The book, however, as is explicitly stated by Rovelli, takes a partisan stance, aiming to promote relational quantum mechanics. As such, it may give a somewhat skewed view of the topic. In that respect, it would be a good idea to read it alongside books with different perspectives, such as Sean Carroll’s Something Deeply Hidden (2019) and Adam Becker’s What is Real? (2018).

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Throughout the history of nuclear, particle and astroparticle physics, novel detector concepts have paved the way to new insights and new particles, and will continue to do so in the future. To help train the next generation of innovators, noted experimental particle physicists Hermann Kolanoski (Humboldt University Berlin and DESY) and Norbert Wermes (University of Bonn) have written a comprehensive textbook on particle detectors. The authors use their broad experience in collider and underground particle-physics experiments, astroparticle physics experiments and medical-imaging applications to confidently cover the spectrum of experimental methods in impressive detail.

Particle Detectors – Fundamentals and Applications combines in a single volume the syllabus also found in two well-known textbooks covering slightly different aspects of detectors: Techniques for Nuclear and Particle Physics Experiments by W R Leo and Detectors for Particle Radiation by Konrad Kleinknecht. Kolanoski and Wermes’ book supersedes them both by being more up-to-date and comprehensive. It is more detailed than Particle Detectors by Claus Grupen and Boris Shwartz – another excellent and recently published textbook with a similar scope – and will probably attract a slightly more advanced population of physics students and researchers. This new text promises to become a particle-physics analogue of the legendary experimental-nuclear-physics textbook Radiation Detection and Measurement by Glenn Knoll.

The book begins with a comprehensive warm-up chapter on the interaction of charged particles and photons with matter, going well beyond a typical textbook level. This is followed by a very interesting discussion of the transport of charge carriers in media in magnetic and electric fields, and – a welcome novelty – signal formation, using the method of “weighting fields”. The main body of the book is devoted first to gaseous, semiconductor, Cherenkov and transition-radiation detectors, and then to detector systems for tracking, particle identification and calorimetry, and the detection of cosmic rays, neutrinos and exotic matter. Final chapters on electronics readout, triggering and data acquisition complete the picture. 

Particle Detectors – Fundamentals and Applications is best considered a reference for lectures on experimental methods in particle and nuclear physics for postgraduate-level students. The book is easy to read, and conceptual discussions are well supported by numerous examples, plots and illustrations of excellent quality. Kolanoski and Wermes have undoubtedly written a gem of a book, with value for any experimental particle physicist, be they a master’s student, PhD student or accomplished researcher looking for detector details outside of their expertise.

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A greying giant of the field speaks to the blackboard for 45 minutes before turning, dismissively seizing paper and scissors, and cutting a straight slit. The sheet is twisted to represent the conical space–time described by the symbols on the board. A lecture theatre of students is transfixed in admiration.

This is not the teaching style advocated by José Mestre and Jennifer Docktor in their new book The Science of Learning Physics. And it’s no longer typical, say the authors, who suggest that approximately half of physics lecturers use at least one “evidence-based instructional practice” – jargon, most often, for an interactive teaching method. As colleagues joked when I questioned them on their teaching styles, there is still a performative aspect to lecturing, but these days it is just as likely to reflect the rock-star feeling of having a hundred camera phones pointed at you – albeit so the students can snap a QR code on your slide to take part in an interactive mid-lecture quiz.

Swiss and Soviet developmental psychologists Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky are duly namechecked

Mestre and Docktor, who are both educational psychologists with a background in physics, offer intriguing tips to maximise the impact of such practices. After answering a snap poll, they say, students should discuss with their neighbour before being polled again. The goal is not just to allow the lecturer to tailor their teaching, but also to allow students to “construct” their knowledge. Lecturing, they say, gives piecemeal information, but does not connect it. Neurons fire, but synaptic connections are not trained. And as the list of neurotransmitters that reinforce synaptic connections includes dopamine and serotonin, making students feel good by answering questions correctly may be worth the time investment.

Relative to other sciences, physics lecturers are leading the way in implementing evidence-based instructional practices, but far too few are well trained, say Mestre and Docktor, who want to bring the tools and educational philosophies of the high-school physics teacher to the lecture theatre. Swiss and Soviet developmental psychologists Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky are duly namechecked. “Think–pair–share”, mini whiteboards and flipping the classroom (not a discourteous gesture but the advance viewing of pre-recorded lectures before a more participatory lecture), are the order of the day. Students are not blank slates, they write, but have strong attachments to deeply ingrained and often erroneous intuitions that they have previously constructed. Misconceptions cannot be supplanted wholesale, but must be unknotted strand by strand. Lecturers should therefore explicitly describe their thought processes and encourage students to reflect on “metacognition”, or “thinking about thinking”. Here the text is reminiscent of Nobelist Daniel Kahneman’s seminal text Thinking, Fast and Slow, which divides thinking into two types: “system 1”, which is instinctive and emotional, and “system 2”, which is logical but effortful. Lecturers must fight against “knee-jerk” reasoning, say Mestre and Docktor, by modelling the time-intensive construction of knowledge, rather than aspiring to misleading virtuoso displays of mathematical prowess. Wherever possible, this should be directly assessed by giving marks not just for correct answers, but also for identifying the “big idea” and showing your working.

Disappointingly, examples are limited to pulleys and ramps, and, somewhat ironically, the book’s dusty academic tone may prove ineffective at teaching teachers to teach. But no other book comes close to The Science of Learning Physics as a means for lecturers to reflect on and enrich their teaching strategies, and it is highly recommend on that basis. That said, my respect for my old general-relativity lecturer remained undimmed as I finished the last page. Those old-fashioned lectures were hugely inspiring – a “non-cognitive aspect” that Mestre and Docktor admit their book does not consider.

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Science and basic research are drivers of technologies and innovations, which in turn are key to solving global challenges such as climate change and energy. The United Nations has summarised these challenges in 17 “sustainable development goals”, but it is striking how little connection with science they include. Furthermore, as found by a UNESCO study in 2017, the interest of the younger generation in studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics is falling, despite jobs in these areas growing at a rate three times faster than in any other sector. Clearly, there is a gulf between scientists and non-scientists when it comes to the perception of the importance of fundamental research in their lives – to the detriment of us all.

Some in the community are resistant to communicate physics spin-offs because this is not our primary purpose

Try asking your neighbours, kids, family members or mayor of your city whether they know about the medical and other applications that come from particle physics, or the stream of highly qualified people trained at CERN who bring their skills to business and industry. While the majority of young people are attracted to physics by its mindboggling findings and intriguing open questions, our subject appeals even more when individuals find out about its usefulness outside academia. This was one of the key outcomes of a recent survey, Creating Ambassadors for Science in Society, organised by the International Particle Physics Outreach Group (IPPOG).

Do most “Cernois” even know about the numerous start-ups based on CERN technologies or the hundreds of technology disclosures from CERN, 31 of which came in 2019 alone? Or about the numerous success stories contained within the CERN impact brochure and the many resources of CERN’s knowledge-transfer group? Even though “impact” is gaining attention, anecdotally when I presented  these facts to my research colleagues they were not fully aware. Yet who else will be our ambassadors, if not us?

Some in the community are resistant to communicate physics spin-offs because this is not our primary purpose. Yet, millions of people who have lost their income as a result of COVID-19 are rather more concerned about where their next rent and food payments are coming from, than they are about the couplings of the Higgs boson. Reaching out to non-physicists is more important than ever, especially to those with an indifferent or even negative attitude to science. Differentiating audiences between students, general public and politicians is not relevant when addressing non-scientifically educated people. Strategic information should be proactively communicated to all stakeholders in society in a relatable way, via eye-opening, surprising and emotionally charged stories about the practical applications of curiosity-driven discoveries.

IPPOG has been working to provide such stories since 2017 – and there is no shortage of examples. Take the touchscreen technology first explored at CERN 40 years ago, or humanitarian satellite mapping carried out for almost 20 years by UNOSAT, which is hosted at CERN. Millions of patients are diagnosed daily thanks to tools like PET and MRI, while more recent medical developments include innovative radioisotopes from MEDICIS for precision medicine, the first 3D colour X-ray images, and novel cancer treatments  based on superconducting accelerator technology. In the environmental arena, recent CERN spin-offs include a global network of air-quality sensors and fibre-optic sensors for improved water and pesticide management, while CERN open-source software is used for digital preservation in libraries and its computing resources have been heavily deployed in fighting the pandemic.

Building trust

Credibility and trust in science can only be built by scientists themselves, while working hand in hand with professional communicators, but not relying only on them. Extracurricular activities, such as those offered by IPPOG, CERN, other institutions and individual initiatives, are crucial in changing the misperceptions of the public and bringing about fact-based decision-making to the young generation. Scientists should develop a proactive strategic approach and even consider becoming active in policy making, following the shining examples of those who helped realise the SESAME light source in the Middle East and the South East European International Institute for Sustainable Technologies.

Particle physics already inspires some of the brightest minds to enter science. But audiences never look at our subject with the same eyes once they’ve learned about its applications and science-for-peace initiatives.

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Most travellers know that it is essential to have a good travel guide when setting out into unexplored territory. A book where one can learn what previous travellers discovered about these surroundings, with both global information on the language, history and traditions of the land to be explored, and practical details on how to overcome day-to-day difficulties. Andrzej Buras’s recent book, Gauge Theory of Weak Decays, is the ideal guide for both new physicists and seasoned travellers, and experimentalists and theoreticians alike, who wish to start a new expedition into the fascinating world of weak meson decays, in pursuit of new physics.

The physics of weak decays is one of the most active and interesting frontiers in particle physics, from both the theoretical and the experimental points of view. Major steps in the construction of the Standard Model (SM) have been made possible only thanks to key observations in weak decays. The most famous example is probably the suppression of flavour-changing neutral currents in kaon decays, which led Glashow, Iliopoulos and Maiani to postulate, in 1970, the existence of the charm quark, well before its direct discovery. But there are many other examples, such as the heaviness of the top quark, inferred from the large matter-to-antimatter oscillation frequency of neutral B mesons, again well before its discovery. In the post-Higgs-discovery era, weak decays are a privileged observatory in which to search for signals of physics beyond the SM. The recent “B-physics anomalies”, reported by LHCb and other experiments, could indeed be the first hint of new physics. The strategic role that weak decays play in the search for new physics is further reinforced by the absence on the horizon, at least in the near future, of a collider with a centre-of-mass energy exceeding that of the LHC, while the LHC and other facilities still have a large margin of improvement in precision measurements.

As Buras describes with clarity, signals of new physics in the weak decays of K, D, and B mesons, and other rare low-energy processes, could manifest themselves as deviations from the precise predictions of the corresponding decay rates that we are able to derive within the SM. In the absence of a reference beyond-the-SM theory, it is not clear where, and at which level of precision, these deviations could show up. But general quantum field theory arguments suggest that weak decays are particularly sensitive probes of new physics, as they can often be predicted with high accuracy within the SM.

The two necessary ingredients for a journey in the realm of weak decays are therefore precise SM predictions on the one hand, and a broad-spectrum investigation of beyond-the-SM sensitivity on the other. These are precisely the two ingredients of Buras’s book. In the first part, he guides the reader though all the steps necessary to arrive to the most up-to-date predictions for rare decays. This part of the book offers different paths to different readers: students are guided, in a very pedagogical way, from tree-level calculations to high-precision multi-loop calculations. Experienced readers can directly find up-to-date phenomenological expressions that summarise the present knowledge on virtually any process of current experimental interest. This part of the book can also be viewed as a well-thought-out summary of the history of precise SM calculations for weak decays, written by one of its most relevant protagonists.

Beyond the Standard Model

The second part of the book is devoted to physics beyond the SM. Here the style is quite different: less pedagogical and more encyclopaedic. Employing a pragmatic approach, which is well motivated to discuss low-energy processes, extensions of the SM are classified according to properties of hypothetical new heavy particles, from Z′ bosons to leptoquarks, and from charged Higgs bosons to “vector-like” fermions. This allows Buras to analyse the impact of such models on rare processes in a systematic way, with great attention paid to correlations between observables.

To my knowledge, this book is the first comprehensive monograph of this type, covering far more than just the general aspects of SM physics, as may be found in many other texts on quantum field theory. The uniqueness of this book lies in its precious details on a wide variety of interesting rare processes. It is a key reference that was previously missing, and promises to be extremely useful in the coming decades.

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We want to break stereotypes about scientists

Vojtech Pleskot

“We just want to show that scientists are absolutely normal people, and that no one needs to fear them,” says Pleskot, who wrote and directed the film alongside producer Martin Rybar and animator Daniel Scheirich. Modest and self-effacing when I interviewed them, the three physicists produced the film with no funding and no prior expertise, beating off competition from well funded projects to win the Canadian award. Even within the vibrant but specialist niche of high-energy-physics geekery, competition included “The world of thinking”, featuring interviews with Ed Witten, Freeman Dyson and others, and a professionally produced film dramatising a love letter from Richard Feynman to his late wife Arline, who passed away while he was working on the Manhattan Project. But Pleskot, Rybar and Scheirich won the judges over with their idiosyncratic distillation of life at the rock-face of discovery. The trio place their film in the context of growing scepticism of science and scientists. “We want to break stereotypes about scientists,” adds Pleskot.

Not every stereotype is broken, and there is room to quibble about some of the details, but grassroots projects such as A Day With Particles boast a quirky authenticity which is difficult to capture through institutional planning, and is well placed to connect emotionally with non-physicists. The film is beautifully paced. Wide-eyed enthusiasm for physics cuts to an adorable glimpse of Pleskot’s two “cute little particles” having breakfast. A rapid hop from Democritus to Rutherford to the LHC cuts to tracking shots of Pleskot making his way through the streets of Prague to the university. The realities of phone conferences, failed grid jobs and being late for lab demonstrations are interwoven with a grad student dancing to discuss her analysis, conversations on free-diving with turtles and the stories of beloved professors recalling life in the communist era. Life as a physicist is good. And life as a physicist is really like this, they insist. “I hope that science communicators will share it far and wide,” says Connie Potter (CERN and ATLAS), who commissioned the film for the 2020 edition of ICHEP, and who was also recognised by the Toronto festival for her indefatigable “indie spirit” in promoting it.

A Day With Particles will next be considered at the World of Film International Festival in Glasgow in June, where it has been selected as a semi-finalist.

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Popular representations of the Standard Model (SM) often hide its beautiful weirdness, for example slotting quarks and leptons into boxes and arranging them like a low-grade Mendeleev, or contriving a dartboard arrangement. The “double simplex” scheme invented in 2005 by US theorist Chris Quigg, which was recently given a flashy makeover by Quanta magazine (see image), is much richer (arXiv:hep-ph/0509037).

Jogesh Pati and Abdus Salam’s suggestion, in their 1974 shot at a grand unified theory, that lepton number be regarded as a fourth colour, inspired Quigg to place the leptons at the fourth point of an SU(4) tetrahedron. The additional edges therefore represent possible leptoquark transitions. Left-handed fermion doublets (left) are reflected in the broken mirror of parity to reveal right-handed fermion singlets (right), though Quanta, unlike Quigg perhaps favouring a purely left-handed Majorana mass term, omit possible right-handed neutrinos.

A final distinction is that Quigg chooses to superimpose the left and right simplexes – a term for a generalised triangle or tetrahedron in an arbitrary number of dimensions – while Quanta elects to separate the tetrahedra, and label couplings to the Higgs boson with sweeping loops. This obscures a beautiful feature of Quigg’s design, whereby the Yukawa couplings hypothesised by the SM, which couple the left- and right-handed incarnations of massive fermions in interactions with the Higgs field, link opposite corners of the superimposed double simplex, placing the Higgs boson at the centre of the picture. Quigg, who intended that the double simplex precipitate questions, also points out that the corners of the superimposed tetrahedra define a cube, whose edges suggest a possible new category of feeble interactions yet to be discovered.

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Finding Higgs bosons can seem esoteric to the uninitiated. The spouse of a colleague of mine has such trouble describing what their partner does that they read from a card in the event that they are questioned on the subject. Do you experience similar difficulties in describing what you do to loved ones? If so, then Ivo van Vulpen’s book How to find a Higgs boson may provide you with an ideal gift opportunity.

Readers will feel like they are talking physics over a drink with van Vulpen, who is a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam and a member of the ATLAS collaboration. Originally published as De melodie van de natuur, the book’s Dutch origins are unmistakable. We read about Hans Lippershey’s lenses, Antonie van Leeuwenhoeck’s microbiology, Antonius van den Broek’s association of charge with the number of electrons in an atom, and even Erik Verlinde’s theory of gravity as an emergent entropic force. Though the Higgs is dangled at the end of chapters as a carrot to get the reader to keep reading, van Vulpen’s text isn’t an airy pamphlet cashing in on the 2012 discovery, but a realistic representation of what it’s like to be a particle physicist. When he counsels budding scientists to equip themselves better than the North Pole explorer who sets out with a Hugo Boss suit, a cheese slicer and a bicycle, he tells us as much about himself as about what it’s like to be a physicist.

Van Vulpen is a truth teller who isn’t afraid to dent the romantic image of serene progress orchestrated by a parade of geniuses. 9999 out of every 10,000 predictions from “formula whisperers” (theorists) turn out to be complete hogwash, he writes, in the English translation by David McKay. Sociological realities such as “mixed CMS–ATLAS” couples temper the physics, which is unabashedly challenging and unvarnished. The book boasts a particularly lucid and intelligible description of particle detectors for the general reader, and has a nice focus on applications. Particle accelerators are discussed in relation to the “colour X-rays” of the Medipix project. Spin in the context of MRI. Radioactivity with reference to locating blocked arteries. Antimatter in the context of PET scans. Key ideas are brought to life in cartoons by Serena Oggero, formerly of the LHCb collaboration.

The weak interaction is like a dog on an attometre-long chain.

Attentive readers will occasionally be frustrated. For example, despite a stated aim of the book being to fight “formulaphobia”, Bohr’s famous recipe for energy levels lacks the crucial minus sign just a few lines before a listing of –3.6 eV (as opposed to –13.6 eV) for the energy of the ground state. Van Vulpen compares the beauty seen by physicists in equations to the beauty glimpsed by musicians as they read sheet music, but then prints Einstein’s field equations with half the tensor indices missing. But to quibble about typos in the English translation would be to miss the point of the book, which is to allow readers “to impress friends over a drink,” and talk physics “next time you’re in a bar”. Van Vulpen’s writing is always entertaining, but never condescending. Filled with amusing but perceptive one-liners, the book is perfectly calibrated for readers who don’t usually enjoy science. Life in a civilisation that evolved before supernovas would have no cutlery, he observes. Neutrinos are the David Bowie of particles. The weak interaction is like a dog on an attometre-long chain.

This book could be the perfect gift for a curious spouse. But beware: fielding questions on the excellent last chapter, which takes in supersymmetry, SO(10), and millimetre-scale extra dimensions, may require some revision.

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Instead of building a large treatise, Weinberg prioritises key topics that appeared in a set of lectures taught by the author at the University of Texas at Austin. The book has four parts, which deal with stars, binaries, the interstellar medium and galaxies, respectively. The analysis of stellar structure starts from the study of hydrostatic equilibrium and is complemented by various classic discussions including the mechanisms for nuclear energy generation and the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. In view of the striking observations in 2015 by the LIGO and Virgo interferometers, the second part contains a dedicated discussion of the emission of gravitational waves by binary pulsars and coalescing binaries.

As you might expect from the classic style of Weinberg’s monographs, the book provides readers with a kit of analytic tools of permanent value. His approach contrasts with many modern astrophysics and particle-theory texts, where analytical derivations and back-of-the-envelope approximations are often replaced by numerical computations which are mostly performed by computers. By the author’s own admission, however, this book is primarily intended for those who care about the rationale of astrophysical formulas and their applications.

Weinberg’s books always stimulate a wealth of considerations on the mutual interplay of particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology

This monograph is also a valid occasion for paying tribute to a collection of classic treatises that inspired the current astrophysical literature and that are still rather popular among the practitioners of the field. The author reveals in his preface that his interest in stellar structure started many years ago after reading the celebrated book of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (An introduction to Stellar Structure), which was reprinted by Dover in the late fifties. Similarly the discussions on the interstellar medium are inspired by the equally famous monograph of Lyman Spitzer Jr. (Physical Processes in the Interstellar medium 1978, J. Wiley & Sons). For the benefit of curious and alert readers, these as well as other texts are cited in the essential bibliography at the end of each chapter.

Steven Weinberg’s books always stimulate a wealth of considerations on the mutual interplay of particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology, and the problems of dark matter, dark energy, gravitational waves and neutrino masses are today so interlocked that it is quite difficult to say where particle physics stops and astrophysics takes over. Modern science calls for multidisciplinary approaches, and while the frontiers between the different areas are now fading away, the potential discovery of new laws of nature will not only proceed from concrete observational efforts but also from the correct interpretation of the existing theories. If we want to understand the developments of fundamental physics in coming years, Lectures on Astrophysics will be an inspiring source of reflections and a valid reference.

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As the school had been forced online due the ongoing pandemic, the organisers settled upon a reduced programme with just one or two 45 minutes lectures per day. Active moderation was key, with students typing questions in the chat box, and the moderator interrupting the lecturer when appropriate, to give the participants a chance to speak up. This format conferred upon less brash participants a more comfortable way to ask questions, several students noted. When one brave pioneer had broken the ice, queries flowed every few minutes – a resonance effect characterised by a lively, stimulating and relaxed atmosphere which boosted concentration levels.

With its global reach and breathing space for students to explore concepts independently, Terascale 2020’s compact online format may merit consideration during less extraordinary times too.

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Larkoski begins with an introduction to special relativity and the standard preliminaries to particle physics, such as the Dirac equation, Fermi’s Golden rule and a very accessible introduction to group theory. The book also features a superb 30-page chapter on experimental concepts and statistics — an excellent resource for any student starting a particle-physics project for the first time. The main menu follows: matrix element and cross-sections calculations for QED, QCD and weak interactions. The book includes a nice introduction to electroweak unification, the basics of flavour physics, neutrino oscillations, and an accessible discussion on parton evolution and jets. The latter will be particularly useful for students of LHC physics. The book closes with an insightful chapter on open problems in particle physics.

A very nice collection of unsolved exercises will serve as an invaluable resource for lecturers. Many refer to processes currently being studied at the LHC and other projects. The book’s modernity is also evident through mentions throughout the text on the latest results in dark matter and neutrino physics, and a discussion on how the Higgs boson discovery was made.

Analogies are drawn between Feynman diagrams and electrical circuits

A particularly attractive feature of Larkoski’s writing is his use of intuitive and conceptual discussions: dimensional analysis is used often in calculations to get an idea of what we expect; analogies are drawn between Feynman diagrams and electrical circuits; connections between space curvature and quantum chromodynamics are pointed out, just to mention some of the very many examples you can find in the book.

One point that the lecturers should be aware of is that Larkoski employs the Weyl basis of Dirac γ-matrices, whereas Griffiths, Thomson (Modern Particle Physics, Cambridge, 2013), Halzen & Martin (Quarks and Leptons, Wiley, 1984), and other popular textbooks which currently form the backbone of many university courses, use the Dirac basis. As a result, both equations and Feynman rules look different, and care will be required when multiple textbooks are used in the same course. In general, Larkoski is closer to Thomson and Griffiths, as it does not include the wide range of calculations of Halzen & Martin, which is slightly more advanced.

Larkoski’s new book will certainly find its way among the most popular particle physics textbooks. Its clear and intuitive presentation will doubtlessly deepen the understanding of students who read it, and inspire lecturers to a more conceptual approach to teaching.

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Science, from the immutable logic of its mathematical underpinnings to the more fluid realms of the social sciences, has carried us from our humble origins to an understanding of such esoteric notions as gravitation and quantum mechanics. This knowledge has been applied to develop devices such as GPS trackers and smartphones – a story repeated in countless domains for a century or more – and it has delivered new tools for basic research along the way in a virtuous circle.

While it is undeniable that science has led us to a better world than that inhabited by our ancestors, and that it will continue to deliver intellectual, utilitarian and economic progress, advancement is not always linear. Research has led us up blind alleys, and taken wrong turnings, yet its strength is its ability to process data, to self-correct and to form choices based on the best available evidence. The current coronavirus pandemic could prove to be a great educator in the methods of science, demonstrating how the right course of action evolves as the evidence accumulates. We’ve seen all too clearly how badly things can go wrong when individuals and governments fail to grasp the importance of evidence-based decision making.

Fundamental science has to make its case not only on the basis of cultural wealth, but also in terms of socioeconomic benefit. In particle physics, we also have no shortage of examples. These go well beyond the web, although an economic impact assessment of that particular invention is one that I would be very interested in seeing. As of 2014, there were some 42,200 particle accelerators worldwide, 64% of which were used in industry, a third for medical purposes and just 3% in research – not bad for a technology invented for fundamental exploration. It’s a similar story for techniques developed for particle detection, which have found their way into numerous applications, especially in medicine and biology.

The benefits of Big Science for economic prosperity become more pertinent if we consider the cumulative contributions to the 21st-century knowledge economy, which relies heavily on research and innovation. In 2018, more than 40% of the CERN budget was returned to industry in its member-state countries through the procurement of supplies and services, generating corollary benefits such as opening new markets. Increasing efforts, for example by the European Commission, to require research infrastructures to estimate their socioeconomic impact are a welcome opportunity to quantify and demonstrate our impact.

CERN has been subject to economic impact assessments since the 1970s, with one recent cost–benefit analysis of the LHC, conducted by economists at the University of Milan, concluding with 92% probability that benefits exceed costs, even when attaching the very conservative figure of zero to the value of the organisation’s scientific discoveries. More recent  studies (CERN Courier September 2018 p51) by the Milan group, focusing on the High-Luminosity LHC, revealed a quantifiable return to society well in excess of the project’s costs, again, not including its scientific output. Extrapolating these results, the authors show that future colliders at CERN would bring similar societal benefits on an even bigger scale.

Across physics more broadly, a 2019 report commissioned by the European Physical Society found that physics-based industries generate more than 16% of total turnover and 12% of overall employment in Europe – represen­ting a net annual contribution of at least €1.45 trillion, and topping contributions from the financial services and retail sectors (CERN Courier January/February 2020 p9).

Of course, there are some who feel that limited resources for science should be deployed in areas such as addressing climate change, rather than blue-sky research. These views can be persuasive, but are misleading. Fundamental research is every bit as important as directed research, and through the virtuous circle of science, they are mutually dependent. The open questions and mind-bending concepts explored by particle physics and astronomy also serve to draw bright young minds into science, even if individuals go on to work in other areas. Surveys of the career paths taken by PhD students working on CERN experiments fully bear this out (CERN Courier April 2019 p55).

In April 2020, as a curtain-raiser to the update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics, Nature Physics published a series of articles about potential future directions for CERN. An editorial pointed out the strong scientific and utilitarian case for future colliders, concluding that: “Even if the associated price tag may seem high – roughly as high as that of the Tokyo Olympic Games – it is one worth paying.” This is precisely the kind of argument that we as a community should be prepared to make if we are to ensure continuing exploration of fundamental physics in the 21st century and beyond.

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The inaugural joint German-Armenian internship in accelerator physics was held at the CANDLE Institute in Yerevan, Armenia, from 29 September to 5 October. In this first round, twelve undergraduates at Universität Hamburg joined eleven students from Yerevan State University to form eight small teams. Each team worked its way through an experiment under the supervision of experts from both nations, interacting with physicists in a laboratory setting for the first time in many cases. The goal of the programme of week-long internships, which was supported by the German Federal Foreign Office, is to integrate accelerator physics and technology into undergraduate courses and provide students with an early experience of international cooperation. It will make use of eight experimental stations recently set up to foster young academics learning accelerator technology in Armenia.

CANDLE is the Armenian synchrotron-radiation storage-ring project. As a first step towards its realisation, AREAL, an ultrafast laser-driven electron accelerator, has been constructed. The next steps are S-band linac acceleration up to 20-50 MeV and the generation of coherent and tunable THz-radiation in an undulator.

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On 25 January, a muon detector, a particle physicist and a prizewinning pilot ascended 4000 m above the Swiss countryside in a hot-air balloon to commemorate the discovery of cosmic rays. The event was the highlight of the opening ceremony of the 42nd Château-d’Oex International Balloon Festival, attended by an estimated 30,000 people, and attracted significant media coverage.

In the early 1900s, following Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity, studying radiation was all the rage. Portable electrometers were used to measure the ionisation of air in a variety of terrestrial environments, from fields and lakes to caves and mountains. With the idea that ionisation should decrease with altitude, pioneers adventured in balloon flights as early as 1909 to count the number of ions per cm³ of air as a function of altitude. First results indeed indicated a decrease up to 1300 m, but a subsequent ascent to 4500 m by Albert Gockel, professor of physics at Fribourg, concluded that ionisation does not decrease and possibly increases with altitude. Gockel, however, who later would coin the term “cosmic radiation”, was unable to obtain the hydrogen needed to go to higher altitudes. And so it fell to Austrian physicist Victor Hess to settle the case. Ascending to 5300 m in 1912, Hess clearly identified an increase, and went on to share the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of cosmic rays. Gockel, who died in 1927, could not be awarded, and for that reason is almost forgotten by history.

ATLAS experimentalist Hans Peter Beck of the University of Bern, and a visiting professor at the University of Fribourg, along with two students from the University of Fribourg, reenacted Gockel’s and Hess’s pioneering flights using 21st-century technology: a muon telescope called the Cosmic Hunter, newly developed by instrumentation firm CAEN. The educational device, which counts coincidences in two scintillating-fibre tiles of 15 × 15 cm² separated by 15 cm, verified that the flux of cosmic rays increases as a function of altitude. Within two hours of landing, including a one-hour drive back to the starting point, Beck was able to present the data plots during a public talk attended by more than 250 people. A second flight up to 6000 m is planned, with oxygen supplies for passengers, when weather conditions permit.

“Relating balloons with particle physics was an easy task, given the role balloons played in the early days for the discovery of cosmic rays,” says Beck. “It is a narrative that works and that touches people enormously, as the many reactions at the festival have shown.”

The event – a collaboration with the universities of Bern and Fribourg, the Swiss Physical Society, and the Jungfraujoch research station – ran in parallel to a special exhibition about cosmic rays at the local balloon museum, organised by Beck and Michael Hoch from CMS, which was the inspiration for festival organisers to make physics a focus of the event, says Beck: “Without this, the festival would never have had the idea to bring ‘adventure, science and freedom’ as this year’s theme. It’s really exceptional.”

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We have many fantastic achievements in our wonderful field of research, most recently the completion of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its discovery of a new form of matter, the Higgs boson. The field is now preparing to face the next set of challenges, in whatever direction the European Strategy for Particle Physics recommends. With ambitious goals, this strategy update is the right time to ask: “How do we make ourselves as good as we need to be to succeed?”

Big science has brought more than fundamental knowledge: it has taught us that we can achieve more when we collaborate, and to do this we need to communicate both within and beyond the community. We need to communicate to our funders and, most importantly of all, we need to communicate with wider society to give everyone an opportunity to engage in or become a part of the scientific process. Yet some of the audiences we could and should be reaching are below the radar.

Reaching high-science capital people – those who will attend a laboratory open day, watch a new documentary on dark energy or read a newspaper article about medical accelerators – is a vital part of our work, and we do it well. But many audiences have barriers to traditional modes of outreach and engagement. For example, groups or families with an inherently low science background, perhaps linked to socio-economic grouping, will not read articles in the science-literate mainstream press as they feel, incorrectly, that science is not for them. Large potential audiences with physical or mental disabilities will be put off coming to events for practical reasons such as accessibility or perhaps being unable to read or understand printed or visual media. In the UK alone, millions of people are registered as visually impaired (VI) to some degree. To reach these and other “invisible” audiences, we need to enter their space.

Inspired by the LHC

When it comes to science engagement, which is a predominantly visual interaction, the VI audience is underserved. Tactile Collider is a communication project aimed at addressing this gap. The idea came in 2014 when a major LHC exhibition came to Manchester, UK. Joining in panel discussions at a launch party held at the Museum for Science and Industry, it became clear that the accessibility of the exhibition could be improved. Spurring us into action, we also had a request from a local VI couple for an adapted tour. I gathered together some pieces of the ATLAS forward detector and some radio-frequency cavity models, both of which had a pleasing weight and plenty of features to feel with fingers, and gave the couple a bespoke tour of the exhibition. The feedback was fantastic, and making this tactile, interactive and bespoke form of engagement available to more people, be it sighted or VI, was a challenge we accepted.

With the help of the museum staff, we developed the idea further and were soon put in touch with Kirin Saeed, an independent consultant on accessibility and visually impaired herself. Together, we formulated a potential project to a stage where we could approach funders. The UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) recognised and supported our vision for a UK-wide project and funded the nascent Tactile Collider for two years through a £100,000 public-engagement grant.

We wanted to design a project without preconceptions about the techniques and methods of communication and delivery. With co-leaders Chris Edmonds of the University of Liverpool and Robyn Watson, a teacher of VI students, our team spent one year listening to and talking with audiences before we even considered producing mat­erials or defining an approach. We spent time in focus groups, in classrooms across the north of England, visiting museums with VI people, and looking at the varied ways of learning and accessing information for VI groups of all ages. Training in skills such as audio description and tactile-map production was crucial, as were the PhD students who got involved to design materials and deliver Tactile Collider events.

Early on, we focused on a science message based around four key themes: the universe is made of particles; we accelerate these particles using electric fields in cavities; we control particle beams using magnets; and we collide particle beams to make the Higgs boson. The first significant event took place in Liverpool in 2017 and since then the exhibition has toured UK schools, science festivals and, in 2019, joined the CERN Open Days for our first Geneva-region event.

Content development

A key aspect of Tactile Collider is content developed specifically for a VI audience, along with training the delivery team in how to sight-guide and educating them about the large range of visual impairments. As an example, take the magnetic field of a dipole – the first step to understanding how magnets are used to control and manipulate charged particle beams. The idea of a bar magnet having a north pole and a south pole, and magnetic field lines connecting the two, is simple enough to convey using pencil and paper. To communicate with VI audiences, by contrast, the magnet station of Tactile Collider contains a 3D model of a bar magnet with tactile bumps for north and south poles, partnered with tactile diagrams. In some areas of Tactile Collider, 3D sound is employed to give students a choice in how to interact.

The lessons learned during the project’s development and delivery led us to a set of principles for engagement, which work for all audiences regardless of any particular needs. We found that all science engagement should strive to be authentic, with no dumbing down of the science message and delivered by practicing scientists striving to involve the audience as equals. Alongside this authentic message, VI learners require close interaction with a scientist-presenter in a group of no bigger than four. The scientist should also be trained in VI-audience awareness, sighted guiding, audio description and in the presentation of a tactile narrative linked to the learning outcomes. Coupled with this idea is the need to train presenters to be able to use the differing materials with diverse audience groups.

Tactile Collider toured the UK in 2017 and 2018, visiting many mainstream and specialist schools, and meeting many motivated and enthusiastic students. We have also spent time at music festivals, with a focus on raising awareness of VI issues and giving people a chance to learn about the LHC using senses other than their eyes. One legacy of Tactile Collider is educating our community, and we are planning “VI in science” training events in 2020 in addition to a third community meeting bringing together scientists and communication professionals.

There is now a real interest and understanding in particle physics about the importance of reaching underrepresented audiences. Tactile Collider is a step towards this, and we are working to share the skills and insights we have gained in our journey so far. The idea has also appeared in astronomy: Tactile Universe, based at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth, engages the VI community with astrophysics research, for example by creating 3D printed tactile images of galaxies for use in schools and at public events. The first joint Tactile Collider/Universe event will take place in London in 2020 and we have already jointly hosted two community workshops. The Tactile Collider team is happy to discuss bringing the exhibition to any event, lab or venue.

Fundamental science is a humbling and levelling endeavour. When we consider the Higgs boson and supernovae, none of us can directly engage with the very small or the far or the very massive. Using all of our senses shows us science in a new and fascinating way. 

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“It’s a huge place full of ideas to try in case something revolutionary turns up.”

“There is high-tech science going on. You’re trying to make applications to real life, such as non-destructive testing.”

“We’re not here for the science, we’re here for the machines!”

“I thought it was all about programming, but you actually build things.”

“CERN is here to test out how particles behave and exploring the limit of the universe, like matter (which we know) and antimatter (which we don’t).”

“If you understand materials and energy at the basic scale, you have a better chance of creating new energy sources and materials for the future.”

“I read an article recently that said this was all a waste of taxpayers’ money, but now I am less sure because I have seen today that there are a lot of applications.”

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As someone who lives and breathes physics every day, I have to confess that when I curl up with a book, it’s rarely a popularisation of science. But when I saw that Tim Radford had written such a book, and that it was all about how physics can make you happy, it went straight to the top of my reading list.

Despite Radford’s refusal to be pigeonholed as a science journalist, insisting instead that a good journalist moves from beat to beat, never colonising any individual space, he was science correspondent for The Guardian for a quarter of a century. Now retired, he remains one of the most respected science writers around.

The book is a joy to read. More a celebration of human curiosity than a popular science book, it’s an antidote to the kind of narrow populism so prevalent in popular discourse today: a timely reminder of what we humans are capable of when we put differences aside and work together to achieve common goals.

Boethius, who took consolation in philosophy as he languished in a sixth-century jail is another recurring presence

The Voyager mission, along with LIGO and the LHC, serves as a guiding thread through Radford’s vast and winding exploration of human curiosity. Right from the opening lines, the reader is taken on a breathtaking tour of the full spectrum of human inventiveness, from science to religion, and from art to philosophy. On the way, we encounter thinkers as diverse as St Augustine, Dante and H G Wells. Boethius, who took consolation in philosophy as he languished in a sixth-century jail is another recurring presence, the book’s title being a nod to him.

We’re treated to a concise and clear consideration of the roles of science and religion in human societies. “Religious devotion demands unquestioning faith,” says Radford, whereas “science demands a state of mind that is always open to doubt”. While many can enjoy both, he concludes that it may be easier to enjoy science because it represents truth in a way that can be tested.

No sooner have we dealt with religion than we find ourselves listening to echoes of the great Richard Feynman as Radford considers the beauty of a dew-laden cobweb on an English autumn morning. “Does it make it any less magical a sight to know that this web was spun from a protein inside the spider?”, he asks, bringing to mind Feynman’s wonderful monologue about the beauty of a flower in Christopher Sykes’ equally wonderful 1981 documentary, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. Both conclude that science can only enhance the aesthetic beauty of the natural world.

The overall effect is a bit like a roller-coaster ride in the dark: you’re never quite sure when the next turn will come, or where it will take you. That’s part of the joy of the book. There are few writers who could pull so many diverse threads together, spanning such a broad spectrum of time and subjects. Radford pulls it off brilliantly.

Someone expecting a popularisation of physics might be disappointed. Indeed, the physics is sometimes a little cursory. Yes, the LHC takes us back to the first unimaginably brief instants of the universe’s life, and that’s indeed something that catches the imagination. But that’s just a part of what the LHC does – it’s also about the here and now, and it’s about the future as well. But to dwell on such things would be to miss the point of this book entirely.

An elegant manifesto for physics is how the publisher describes this book, but it’s more than that. It’s a celebration of the best in humanity, built around the successes of CERN, LIGO and most of all the Voyager mission. What such projects bring us may be intangible and uncertain, but their results are available to all, and they enrich anyone who cares to look. Like any good roller coaster, when you get off, you just want to get right back on again, because if there’s something else that can make you happy, it’s Tim Radford’s writing.

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Two teams of high-school students, one from the Praedinius Gymnasium in Groningen, Netherlands (pictured), and one from the West High School in Salt Lake City, US, have won CERN’s 2019 Beamline for Schools competition. In October, the teams will travel to DESY in Germany to carry out their proposed experiments together with scientists from CERN and DESY. The Netherlands team “Particle Peers” will compare the properties of the particle showers originating from electrons with those created from positrons, while the “DESY Chain” team from the US will focus on the properties of scintillators for more efficient particle detectors. Since Beamline for Schools was launched in 2014, almost 10,000 students from 84 countries have participated. This year, 178 teams from 49 countries worldwide submitted a proposal for the sixth edition of the competition. Due to the current long shutdown of CERN’s accelerators for maintenance and upgrade, there is currently no beam at CERN, which has opened up opportunities to explore partnerships with DESY and other laboratories.

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MC Escher’s 1941 woodcut Plane-Filling Motif with Reptiles depicts two tessellating tetrapods, one black and one white, with intertwined legs and feet on the adjacent sides. Reflect the image horizontally and vertically, and the result is a photo negative: maximal parity violation. A black–white transformation – charge conjugation in the metaphor that inspired Steven Vigdor’s book – and, as in nature, we return to the original. Well, almost. We can tell the difference from the position and colouration of Escher’s stylised initials in the corner. The only imperfection is the signature of the artist.

Vigdor’s idea is that such deviations from perfect symmetry are not in fact “bugs”, but are beautiful and essential. In the case of CP violation – an essential ingredient in Sakharov’s baryogenesis recipe – the artist’s signature is indispensable to our very existence, and the subject of a glut of searches for physics beyond the Standard Model.

Taking no position on the existence of a creator artist per se, Vigdor’s aim is rather to complement books that speculate on new theories with an exposition of the “painstaking and innovative” efforts of generations of experimentalists to establish the weird and wonderful physics we know. His book is a romp from quantum mixing to the apparent metastability of the vacuum (given current measurements of the Higgs and top masses), with excursions into cosmology, biology and metaphysics. The intended audience is university students. As they cut their way through a jungle of mathematical drills in 19th-century physics, many lose sight of the destination. Cheerful and down to earth, this book offers an invigorating glimpse through the foliage.

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The 10th edition of the CERN–Latin- American School of High-Energy Physics (CLASHEP) hosted 75 students from 13 to 26 March in Villa General Belgrano in the Argentinian province of Cordoba. CLASHEP is a biennial series that takes place in different Latin-American locations. Since the first school in 2001, there has been a dramatic increase in the involvement of Latin-American groups in experimental HEP, including collaboration in the ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb experiments at CERN. The schools have played an important role in fostering this increased interest and participation in HEP in the region, as well as reinforcing existing activities and training young scientists.

The first schools in 2001 and 2003 took place in Brazil and Mexico, two countries in Latin America that already had substantial involvement in experimental HEP, followed by Argentina in 2005. María Teresa Dova of the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP) recalled that this first Argentinian school was a “strong catalyst” for Latin-American groups joining the LHC experimental programme. In due course, both UNLP and the Universidad de Buenos Aires formally joined ATLAS with support from the national funding agencies ANPCyT and CONICET.

The fourth school in Chile in 2007 gave unprecedented visibility for CERN and the LHC in a country which, until then, had no experimental HEP activity. Claudio Dib, the local director of the school, remarked that this was a key event in reaching agreements for the inclusion of Chile in the ATLAS experiment, and CERN and ATLAS representatives who were present were personally introduced to the authorities of the universities and the national funding agency, Conicyt. Following the fifth event in Colombia, in 2009, where there were also constructive meetings with the national funding agency and universities, the school returned to Brazil for a second time in 2011.

The Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú celebrated the seventh school in Peru in 2013 with a special supplement of the university magazine dedicated to the work of local school director Alberto Gago’s group, which participates in the ALICE experiment and in neutrino experiments at Fermilab. Gago commented that the impact of the school had been “impressive and far beyond [his] expectations”. Similarly, discussions connected with the eighth school in Ecuador in 2015 were very important in stimulating interest in HEP within the universities and government agencies. This advanced the plans for the Escuela Politécnica Nacional and the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ) to join the CMS collaboration, supported by the national funding agency, Senescyt. USFQ’s rector Carlos Montúfar Freile described the school as a milestone for physics in Ecuador. In 2017 the school returned to Mexico for a second time, with strong interest and encouragement from the national funding agency, CONACyT.

There has been a dramatic increase in the involvement of Latin-American groups in experimental HEP

The 75 students attending this year’s school were of 17 different nationalities and more than 30% were women. Most came from universities in Latin America, while 15 were from European institutes. Lectures on HEP theory and experiment were given by leading scientists from both sides of the Atlantic, with special lectures on gravitational waves and cosmological collider physics by prominent Argentinian physicists Gabriela González (spokesperson of LIGO when gravitational waves were discovered in 2016) and Juan Martín Maldacena (winner of the 2012 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics). In addition to 50 hours reserved for plenary lectures, parallel group discussions were held for 90 minutes most afternoons. CERN Director-General Fabiola Gianotti took part in a lively Q&A session by video link.

The school also received visits from senior representatives of the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (UNC), including Gustavo Monti, who is president of the Argentinean Physical Society, and Francisco Tamarit, a director of the national research council CONICET.

Building on the tradition of the last few schools in the series, outreach activities were organised at UNC in the city of Cordoba. María Teresa Dova from UNLP, again the local director of the school, explained experimental particle physics to a general audience, and Juan Martín Maldacena, who was awarded an honorary doctorate, talked about black holes and the structure of space–time.

The next CLASHEP is set to take place in 2021.

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Communication is increasingly seen as integral to the research process, and is one of the strands of the open symposium of the European Strategy for Particle Physics (ESPP) update, which takes place from today in Granada, Spain. The ESPP update takes on board worldwide activities in particle physics and related topics, and is due to conclude early next year. It aims to reach a consensus on the scientific goals of the community and assess the proposed projects and technologies to achieve these goals. Though no decisions will be made now, the process is hoped to bring clarity to the question of which project will succeed the LHC following the end of its high-luminosity operations in the mid-2030s.

The landscape of communications has changed dramatically since the pre-web/mobile days of the nascent LHC. In one of 160 written contributions to the ESPP update, the International Particle Physics Outreach Group (IPPOG) emphasises the strategic relevance of concerted, global outreach activities for future colliders, stating that the success of such endeavours “depends greatly on the establishment of broad public support, as well as the commitment of key stakeholders and policymakers throughout Europe and the world”. IPPOG proposes that particle physics outreach and communication be explicitly recognised as strategic pillars in the final ESPP update document in 2020.

A contribution from the European Particle Physics Communication Network with support from the Interactions Collaboration highlights specific challenges that communicators face. These include the pace of change in social media, the speed of dissemination of good news, bad news and rumours, and the need to maintain trust and transparency in an era where there appears to be a popular backlash against expert opinion. The document notes the complexities of maintaining press interest over long timescales, and in conveying the costs involved: “Proposals for major international particle-physics experiments are infrequent, and when they are proposed, they seem disproportionately expensive when compared to other science disciplines”. A plenary talk on education, communication and outreach will take place on Wednesday at this week’s symposium. The European Strategy Group has also established a working group to recognise and support researchers who devote their time to such activities.

Consensus in the community is a further factor for communications. In the early 1990s, when the LHC was seeking approval, there was broad agreement that a circular hadron collider was the right step for the field. The machine had a new energy territory to explore and a clear physics target (the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking), around which narratives could be built. The ability to witness the construction of the LHC and its four detectors itself was a massive draw. On the big-collider menu today, against a backdrop of the LHC’s discovery of a light Higgs boson but no particles beyond the Standard Model, is an International Linear Collider in Japan, a Compact Linear Collider or Future Circular Collider at CERN, and a Circular Electron Positron Collider in China. The projects would span decades and may require international collaboration on an entirely new scale. While not all equally mature, each has its own detailed physics and technology case that will be dissected this week.

Whether straight or circular, European or Asian, the next big collider requires a fresh narrative if it is to inspire the wider world. The rosy picture of eager experimentalists uncovering new elementary particles and wispy-haired theorists travelling to Stockholm to pick up prizes seems antiquated, now that all the particles of the Standard Model have been found. Short of major new theoretical insights, the best signposts in the dark and possibly hidden sectors ahead may come from experimental exploration. As Nima Arkani-Hamed put it recently in an interview with the Courier: “When theorists are more confused, it’s the time for more, not less experiments.”

Interrogating the Higgs boson – a completely new form of scalar matter with connections to the dynamics of the vacuum and other deep puzzles in the Standard Model – is the focus of all future collider proposals. Direct and indirect searches for new physics at much higher energy scales is another. However, as the range of contributions to the ESPP update illustrates, and which is integral to communications efforts, frontier colliders are only one tool to enable progress. Enigmas such as dark matter and energy are being probed from multiple angles both on the ground and in space; gravitational-wave astronomy is revolutionising astroparticle physics. Experiments large and small are closing in on the neutrino’s unique properties; heavy-ion, flavour, antimatter, fixed-target and numerous other programmes are thriving. A CERN initiative to specifically explore experimental programmes beyond high-energy colliders is advancing rapidly.

The LHC has demonstrated that there is a huge public appetite for the abstract, mind-expanding science made possible by awesomely large machines. There is no reason to think that the next leg of the journey in fundamental exploration is any less inspiring, and every reason to shout about its impact. Above and beyond the knowledge it creates and the advanced technologies that it drives, particle physics is one of the subjects that attracts young people into STEM subjects, many going on to pursue more applied research or industry careers. Large research infrastructures also have direct, though little reported, economic and societal benefits. Last but not least, the success of big science sends a positive message about human progress and global collaboration at a time when many nations are looking inwards. Clearly, engaging the public, politicians and fellow scientists in the next high-energy physics adventure presents a golden opportunity for those of us in the comms business.

For now, though, it’s over to the 600 or so physicists here in Granada to carve out the new physics avenues ahead. The Courier will be following discussions throughout the week in an attempt to unravel the big picture.

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In the world of communication, everyone has a role to play. During the past two decades, the ability of researchers to communicate their work to funding agencies, policymakers, entrepreneurs and the public at large has become an increasingly important part of their job. Scientists play a fundamental role in society, generally enjoying an authoritative status, and this makes us accountable.

Science communication is not just a way to share knowledge, it is also about educating new generations in the scientific approach and attracting young people to scientific careers. In addition, fundamental research drives the development of technology and innovation, playing an important role in providing solutions in challenging areas such as health care, the provision of food and safety. This obliges researchers to disseminate the results of their work.

Evolving attitudes

Although science communication is becoming increasingly unavoidable, the skills it requires are not yet universal and some scientists are not prepared to do it. Of course there are risks involved. Communication can distract individuals from research and objectives, or, if done badly, can undermine the very messages that the scientist needs to convey. The European Researchers’ Night is a highly successful annual event that was initiated in 2005 as a European Commission Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action, and offers an opportunity for scientists to get more involved in science communication. It falls every final Friday of September, and illustrates how quickly attitudes are evolving.

In 2006, with a small group of researchers from the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) located close to Frascati, we took part in one of the first Researchers’ Night events. Frascati is surrounded by important scientific institutions and universities, and from the start the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development, the European Space Agency and the National Institute for Astrophysics joined the collaboration with INFN, along with the Municipality of Frascati and the Cultural and Research Department of the Lazio region, which co-funded the initiative.

Since then, thousands of researchers, citizens, public and private institutions have worked together to change the public perception of science and of the infrastructure in the Frascati and Lazio regions, supported by the programme. Today, after 13 editions, it involves more than 60 scientific partners spread from the north to the south of Italy in 30 cities, and attracts more than 50,000 attendees, with significant media impact (figure 1). Moreover, it has now evolved to become a week-long event, is linked to many related events throughout the year, and has triggered many institutions to develop their own science-communication projects.

Analysing the successive Frascati Researchers’ Night projects allows a better understanding of the evolution of science-communication methodology. Back in 2006, scientists started to open their laboratories and research infrastructures to present their jobs in the most comprehensible way, with a view to increasing the scientific literacy of the public and to fill their “deficit” of knowledge. They then tried to create a direct dialogue by meeting people in public spaces such as squares and bars, discussing the more practical aspects of science, such as how public money is spent, and how much researchers are responsible for their work. Those were the years in which the socio-economic crisis started to unfold. It was also the beginning of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, when economic growth and terms such as “innovation” started to substitute scientific progress and discovery. It was therefore becoming more important than ever to engage with the public and keep the science flag flying.

In recent years, this approach has changed. Two biannual projects that are also part of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action – Made in Science and BEES (BE a citizEn Scientist) underline a different vision of science and of the methodology of communication. Made in Science (which was live between 2016 and 2017) was supposed to represent the “trademark” of research, aiming to communicate to society the importance of the science production chain in terms of quality, identity, creativity, know-how and responsibility. In this chain, which starts from fundamental research and ends with social benefits, no one is excluded and must take part in the decision process and, where possible, in the research itself. Its successor, BEES (2018–2019), on the other hand, aims to bring citizens up close to the discovery process, showing how long it takes and how it can be tough and frustrating. Both projects follow the most recent trends in science communication based on a participative or “public engagement” model, rather than the traditional “deficit” model. Here, researchers are not the main actors but facilitators of the learning process with a specific role: the expert one.

Nerd or not a nerd?

Nevertheless, this evolution of science communication isn’t all positive. There are many examples of problems in science communication: the explosion of concerns about science (vaccines, autism, GMO, homeopathy, etc); the avoidance of science and technology in preference to returning to a more “natural” life; the exploitation of science results (positive or negative) to support conspiracy theories or influence democracies; and overplaying the benefits for knowledge and technology transfer, to list a few examples. Last but not least, some strong bias still remains among both scientists and audiences, limiting the effectiveness of communication.

The first, and probably the hardest, is the stereotype bias: are you a “nerd”, or do you feel like a nerd? Often scientists refer to themselves as a category that can’t be understood by society, consequently limiting their capacity to interact with the public. On the other hand, scientists are sometimes real nerds, and seen by the public as nerds. This is true for all job categories, but in the case of scientists this strongly conditions their ability to communicate.

Age, gender and technological bias also still play a fundamental role, especially in the most developed European countries. Young people may understand science and technology more easily, while women still do not seem to have full access to scientific careers and to the exploitation of technology. Although the transition from a deficit to a participative model is already common in education and democratic societies, it is not yet completed in science, which is likely because of the strong bias that still seems to exist among researchers and audiences. The Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Researchers’ Night is a powerful way in which scientists can address such issues.

The post Science communication: a new frontier appeared first on CERN Courier.

Take a leap and enter, past the chalkboard wall filled with mathematical equations written, erased and written again, into the darkened room of projected questions where it all begins. What is reality? How do we describe nature? And for that matter, what is science and what is art?

Quàntica, which opened on 9 April at the Centre de Cultural Contemporània de Barcelona, invites you to explore quantum physics through the lens of both art and science. Curated by Mónica Bello, head of Arts at CERN, and art curator José-Carlos Mariátegui, with particle physicist José Ignacio Latorre serving as its scientific adviser, Quàntica is the second iteration of an exhibition that brings together 10 artworks resulting from Collide International art residences at CERN.

The exhibition illustrates how interdisciplinary intersections can present scientific concepts regarded by the wider public as esoteric, in ways that bridge the gap, engage the senses and create meaning. Punctuating each piece is the idea that the principles of quantum physics, whether we like it or not, are pervasive in our lives today – from technological applications in smart phones and satellites to our philosophies and world views.

Nine key concepts – “scales”, “quantum states”, “overlap”, “intertwining”, “indeterminacy”, “randomness”, “open science”, “everyday quantum” and “change-evolution” – guide visitors through the meandering hallway. Each display point prompts pause to consider a question that underlies the fundamental principles of quantum physics. Juxtaposed in the shared space is an artist-made particle detector and parts of experiments displayed as artistic objects. Video art installations are interspersed with video interviews of CERN physicists, including Helga Timko, who asks: what if we were to teach children quantum physics at a very young age, would they perceive the world as we do? On the ceiling above is a projection of a spiral galaxy, a part of Juan Cortés’ Supralunar. Inspired by Vera Rubin’s work on dark matter and the rotational motion of galaxies, Cortés made a two-part multisensorial installation: a lens through which you see flashing lights and vibrating plates to rest your chin and experience, on some level, the intensity of a galaxy’s formation.

From the very large scale, move to the very small. A recording of Richard Feynman explaining the astonishing double-slit experiment plays next to a standing demonstration allowing you to observe the counterintuitive possibilities that exist at the subatomic level. You can put on goofy glasses for Lea Porsager’s Cosmic Strike, an artwork with a sense of humour, which offers an immersive 3D animation described as “hard science and loopy mysticism”. She engages the audience’s imagination to meditate on being a neutrino as it travels through the neutrino horn, one of the many scientific artefacts from CERN’s archives that pepper the path.

Around the corner is Erwin Schrödinger’s 1935 article where he first used the word “Verschränkung” (or entanglement) and Anton Zeilinger’s notes explaining the protocol for quantum teleportation. Above these is projected a scene from Star Trek, which popularised the idea of teleportation.

The most visually striking piece in the exhibition is Cascade by Yunchul Kim, made up of three live elements. The first part is Argos (see image), splayed metallic hands that hang like lamps from the ceiling – an operational muon detector made of 41 channels blinking light as it records the particles passing through the gallery. Each signal triggers the second element, Impulse, a chandelier-like fluid-transfer system that sends drops of liquid through microtubes that flow into transparent veins of the final element, Tubular. Kim, who won the 2016 Arts at CERN Collide International Award, is an artist who employs rigorous methods and experiments in his laboratory with liquid and materials. Cascade encapsulates the surprising results knowledge-sharing can yield.

Quàntica is a must-see for anyone who views art and science as opposite ends of the academic spectrum. The first version of the exhibition was held at Liverpool in the UK last year. Co-produced by the ScANNER network (CERN, FACT, CCCB, iMAL and Le Lieu Unique), the exhibition continues until 24 September in Barcelona, before travelling to Brussels.

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On 8 April, CERN unveiled plans for a major new facility for scientific education and outreach. Aimed at audiences of all ages, the Science Gateway will include exhibition spaces, hands-on scientific experiments for schoolchildren and students, and a large amphitheatre to host science events for experts and non-experts alike. It is intended to satisfy the curiosity of hundreds of thousands visitors every year and is core to CERN’s mission to educate and engage the public in science.

“We will be able to share with everybody the fascination of exploring and learning how matter and the universe work, the advanced technologies we need to develop in order to build our ambitious instruments and their impact on society, and how science can influence our daily life,” says CERN director-general, Fabiola Gianotti. “I am deeply grateful to the donors for their crucial support in the fulfilment of this beautiful project.”

The overall cost of the Science Gateway, estimated at 79 m Swiss Francs, is entirely funded through donations. Almost three quarters of the cost has already been secured, thanks in particular to a contribution of 45 m Swiss Francs from Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. Other donors include a private foundation in Geneva and Loterie Romande, which distributes its profits to public utility projects. CERN is looking for additional donations to cover the full cost of the project.

The Science Gateway will be hosted in iconic buildings with a 7000 m² footprint, linking CERN’s Meyrin site and the Globe of Science and Innovation. It is being designed by renowned architects Renzo Piano Building Workshop and intends to “celebrate the inventiveness and creativity that characterise the world of research and engineering”. Construction is planned to start in 2020 and be completed in 2022.

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Every second, each square metre of the Earth is struck by thousands of charged particles travelling from deep space. It is now more than a century since cosmic rays were discovered, yet still they present major challenges to physics. The origin of high-energy cosmic rays is the biggest mystery, their energy too high to have been generated by astrophysical sources such as supernovae, pulsars or even black holes. But cosmic rays are also of interest beyond astrophysics. Recent studies at CERN’s CLOUD experiment, for example, suggest that cosmic rays may influence cloud cover through the formation of new aerosols, with important implications for the evolution of Earth’s climate.

This year, two independent missions were mounted in the Arctic and in Antarctica – Polarquest2018 and Clean2Antarctica – to understand more about the physics of high-energy cosmic rays. Both projects have a strong educational and environmental dimension, and are among the first to measure cosmic rays at such high latitudes.

Geomagnetic focus

Due to the shape of the geomagnetic field, the intensity of the charged cosmic radiation is higher at the poles than it is in equatorial regions. At the end of the 1920s it was commonly believed that cosmic rays were high-energy neutral particles (i.e. gamma rays), implying that the Earth’s magnetic field would not affect cosmic-ray intensity. However, early observations of the dependence of the cosmic-ray intensity on latitude rejected this hypothesis, showing that cosmic rays mainly consist of charged particles and leading to the first quantitative calculations of their composition.

The interest in measuring the cosmic-ray flux close to the poles is related to the fact that the geomagnetic field shields the Earth from low-energy charged cosmic rays, with an energy threshold (geomagnetic cut-off) depending on latitude, explains Mario Nicola Mazziotta, an INFN researcher and member of the Polarquest2018 team. “Although the geomagnetic cut-off decreases with increasing latitude, the cosmic-ray intensity at Earth reaches its maximum at latitudes of about 50–60°, where the cut-off is of a few GeV or less, and then seems not to grow anymore with latitude. This indicates that cosmic-ray intensity below a given energy is suppressed, due to solar effects, and makes the study of cosmic rays near the polar regions a very useful probe of solar activity.”

Polarquest2018 is a small cosmic-ray experiment that recently completed a six-week-long expedition to the Arctic Circle, on board a 18 m-long boat called Nanuq designed for sailing in extreme regions. The boat set out from Isafjordur, in North-East Iceland, on 22 July, circumnavigating the Svalbard archipelago in August and arriving in Tromsø on 4 September. The Polarquest2018 detectors reached 82 degrees north, shedding light on the soft component of cosmic rays trapped at the poles by Earth’s magnetic field.

Polarquest2018 is the result of the hard work of a team of a dozen people for more than a year, in addition to enthusiastic support from many other collaborators. Built at CERN by school students from Switzerland, Italy and Norway, Polarquest2018 encompasses three scintillator detectors to measure the cosmic-ray flux at different latitudes: one mounted on the Nanuq’s deck and two others installed in schools in Italy and Norway. The detectors had to operate with the limited electric power (12 W) that was available on board, both recording impinging cosmic rays and receiving GPS signals to timestamp each event with a precision of a few tens of nanoseconds. The detectors also had to be mechanically robust to resist the stresses from rough seas.

The three Polarquest2018 detectors join a network of around 60 others in Italy called the Extreme Energy Events – Science Inside Schools (EEE) experiment, proposed by Antonino Zichichi in 2004 and presently co-ordinated by the Italian research institute Centro Fermi in Rome, with collaborators including CERN, INFN and various universities. The detectors (each made of three multigap resistive plate chambers of about 2 m² area) were built at CERN by high-school students and the large area of the EEE enables searches for very-long-distance correlations between cosmic-ray showers.

A pivotal moment in the arctic expedition came when the Nanuq arrived close to the south coast of the Svalbard archipelago and was sailing in the uncharted waters of the Recherche Fjord. While the crew admired a large school of belugas, the boat struck the shallow seabed, damaging its right dagger board and leaving the craft perched at a 45° incline. The crew fought to get the Nanuq free, but in the end had to wait almost 12 hours for the tide to rise again. Amazingly, explains Polarquest2018 project leader Paola Catapano of CERN, the incident had its advantages. “It allowed the team to check the algorithms used to correct the raw data on cosmic rays for the inclination and rolling of the boat, since the data clearly showed a decrease in the number of muons due to a reduced acceptance.”

Analysis of the Polarquest2018 data will take a few months, but preliminary results show no significant increase in the cosmic-ray flux, even at high latitudes. This is contrary to what one could naively expect considering the high density of the Earth’s magnetic field lines close to the pole, explains Luisa Cifarelli, president of Centro Fermi in Rome. “The lack of increase in the cosmic flux confirms the hypothesis formulated by Lemaître in 1932, with much stronger experimental evidence than was available up to now, and with data collected at latitudes where no published results exist,” she says. The Polarquest2018 detector has also since embarked on a road trip to measure cosmic rays all along the Italian peninsula, collecting data over a huge latitude interval.

Heading south

Meanwhile, 20,000 km south, a Dutch expedition to the South Pole called Clean2Antarctica has just got under way, carrying a small cosmic-ray experiment from Nikhef on board a vehicle called Solar Voyager. The solar-powered cart, built from recycled 3D-printed household plastics, will make the first ground measurements in Antarctica of the muon decay rate and of charged particles from extensive-air cosmic-ray showers. Cosmic rays will be measured by a roof-mounted scintillation device as the cart makes a 1200 km, six-week-long journey from the edge of the Antarctic icefields to the geometric South Pole.

The team taking the equipment across the Antarctic to the South Pole comprises mechanical engineer Ter Velde and his wife Liesbeth, who initiated the Clean2Antarctica project and are both active ocean sailors. Back in the warmer climes of the Netherlands, researchers from Nikhef will remotely monitor for any gradients in the incoming particle fluxes as the magnetic field lines are converging closer to the pole. In theory, the magnetic field will funnel charged particles from the high atmosphere to the Earth’s surface, leading to higher fluxes near the pole. But the incoming muon signal should not be affected, as this is produced by high-energy particles producing air showers of charged particles, explains Nikhef project scientist Bob van Eijk. “But this is experimental physics and a first, so we will just do the measurements and see what comes out,” he says.

The scintillation panel used is adapted from the HiSPARC rooftop cosmic-ray detectors that Nikhef has been providing in high schools in the Netherlands, the UK and Denmark for the past 15 years. Under professional supervision, students and teachers build these roof-box-sized detectors themselves and run the detection programme and data-analysis in their science classes. Some 140 rooftop stations are online and many thousands of pupils have been involved over the years, stimulating interest in science and research.

Pristine backdrop

The panel being taken to Antarctica is a doubled-up version that is half the usual area of the HiSPARC panels due to strict space restrictions. Two gyroscope systems will correct for any changes in the level of the panel while traversing the Antarctic landscape. All the instruments are solar powered, with the power coming from photovoltaic panels on two additional carts pulled by the main electric vehicle. The double detection depth of the panels will allow for muon-decay detection by photomultiplier tubes as well as regular cosmic-ray particles such as electrons and photons. Data from the experiment will be relayed regularly by satellite from the Solar Voyager vehicle so that analysis can take place in parallel, and will be made public through a dedicated website.

The Clean2Antarctic expedition set off in mid-November from Union Glacier Camp station near the Antarctic Peninsula. It is sponsored by Dutch companies and from crowd funding, and has benefitted from extensive press and television coverage. The trip will take the team across bleak snow planes and altitudes up to 2835 m and, despite being the height of Antarctic summer, temperatures could be down to –30 °C. The mission aims to use the pristine backdrop of Antarctica to raise public awareness about waste reduction and recycling.

“This is one of the rare occasions that a scientific outreach programme, with genuine scientific questions targeting high-school students as prime investigators, teams up with an idealist group that tries to raise awareness on environmental issues regarding circular economy,” says van Eijk. “The plastic for the vehicles was collected by primary-school kids, while three groups of young researchers formed ‘think tanks’ to generate solutions to questions about environmental issues that industrial sponsors/partners have raised.” Polarquest2018 had a similar goal, and its MantaNet project became the first to assess the presence and distribution of microplastics in the Arctic waters north of Svalbard at a record latitude of 82.7° north. According to MantaNet project leader Stefano Alliani: “One of the conclusions already drawn by sheer observation is that even at such high latitudes the quantity of macro plastic loitering in the most remote and wildest beaches of our planet is astonishing.”

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Is it fun to learn physics from a textbook? According to many teenage participants in CERN’s Beamline for Schools (BL4S) programme, physics lessons at school are much too theoretical. Students from some countries do not even have physics lessons at all, let alone any contact with current science.

Many years back, in 2011, experimental particle physicist Christoph Rembser of CERN had an idea to get high-school students engaged with particle physics by offering them the chance to carry out their own experiment on a CERN beamline. Three years later, the 60th anniversary of CERN in 2014 offered an opportunity for what was meant to be a one-off worldwide science competition: BL4S was born. With the help of media attention in CERN around the time of the anniversary, teams of high-school students and their teachers were invited to propose an experiment at CERN. The response was overwhelming: almost 300 teams involving more than 3000 students from 50 countries submitted a proposal.

When the first two teams came to CERN in September 2014, it was clear that BL4S would not be a one-off event. Clearly the competition had the potential to attract large numbers of high-school students every year to get deeply involved with physics at the crucial stage in their education, two years before leaving school to take up further study. Ashish Tutakne, a member of the 2018 winning team from the Philippines, sums this up: “I believe the experience holds significant weight as it is not only a chance to collaborate with some of the smartest people in the world on a scientific project, it is also a taste of what conducting research is actually like. It is this experience that I believe that will in fact prove valuable to me … throughout the rest [of] my life.”

CERN and society

Thanks to the huge success of the first edition, institutes and foundations around the world also recognised the potential of the competition. Through the CERN & Society Foundation, an independent charitable organisation supported by private donors, BL4S has since been provided with the financial help without which it would not have been possible to turn the competition into an annual event. The CERN & Society Foundation has the aim of spreading CERN’s spirit of scientific curiosity for the benefit of society, and supports young talent through high-quality, hands-on training. This year, for example, in addition to the BL4S initiative, the foundation has helped more than 80 educators participate in CERN’s national teacher programme and granted more than 60 Summer Student scholarships.

So far, more than 900 teams with almost 8500 students from 76 countries have taken part in the BL4S competition, with one third of these students being female. While in the first edition in 2014 about 70% of the teams came from member states of CERN, this year roughly two-thirds of the participating teams were from associate and non-member states. This emphasises the international character of the competition and its global appeal.

The announcement of each edition of BL4S is usually made during the summer the year before, with a deadline for submitting a proposal of up to 1000 words and a one-minute video by 31 March. After about two months of evaluation, involving more than 50 volunteer physicists, the two winning teams and up to 30 shortlisted teams are announced in June. Besides certificates, which every participant receives, the shortlisted teams win special prizes such as BL4S T-shirts for every team member. The two winning teams are finally invited to CERN in September/October for a period of about 12 days to carry out their experiments.

Of course they are not doing this alone, but are guided by two professional scientists. These scientists, typically young PhD students in physics, make the largest contribution to the success of BL4S. They are not only responsible for the fine-tuning and implementation of the experiments of the winning teams but have, in collaboration with the CERN detector workshops, also developed bespoke devices for use in the BL4S experiments. Even though these support scientists were only involved with the project for less than a year, it offered them the opportunity to carry out a complete physics experiment from the beginning to the end; the skills that they acquired helped several of them to find interesting postdoc positions.

Beamline specifics

From the beginning, BL4S attracted a lot of CERN staff members as well as users and even retired staff to make voluntary contributions to the organisation of the event. This involves answering questions from the student teams, evaluating proposals, developing detectors and software, helping the winners with the analysis of the data, and many other things. These volunteers have become a crucial part of the competition.

CERN’s accelerator complex is vast, and is in constant use by thousands of physicists worldwide. Since the first edition, the BL4S experiments have taken place at the T9 beamline of the Proton Synchrotron fixed-target area in the “East Hall” on the main CERN site. This beamline offers a secondary beam with a momentum of 0.5–10 GeV/c and a mixture of electrons, pions, kaons, protons and some muons. Regarding detectors, CERN provides a range of technologies: scintillators, Cherenkov counters, delay wire chambers, multigap resistive plate chambers, micro-mesh gaseous structure detectors, lead-glass calorimeters and Timepix detectors. In addition, students are allowed to build their own detectors and bring them to CERN. For the triggering, NIM modules are used, while the data-acquisition system is based on the RCD-TDAQ system of the ATLAS experiment. The student teams are provided with a detailed document that describes all of these components.

The students are completely free with respect to the experiment and use of these materials as long as it does not raise any safety concerns. Quite often we are surprised by their creativity, and the ten winning proposals from the past five years illustrate the wide spectrum of their ideas (see table above). Besides these winning proposals, all of the proposals received show what captures the attention of curious teenagers. Just a few examples are: the shielding of spacecraft to protect astronauts from the dangers of cosmic radiation; the analysis of the atmosphere with respect to greenhouse gasses; the exploration of natural resources; the creation of artificial aurora borealis; and the artistic translation of signals of elementary particles into sights or sounds.

For a successful participation in BL4S, the role of teachers and other mentors is paramount. Many teachers do not feel confident enough and might not propose their students to take part in BL4S. Partly they feel not qualified enough for such a challenge or they do not get the support from their schools that is necessary to coach a team for many weeks if not months. After all, many teachers are severely limited in the time that they can devote to such activities. In some cases, the students go ahead without any mentors and complete their proposal in a self-directed way. In other cases, they contact physicists at local universities or at one of the national or regional contact points established in almost 30 individual countries. Usually, however, the main burden is on the teacher and we are very grateful to the many teachers who every year dedicate a substantial part of their free time to coach a team of students. Unfortunately, our surveys show that due to the high workload only a few teachers are able to participate several years in a row.

The effect that BL4S has on the many students that are not lucky enough to be invited to CERN is difficult to assess. We know, however, via feedback from several teachers, that BL4S is appreciated as a means of motivating their students. In addition, the students themselves often write that their participation was a great experience for them and many are even motivated to work on their proposals and improve them to take part again in the next edition.

The winning teams are encouraged to stay together after having been at CERN and to write a paper about their experiment. So far, three papers have been published in an international peer-reviewed journal, Physics Education, with the following titles: Building and testing a high school calorimeter at CERN; The secret chambers in the Chephren pyramid; and Testing the validity of the Lorentz factor (see further reading). Papers are typically published one to two years after the completion of the experiment. At least one further paper is currently in the pipeline. This is not a mandatory step for the teams, but it represents a unique opportunity to have authored a scientific publication before even starting at university.

According to a recent survey among the previous winners, most take up studies of natural sciences, engineering or mathematics. Max Raven of the 2016 winning team “Relatively Special” from Colchester Royal Grammar School in the UK remarked: “The most beneficial impact of BL4S has been the strong team-working and communication skills I developed… This invaluable experience has been instrumental to developing my interpersonal skills, which are vital for a successful career in engineering.” After taking part in the BL4S competition Raven was accepted to study engineering by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Students and teachers alike are clearly very happy to be associated with the competition, and this also benefits CERN and its educational aims. Winning BL4S often creates a lot of media attention in the home region of the teams or even at the national level, and recently the two Italian teams that won BL4S in 2015 and 2017 were invited to the ministry of foreign affairs in Rome for a special ceremony. At the same time, BL4S makes a contribution to physics education by leading students into a field of physics rarely touched upon in school curricula. Being able to do hands-on physics with detectors and accelerators used also for other current experiments presents a huge motivation for students to learn even in their free time. Yash Karan, a member of the Philippine winning team in 2018, remarked: “I have learnt much more in the last two weeks at CERN than in the last six months in school!”

Next stop DESY

At the end of this year, CERN’s accelerator complex will be shut down for a period of two years to make way for maintenance and upgrades, in particular for the High-Luminosity LHC. This opens a new chapter in the history of the BL4S competition. In close collaboration with the DESY laboratory in Germany, the competition will continue there in 2019. DESY will provide beam time at the DESY II facility, offering electron and positron beams, and employ a dedicated support scientist on a three-year staff contract. Other institutes such as INFN-Frascati in Italy and the Paul Scherrer Institut in Switzerland are also interested in hosting the competition in the future.

What remains is the never-ending challenge of spreading the word. Even though CERN has many traditional and modern channels of communication, making BL4S known to high-school students and teachers around the world takes the effort of a large number of people at all levels. In particular, volunteers are needed to spread the word in their region and through their available channels, where they play several roles: acting as additional regional contacts for candidate teams; providing coaching if no teacher is available; taking part in the evaluation of proposals; assisting the winning teams with their data analysis and writing of scientific papers; and, finally, finding additional sponsors. Anyone interested can contact the BL4S team via bl4s.team@cern.ch.

As this article went to press, the 2018 winners were completing their experiments, which were hugely successful. All students claimed to have gained an immense increase in knowledge and they admired the passion that surrounded them everywhere they went at CERN. Working together in mixed shift crews each day, the teams have also learned about one another’s experiments, fostering cooperation and personal growth. Quotes such as “Beamline for Schools was a life-changing experience” are not uncommon, and many of this year’s students have made up their minds that they would like to pursue a career in particle physics or engineering.

The registration and proposal-submission for BL4S 2019 are now open. Hopefully the next edition will attract even more students from all around the globe to participate in this unique opportunity.

The post Hands-on education at the frontiers of science appeared first on CERN Courier.

When Lyn Evans, project leader of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), turned up for work at the CERN Control Centre (CCC) at 05:30 on 10 September 2008, he was surprised to find the car park full of satellite trucks. Normally a scene of calm, the facility had become the focus of global media attention, with journalists poised to capture the moment when the LHC switched on. Evans knew the media were coming, but not quite to this extent. A few hours later, as he counted down to the moment when the first beam had made its way through the last of the LHC’s eight sectors, the CCC erupted in cheers – and Evans wasn’t even aware that his impromptu commentary was being beamed live to millions of people. “I thought I was commenting to others on the CERN site,” he recalls. The following weekend, he was walking in the nearby ski town of Megève when a stranger recognised him in the street.

Of all human endeavours that have captured the world’s attention, the events of 10 September 2008 are surely among the most bizarre. After all, this wasn’t something as tangible as sending a person to the Moon. At 10:28 local time on that clear autumn Wednesday, a bunch of subatomic particles made its way around a 27 km-long subterranean tube, and the spectacle was estimated to have reached an audience of more than a billion people. There were record numbers of hits to the CERN homepage, overtaking visits to NASA’s site, in addition to some 2500 television broadcasts and 6000 press articles on the day. The event was dubbed “first-beam day” by CERN and “Big Bang day” by the BBC, which had taken over a room in the CCC and devoted a full day’s coverage on Radio 4. Google turned its logo into a cartoon of a collider – such “doodles” are now commonplace, but it was a coup for CERN back then. It is hard to think of a bigger media event in science in recent times, and it launched particle physics, the LHC and CERN into mainstream culture.

It is all the more incredible that no collision data, and therefore no physics results, were scheduled that day; it was “simply” part of the commissioning period that all new colliders go through. When CERN’s previous hadron collider, the Super Proton Synchrotron, fired up in the summer of 1981, says Evans, there was just him and Carlo Rubbia in the control room. Even the birth of the Large Electron Positron collider in 1989 was a muted affair. The LHC was a different machine in a different era, and its birth offers a crash course in the communication of big-science projects.

News values

Fears that the LHC would create a planet-eating black hole were a key factor behind the enormous media interest, says Roger Highfield, who was science editor of the UK’s The Telegraph newspaper at the time. “I have no doubt that the public loved all the stuff about the hunt for the secrets of the universe, the romance of the Peter Higgs story and the deluge of superlatives about energy, vacuum and all that,” says Highfield. “But the LHC narrative was taken to a whole new level by the potty claim by doomsayers that it could create a black hole to swallow the Earth. When ‘the biggest and most complex experiment ever devised’ was about to be turned on, it made front-page news, with headlines like, ‘Will the world end on Wednesday?’”.

The conspiracies were rooted in attempts by a handful of individuals to prevent the LHC from starting up in case its collisions would produce a microscopic black hole – one of the outlandish models that the LHC was built to test. That the protons injected into the LHC that day had an energy far lower than that of the then-operational Tevatron collider in the US, and that collisions were not scheduled for weeks afterwards, didn’t seem to get in the way of a good story. Nor, for that matter, did CERN’s efforts to issue scientific reassurances. Indeed, when science editor of The Guardian, Ian Sample, turned up at CERN on first-beam day, he expected to find protestors chained to the fence outside, or at least waving placards asking physicists not to destroy the planet. “I did not see a single protestor – and I looked for them,” he says. “And yet, inside the building, I remember one TV host doing a piece to camera on how the world might end when the machine switched on. It was a circus that the media played a massive part in creating. It was shameful and it made the media who seriously ran with those stories look like fools.”

The truth is the black-hole hype came long after the LHC had started to capture the public imagination. As the machine and its massive experiments progressed through construction in the early 2000s, the project’s scale and abstract scientific goals offered an appeal to wonder. Though designed to explore a range of phenomena at a new energy frontier, the LHC’s principal quarry, the Higgs boson, had a bite-sized description: the generator of mass. It also had a human angle – a real-life, white-haired Professor Higgs and a handful of other theorists waiting to see if their half-century-old prediction was right, and international teams of thousands working night and day to build the necessary equipment. Nobel laureate Leon Lederman’s 1993 book The God Particle, detailing the quest for the Higgs boson, added a supernatural dimension to the enterprise.

“I am confident that no editor-in-chief of any newspaper in the world truly understood the Higgs field, the meaning or significance of electroweak symmetry breaking, or how the Higgs boson fits into the picture,” continues Sample. “But what they did get was the appeal of hunting for a particle that in their minds explained the origin of mass. It is such an intriguing concept to imagine that we even need to explain the origin of mass. Isn’t it the case that matter just has mass, plain and simple? All of this, in addition to the sheer awe at the engineering and physics achievement, made for an enormously exotic and appealing story.”

There were also more practical reasons for LHC’s media extravaganza, notes Geoff Brumfiel, a reporter at Nature at the time and now a senior editor at National Public Radio in the US. The fact that pretty much every country and region on Earth had somebody working on the LHC meant that there was a local story for thousands of news outlets, he says, plus CERN’s status as a publicly funded institution made it possible for the lab to open up to the world. “There was also great visual appeal: the enormous, colourful detectors, deep underground, teeming with little scientists in hard hats – it just looked cool. That was hugely important for cable news, television documentary producers, etc.” In addition, says Brumfiel, something actually happened on first-beam day – there was something for journalists to see. “That’s always big in the news business. A big new machine was turning on and might or might not work. And when it worked there were lots of happy people to look at and hear.”

Strategy first

Despite the many external factors influencing LHC communications, the switch-on would never have had the huge reach that it did were it not for a dedicated communication strategy, says James Gillies, CERN’s head of communications at the time. It started as far back as 2000, when Dan Brown’s science-fiction novel Angels & Demons, about a plot to blow up the Vatican using antimatter stolen from CERN, was published. “Luckily for us, it didn’t sell, but it alerted us to the fact that the notion that CERN could be dangerous was bubbling up into popular culture,” says Gillies. A few years later, the BBC made a drama documentary called End Day, which examined a range of ways that humanity might not last the century – including a black hole being created at a particle accelerator. Then, when Dan Brown’s next book, The Da Vinci Code, became a bestseller, CERN realised that Angels & Demons would be next on people’s reading list – so it had better act. “That led to one of the most peculiar conversations that I’ve ever had with a CERN director general, and resulted in us featuring fact and fiction in Angels & Demons on the CERN website,” says Gillies. “Our traffic jumped by an order of magnitude overnight and we never looked back.” CERN later played a significant role in the screen adaption of the book, and Sony Pictures included a short film about CERN in its Blu-ray release.

The first dedicated LHC communications strategy was put in place in 2006. The perception of CERN as portrayed in End Day and Angels & Demons was so wide off the mark that is was laughable, says Gillies, so he took it as opportunity to lead the conversation about CERN and be transparent and timely. In addition to actions such as working with science communicators in CERN Member States and beyond, to organise national media visits for key journalists, he says, “the big idea is that we took a conscious decision to do our science in the public eye, to involve people in the adventure of research at the forefront of human knowledge”. Publicly fixing the date for first beam was a high-risk strategy, but it paid off. The scheduled LHC start-up exceeded the expectations of everyone involved. Both proton beams made a full turn around the machine and one beam was captured by the radio-frequency system, showing that it could be accelerated. For the thousands of people working on the LHC and its experiments, it marked the transition from 25 years of preparation to a new era of scientific discovery. But the terrain was about to get tougher.

Once the journalists had departed and the champagne bottles were stacked away, the LHC teams continued with the task of commissioning away from the spotlight, with a view to obtaining collisions as soon as possible. Then, a couple of days after first-beam day, a transformer powering part of the LHC’s cryogenic system failed, forcing a pause in commissioning during which the teams decided to test the last octant of the machine for high-current operations. While ramping the magnets towards 9.3 kA on 19 September, one of the LHC’s 10,000 superconducting-dipole interconnects failed, ultimately damaging roughly 400 m of the machine. Evans described the event, which set operations back by 14 months, as “a kick in the teeth”. But CERN recovered quickly (see “Lessons from the accelerator frontier“) and, today, Evans says that he is glad that the fault was discovered when it was. “It would have been a disaster had it happened five years in. As it was, we didn’t come under criticism. We were pushing the limits of technology.”

The timing of the incident was doubly fortuitous: the same week it took place, US investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for the largest bankruptcy in history, with other banks looking set to follow suit. The world might not have been consumed by a black hole, but the prospect of a distinctly more real financial Armageddon dominated the headlines that week.

To collisions and beyond

The coming to life of the LHC is a thrilling story, a scientific fairy-tale. From its long-awaited completion, to the tense sector-by-sector threading of its first beam in front of millions of people and the incident nine days later that temporarily ruined the party, the LHC finally arrived at a new energy frontier in November 2009 (achieving 1.18 TeV per beam). Its physics programme began in earnest a few months later, on 30 March 2010, at a collision energy of 7 and then 8 TeV. Barely two years later, the LHC produced its first major discovery – the Higgs boson, announced to a packed CERN auditorium on 4 July 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations and webcast around the world. The discovery was followed by the award of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics to Peter Higgs and François Englert. The CERN seminar was the first time that the pair had met, with cameras capturing Higgs wiping a tear from his eye as the significance of the event sunk in. Since 2015, the LHC has been operating at 13 TeV while notching up record levels of performance, and the machine is now being prepared for its high-luminosity upgrade (HL-LHC).

Has the success of LHC communications set the bar too high? The CERN press office tracked a steady increase in the number of LHC-related articles in the period leading up to the switch-on, in addition to an increasing number of visits by the media and the public. Coverage peaked around September 2008, died down a little, then picked up again four years later as the drama of the Higgs-boson discovery started to unfold. When ATLAS and CMS announced the discovery, press coverage exceeded even that of first-beam day. Of the top 10-read items on The Guardian website, says Sample, stories about the Higgs made up eight or nine of them, when there were plenty of other big news stories around that day. Why? “The absolute competence and dedication and hard work of those scientists and engineers was so refreshing compared to the crooks, bullies, liars and murderers that we write about every day,” he says. “Perhaps people enjoyed reading about something positive, about people doing astounding work, about something far bigger than the world they normally encounter in the news.”

Today, press coverage of the LHC remains higher than it was before the switch-on, with an average of 200 clippings per day worldwide. The number of media visits to CERN, having peaked in around 2008 and 2012, is now at the level that it was before the switch-on, corresponding to around 300 media outlets per year. The LHC’s life so far has also coincided with the explosion of social-media tools. CERN’s first ever tweet, on 7 August 2008, announced the date for first-beam day, and today the lab has more than two million Twitter followers – rising at a rate of around 1000 per day. During the announcement of the Higgs-boson discovery in 2012, CERN’s live tweets reached journalists faster than the press release and helped contribute to worldwide coverage of the news.

Framing the search for the Higgs boson as the LHC’s only physics goal was never the message that CERN intended to put out, but it’s the one that the media latched on to. Echoing others working in the media who were interviewed for this article, Brumfiel thinks that the LHC has largely left the public eye. In terms of the media, he says, “It’s a victim of its own success: it was designed to do one thing, and it’s done it.”

The challenge facing communications at CERN today is how to capitalise on the existing interest while constructing a new or updated narrative of exploration and discovery. After all, in terms of physics measurements, the LHC is only getting into its stride – having collected just 5% of its expected total dataset and with up to two decades of operations still to go. Although the LHC has not yet found any conclusive signs of physics beyond the Standard Model, it is clear from astronomical and other observations that such phenomena are out there, somewhere. In the absence of direct discoveries, identifying the new physics will be a hard slog involving ever more precise measurements of known particles – a much tougher sell to the public, even if it is all part of the same effort to uncover the basic laws of the universe.

“CERN has managed to build upon previous communication successes as the public is already interested, so they can simply strap a camera onto a drone, fly it around and a lot of people will happily watch!” says David Eggleton of the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex in the UK, who studies leadership and governance in major scientific projects such as the LHC. “But, just like with the scientists, the public is going to need something new and exciting to focus on – even if the pay-off is 10 years in the future, so it depends on how the laboratory wants to strategise – do they want to pitch HL-LHC as the next big machine or is it just going to be articulated as an upgrade with the FCC (Future Circular Collider) becoming the thing to capture the public’s imagination?”

Theoretical physicist and science populariser Sabine Hossenfelder of the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany thinks the excitement surrounding the switch-on of the LHC has come back to haunt the field, going so far as to label the current situation in particle physics a “PR disaster”. Before the LHC’s launch in 2008, she says, some theorists expressed themselves confident that the collider would produce new particles besides the Higgs boson. “That hasn’t happened. The big proclamations came almost exclusively from theoretical physicists; CERN didn’t promise anything that they didn’t deliver. That is an important distinction, but I am afraid in the public perception the subtler differences won’t matter.”

Cultural icon

At least for now, and in some countries, the LHC has become embedded in popular culture. The term “hadron collider” is the new “rocket science” – a term dropped into commentary and public discourse to denote the pinnacle of human ingenuity. The LHC has inspired books, films, plays, art and, crucially, adverts – in which firms have used high-production visuals to associate their brands with the standards of the LHC. The number of applications for physics degrees, in the UK at least, soared around the time that the LHC switched on, and the event also launched the television career of ATLAS physicist Brian Cox, who went on to further engage a primed public. Annually, around 300,000 people apply to visit CERN, less than half of whom can be accommodated.

If the communications surrounding the LHC have proved one thing, it is that there is an inherent interest among huge swathes of the global population in the substance of particle physics. Highfield, who is now director of external affairs at the Science Museum in the London, sees this on a daily basis. “Although I think physicists would have liked to have seen more surprises, I know from my work at the Science Museum that the public has a huge appetite for smashing physics,” he says. In November 2013, the Science Museum launched Collider, an immersive exhibition that blended theatre, video and sound art with real artefacts from CERN to recreate a visit to the laboratory. The exhibition went on international tour, finishing in Australia in April 2017, having pulled in an audience of more than 600,000 people. “Yes, the public still cares about the quest to reveal the deepest secrets of the cosmos,” says Highfield.

From a communications perspective, the switch-on of the LHC proves the importance of a clear strategy, the rewards from taking risks, and the difficulty in keeping control of a narrative. For Evans, the LHC changed everything. “Of all the machines that I’ve worked on, never before has there been such interest,” he says. “Before the LHC, no one knew what you were talking about. Now, I can get into a cab in New York or speak to an immigration officer in Japan, and they say: oh, cool, you work at CERN?”.

The post The day the world switched on to particle physics appeared first on CERN Courier.

On 28 June, 200 servers from the CERN computing centre were donated to Kathmandu University (KU) in Nepal. The equipment, which is no longer needed by CERN, will contribute towards a new high-performance computing facility for research and educational purposes.

With more than 15,000 students across seven schools, KU is the second largest university in Nepal. But infrastructure and resources for carrying out research are still minimal compared to universities of similar size in Europe and the US. For example, the KU school of medicine is forced to periodically delete medical imaging data because disk storage is at a premium, undermining the value of the data for preventative screening of diseases, or for population health studies. Similarly, R&D projects in the schools of science and engineering fulfill their needs by borrowing computing time abroad, either through online data transfer, marred by bandwidth, or by physically taking data tapes to institutes abroad for analysis.

“We cannot emphasise enough the need for a high-performance computing facility at KU, and, speaking of the larger national context, in Nepal,” says Rajendra Adhikari, an assistant professor of physics at KU. “The server donation from CERN to KU will have a historically significant impact in fundamental research and development at KU and in Nepal.”

A total of 184 CPU servers and 16 disk servers, in addition to 12 network switches, were shipped from CERN to KU. The CPU servers’ capacity represents more than 2500 processor cores and 8 TB of memory, while the disk servers will provide more than 700 TB of storage. The total computing capacity is equivalent to more than 2000 typical desktop computers.

Since 2012, CERN has regularly donated computing equipment that no longer meets its highly specific requirements but is still more than adequate for less exacting environments. To date, a total of 2079 servers and 123 network switches have been donated to countries and international organisations, namely Algeria, Bulgaria, Ecuador, Egypt, Ghana, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, the Philippines, Senegal, Serbia, the SESAME laboratory in Jordan, and now Nepal. In the process leading up to the KU donation, the government of Nepal and CERN signed an International Cooperation Agreement to formalise their relationship (CERN Courier October 2017 p28).

“It is our hope that the server handover is one of the first steps of scientific partnership. We are committed to accelerate the local research programme, and to collaborate with CERN and its experiments in the near future,” says Adhikari.

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Training and education have been among CERN’s core activities since the laboratory was founded. The CERN Convention of 1954 stated that these activities might include “promotion of contacts between, and interchange of, scientists…and the provision of advanced training for research workers”. It was in this spirit that the first residential schools of physics were organised by CERN in the early 1960s. Initially held in Switzerland, with a duration of one week, the schools soon evolved into two-week events that took place annually and rotated among CERN Member States.

Following discussions between the Directors-General of CERN and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Russia, it was agreed that CERN should organise the 1970 school in collaboration with JINR. The event was held in Finland, which at that time was not a Member State of either institution, and the CERN–JINR collaboration evolved into today’s annual CERN–JINR European Schools of High-Energy Physics (HEP). The European schools that began in 1993 (CERN Courier June 2013 p27) are held in a CERN Member State three years out of four, and in a JINR Member State one year out of four.

The target audience of the European schools is advanced PhD students in experimental HEP, preparing them for a career as research physicists. Around 100 students attend each event following a rigorous selection process. Those attending the 2017 school – the 25th in the series, held from 6 to 19 September in Évora, Portugal – were selected from more than 230 candidates, taking into account their potential to pursue a research career in experimental particle physics. The 100 successful students included 33 different nationalities and, reflecting an increasing trend over the past quarter century of the European schools, about a third were women.

The core programme of the schools continues to be particle-physics theory and phenomenology, including general topics such as the Standard Model, quantum chromodynamics and flavour physics, complemented by more specialised aspects such as heavy-ion physics, Higgs physics, neutrino physics and physics beyond the Standard Model. A course on practical statistics reflects the importance of this topic in modern HEP data analysis. The school also includes classes on cosmology, in light of the strong link between particle physics and astrophysical dark-matter research. Students are taught about the latest developments and prospects at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). They also hear from the Director-General of CERN and the director of JINR about the programmes and plans of the two organisations, which have links going back more than half a century. Thus, in addition to studying a wide spectrum of physics topics, the students are given a broad overview and outlook on particle-physics facilities and related issues.

The two-week residential programme includes a total of more than 30 plenary lectures of 90 minutes each, complemented by parallel discussion sessions involving six groups of about 17 students. Each group remains with the same discussion leader for the duration of the school, providing an environment where the students are comfortable to ask questions about the lectures and explore topics of interest in greater depth. The students are encouraged to discuss their own research work with each other and with the staff of the school during an after-dinner poster session. The lecturers are highly experienced experts in their fields, coming from many different countries in Europe and beyond, while the discussion leaders are highly active, but sometimes less-senior physicists.

New ingredient

A new ingredient in the school’s programme since 2014 is training in outreach for the general public. Making use of two 90 minute teaching slots, the students learn about communicating science to a general audience from two professional trainers who have a background in journalism with the BBC. The compulsory training sessions are complemented by optional one-on-one exercises that are very popular with the students. The exercises involve acting out a radio interview about a discovery of new physics at the LHC based on a fictitious scenario.

Building on what they have learnt in the science-communication training, the students from each discussion group collaborate in their “free time” to prepare an eight-minute talk on a particle-physics topic at a level understandable to the public. This is an exercise in teamwork as well as in outreach. The group needs to identify the specific aspects of the topic that they are going to address, develop a plan to make it interesting and relevant to a general audience, share the work of preparing the presentation between the team members, and agree who will give the talk on their behalf. The results of the collaborative group projects are presented in an after-dinner session that is video recorded. A jury made up of experienced science communicators judges the projects and gives feedback to each group. The topics addressed in the projects at the 2017 school in Portugal included the Standard Model, neutrinos, extra dimensions, and cosmology, with the prize for the best team effort going to a presentation on the Higgs boson illustrated with a “cookie-eating grandmother” field.

Equipping young researchers with good science-communication skills is considered important by the management of both CERN and JINR, and outreach training is greatly appreciated by most of the European school’s students. As a follow up, students are encouraged to make contact with the people responsible for outreach in their experimental collaborations or home institutes, with a view to participating in science-communication activities.

In addition to the outreach training, important public events are often held in the host country at the time of the school – benefitting from the presence of the leading scientists who are lecturing.  This is well illustrated by the 2017 edition, at which a public event at Évora University coincided with visits to the school by CERN Director-General Fabiola Gianotti, who gave a talk entitled “The Higgs particle and our life”, and JINR director Victor Matveev. The event was attended by numerous high-level representatives of Portuguese scientific institutes and universities, and also by the Portuguese minister of science, technology and higher education, Manuel Heitor. There was an audience of about 300, including high-school teachers, pupils and university students, with more following a live webcast.

Branching out

In addition to the annual schools that take place in Europe, CERN is involved in organising schools of HEP in Latin America (in odd-numbered years since 2001) and in the Asia-Pacific region (in even-numbered years since 2012). These schools have a similar core programme to the European ones, but with more emphasis on instrumentation and experimental techniques. This reflects the fact that there are fewer opportunities in some of the countries concerned for advanced training in these areas.

Although there is so far no specific teaching at the schools in Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region on communicating science to a general audience, education and outreach activities are often arranged in the host country around the time of the schools. For example, an important education and outreach programme was organised to coincide with the 2017 CERN–Latin-American School held from 8 to 21 March in Querétaro, Mexico. Here, several teachers from the CERN school gave short lecture courses or seminars to undergraduate students from Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro and the Juriquilla campus of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

A highlight of the outreach programme in Mexico was a large public event on 8 March, the arrivals day for students at the CERN school and, by coincidence, International Women’s Day. This included introductory talks by Fabiola Gianotti (recorded in advance and subtitled in Spanish) and by Julia Tagüeña Parga (in person), deputy director for scientific development in the Mexican national science and technology agency, CONACyT. These were followed by a lecture entitled “Einstein, black holes and gravitational waves” by Gabriela Gonzalez, spokesperson of the LIGO collaboration, attracting a capacity audience of about 400 people.

As is evident, the European schools of HEP have a long history and continue their primary mission of teaching HEP and related topics to young researchers. However, the programme continues to evolve, and it now includes some training in science communication that is becoming increasingly important in the CERN and JINR Member States. The success of the schools can be judged by an anonymous evaluation questionnaire in which the overall assessment is overwhelmingly positive, with about 60% of students in 2014–2017 giving the highest ranking of “excellent”.

In total, more than 3000 students have attended the schools, including the Latin-American schools since 2001 and the Asia–Europe–Pacific schools since 2012, as well as the European schools since 1993. All these schools are important ingredients in delivering CERN’s mission in education and outreach, and in supporting its policies of international co-operation and being open to geographical enlargement within and beyond Europe. They bring together participants and teachers of many different nationalities, and each school requires close collaboration between CERN, co-organisers such as JINR for the European schools, and colleagues from the host country. The schools may also link in with other aspects of CERN’s international relations. For example, the 2015 Latin-American school in Ecuador helped to pave the way for formal membership of Ecuadorian universities in the CMS experiment. Similarly, the 2011 European school and associated outreach activities in Bucharest marked steps towards Romania becoming a Member State of CERN.

The next European school will be held in Maratea, Italy, from 20 June to 3 July 2018, followed by an Asia–Europe–Pacific school in Quy Nhon, Vietnam, from 12 to 25 September 2018.

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I returned to the Netherlands as a professor of experimental physics at Radboud University Nijmegen in 1998. After having enjoyed more than 10 years almost exclusively doing research work at CERN and elsewhere, I found (as I had strongly suspected) that I very much enjoyed teaching. Teaching first-year undergraduate physics courses, I came into contact with high-school teachers who were assisting students with the transition between secondary school and university. While successful for a broad group of students, many realised during their first year of university that studying physics was rather different from what they had imagined when they were still in school. As a result, there was a significant drop-out rate.

An opportunity to remedy this situation came when I read about a cosmic-ray high-school project in Canada led by experimental particle-physicist Jim Pinfold. Soon thereafter, and independently, a Nijmegen colleague, Charles Timmermans, came to me with a similar proposal for our university, and in 2000 we initiated the Nijmegen Area High School Array. Two years later, together with others, we launched the Dutch national High-School Project on Astrophysics Research with Cosmics (HiSPARC), which involved placing scintillator detectors on the roofs of high schools to form detector arrays. This is an excellent mixture of real science and educating high-school pupils in research methods. It has been a lot of fun to build the detectors with pupils, to legally walk on school roofs, and to analyse the data that arrive. Of course reality is unruly and it is sometimes hard to keep the objectives in focus: the schools can tend to be rather casual, if not careless, about the proper function of their set-up, whereas for the physics harvest it is essential to have a reliable network.

HiSPARC had an interesting side effect. While working with my group on the DΦ experiment at the Tevatron, focusing on finding the Higgs boson, I was, more or less adiabatically, pulled towards the Pierre Auger Observatory (PAO)   the international cosmic-ray observatory in Argentina. The highest-energy particles in the universe are very mysterious: we don’t yet know precisely where they come from, although the latest PAO results suggest we’re getting close (Extreme cosmic rays reveal clues to origin). Nor do we know how they are accelerated to energies up to 100 million TeV. My involvement as a university scientist in a high-school project has completely redirected my research career, and for the past five years I have spent all of my research time on the PAO.

Prompted by my teacher network, around 10 years ago I organised a joint effort between six nearby high schools concerning a new exam subject introduced by the Dutch ministry – “nature, life and technology”, which integrates science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects. Every Friday afternoon, 350 pupils come to our faculty of science, which itself is an organisational and logistical challenge. The groups are organised during the course of the afternoon depending on the activity: a lecture for all, tutorials, and labs in biology, chemistry, physics, computer science and other subjects. Around 10 different locations in the building (and sometimes outside) are involved, and for every 20 25 pupils there is one teacher available. Following this project, in 2011 I initiated a two-year-long pre-university programme for gifted fifth and sixth graders in high school, which also takes place at the university and involves about 20 teachers and 14 university faculty members. The first cohort of pupils arrived in 2013, and one of the first graduates in the programme recently completed an internship at CERN.

Admittedly it is a lot of work. But it has been worth the effort. By thinking about how to teach particle physics to pupils with different backgrounds and experiences, I have gained more insight into the fundamentals of particle physics. Even the sometimes tedious experience of bringing school managements together and getting them to carry out projects outside of their comfort zones has prepared me well for some aspects of my present duty as president of CERN Council. Working with pupils and teachers has enriched my life, without having to compromise on research or management duties. And if I can combine such things with a research career, there seems little excuse for most scientists not to help educate and inspire the next generation.

The post So you want to communicate science? appeared first on CERN Courier.

Following a successful debut in 2016 that witnessed 4000 people happily packing themselves into a tent over three days in Charlton Park in the UK, CERN returned to the WOMAD festival this year with the Physics Pavilion. Featuring talks on theremins and electric guitars, the physics of the NA62 experiment, and the origins of creativity, the Pavilion was once again packed during a year with record attendance at the festival. Those who craved something more hands-on were not disappointed: The Lab, one of two new additions requested by the festival’s management team, allowed participants to build their own cloud chamber, particle collision event, and more. CERN virtual-reality headsets created a queue at a third location called Outside at The Lab, where people eagerly explored the CMS experiment, and Devoxx4Kids allowed children to understand physics by modelling catapults in Minecraft code – perhaps inspiring the next generation of physics model-builders.

The team behind the Physics Pavilion includes physicists from CERN, the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, the Institute of Physics, and Lancaster University. The enthusiasm for science was clear to see, with proud parents asking for careers advice for their young Einsteins and Curies. “Can we visit?”, “What if there are things smaller than quarks?”, “What are you looking for now?” and “What can we use the Higgs boson for?” were just some of the tough questions asked by hungry minds at a festival that celebrates diversity and culture. With events like this, CERN and its partners are reaching out to a wide range of people, sharing knowledge and excitement, and showing that science is part of our common cultural heritage.

The post Physics at the festival frontier appeared first on CERN Courier.

The Particle Zoo, a California-based company that produces soft-toy versions of elementary particles and other outreach materials, is searching for a buyer to take the reins.

Julie Peasley, a graphic designer with a keen interest in physics, started the company in 2008 after having attended a public lecture about cosmology at the University of California at Los Angeles and a craft fair in the same weekend. Setting up an online store, she began selling her particles, slowly expanding the range after requests from physicists. Beginning with little sewing experience, Peasley can now produce around four particle toys per hour and has created more than 50,000 units to date.

Each of the Zoo’s 36 felt particles, plus a range of related products from stickers to pillows, is designed to reflect the properties of its real counterpart: the W boson is double-sided to represent its positive and negative aspects; neutrinos are masked to reflect their elusive nature; and each toy is stuffed with a different material to reflect the mass hierarchy of the real particles.

Looking for a new career path, Peasley says the business has tremendous potential for growth with the right owner and a little capital. “To this day, there are no competitors – I am still the only person selling plush particles! I just never had the capital to take it to the next level,” she told CERN Courier.

Peasley piloted the mass-production of her two most popular particles – the Higgs boson and the electron – in China for three years. However, she struggled to secure the investment required to continue with the mass-production of all the particles. “Iʼd really love to see the business continue rather than die because it brings smiles to anyone who sees it.” Interested potential particle zookeepers can get in touch at particlezoo.net.

The post Particle Zoo searching for new keeper appeared first on CERN Courier.

CERN has begun major work to create a new visitor space called Esplanade des Particules, to welcome the ever-growing numbers of visitors to the laboratory each year. The project, undertaken in conjunction with the Etat de Genève, will integrate the laboratory better into the local urban landscape, making it more open and easily accessible, with work to last until summer 2018.

A competition was launched in 2011 to showcase the public entrance to CERN. Landscape-architects Studio Paolo Bürgi won with a design for a large space dedicated to pedestrians that connects CERN’s reception to the Globe of Science and Innovation. The Esplanade des Particules will see the current “Flags Car Park” replaced by a blue pedestrianised area in which the flags of CERN Member States will cross the main road to the laboratory.

The post CERN on the road appeared first on CERN Courier.

With over 60 years of history and currently more than 13,000 users from all over the world, CERN clearly has great potential to bring together a varied alumni community. Today, CERN alumni are distributed around the world, pursuing their careers and passions across many fields including industry, economics, information technology, medicine and finance. Several have gone on to launch successful start-ups, some of them directly applying CERN-inspired technologies.

Setting up and nurturing this important network is a strategic objective for CERN management. Following 12 months of careful preparation, the new CERN Alumni Programme will be launched in June this year.

The new community, united by a shared pride in having contributed to CERN’s scientific endeavours, will provide an opportunity for alumni to maintain links with the Organization. It will allow them to continue to share CERN’s values and support its activities, and serve as a valuable resource for members of personnel in the transition to work outside the laboratory. Physicists, in particular, often consider CERN as a “prime environment” that comes just after academia. The prospect of having to leave CERN may be daunting, with no guarantee that one’s professional future will offer a similar environment and possibilities. However, preliminary statistics on the CERN alumni community demonstrate that professional experience at CERN nurtures skills and talents that are highly sought after by employers and can aid the development of alumni careers in many different fields.

The CERN Alumni Programme has been purposely designed to be inclusive. Former users, associates, students, fellows, staff, and any member of personnel who has held a contract of either employment or association with CERN, may join the alumni community simply by registering. Current members of personnel will also be able to register and interact with the alumni, as well as partner companies. The final objective is to establish a dynamic, long-lasting and high-energy network of engaged members.

Since November 2016 it has been possible for previous and current members of personnel who wish to become members of the network to leave their contact details on the alumni webpage (see below), which CERN will use to contact them once the new web platform is up and running. Registered members of the CERN alumni community will have access to dedicated editorial content, opportunities to exchange experiences and establish contacts with other alumni, in addition to career development opportunities. The aim is to gather a large number of members, whether they are former colleagues still working in academia, have set up their own businesses, have moved into completely different professional environments, or have retired but wish to stay connected.

CERN alumni will themselves be actively involved in building the community, which will evolve with them. The advisory board of the new programme will include representatives from the community as well as members of CERN management. Alumni will be able to set up thematic groups within the community based on factors such as regional interests and scientific topics. A mobile app will help them to stay connected with news, events and networking activities that are published by the community.

The CERN Alumni Programme kick-off event will be held on 2–3 February 2018. In addition to offering unique networking opportunities, it will be possible to visit the LHC and its experiments as well as experimental areas that are usually not accessible to the public. Inspiring seminars and several panel sessions will complete the programme. The event is designed to be a valuable experience for all different types of alumni, from young scientists who have recently left CERN to those with long-standing careers in different fields, and many others.

We are aware that it will be a challenge to reach all of our alumni spread across the planet over such a long period. If you are one of them, do not hesitate to leave your contact details at https://alumni.cern/. It is the best way to show your interest, join the new community and stay connected with CERN. We also invite you to get in touch with any questions by emailing alumni.relations@cern.ch. We will be very happy to welcome you back to CERN again!

The post Birth of the high-energy network appeared first on CERN Courier.

Establishing and maintaining a strong link between science and society is vital, and is something that has long been recognised by CERN. Writing in 1972, former Director-General Victor Weisskopf put it well when he argued that a concerted effort towards the presentation and popularisation of science would “provide a potent antidote to overspecialisation, bring out clearly what is significant in current research, and make science a more integral part of the culture of today”.

Forty-five years later, as we enter the so-called “post-factual world” emerging from political ideologies in a growing number of modern democracies, it is more important than ever for science and society to maintain an open and transparent dialogue. It has also become evident that the tools and methods currently used to support such a dialogue have not been as successful as we would have hoped. Indeed, many excellent outreach activities at research centres, universities and museums often attract only those people who are already interested and appreciative of the basic and fundamental relevance of science.

Without compromising established methods, we must explore new paths to engage citizens – especially the young. Reaching out to high-school students and their teachers to convey the methods and tools used in fundamental science is a strong investment in the future. While only a fraction of young students will become scientists, and fewer still will become particle physicists, all will become ambassadors for the scientific method and evidence-based decision-making. Developing a dialogue with those who have left school early raises important challenges of its own, and requires that scientists take courageous steps. Partnering with artists, musicians and celebrities, for instance, has enormous potential to get science into the spotlight. But it involves a delicate balance between raising curiosity and descending into trivialities.

The International Particle Physics Outreach Group (IPPOG) is making a concerted and systematic effort to present and popularise particle physics across all audiences and age groups. Established 20 years ago following the recommendations of former CERN Director-General Christopher Llewellyn Smith, IPPOG has evolved from a European to a global network that involves countries, laboratories and scientific collaborations active in particle-physics research. It is best known for its International Masterclasses (IMC) programme, which evolved in the mid-1990s from national outreach efforts in the days of the LEP collider and has gone from strength to strength. Since 2005, the programme has offered high-school students the opportunity to become physicists for a day by performing a tailor-made physics analysis involving real LHC data (CERN Courier June 2014 p37). In terms of numbers, last year’s edition of the IMC included 213 institutions in 46 countries and around 13,000 students took part.

Particle physics has become a truly global activity, with experimental collaborations such as those of the LHC experiments featuring thousands of researchers from all over the world. With this trend, IPPOG is evolving further to cover more countries, laboratories and experiments spanning all aspects of collider and non-collider research, including astroparticle physics and accelerator and detector technology. This expanding remit demands that IPPOG adopts a more formal structure to guarantee the quality and sustainability of its work.

Following the model of collaboration in experimental particle physics, on 19 December IPPOG became a formal scientific collaboration based on a memorandum of understanding. A total of 13 countries have now signed as members, with several candidate members expected to join soon, and each is required to contribute a membership fee weighted by its GDP and the size of its particle-physics community. Laboratories and even individual scientific collaborations are also part of IPPOG, where they contribute to the expert knowledge and skills required to inspire young thinkers.

The new collaboration status of IPPOG, and CERN’s formal membership, demonstrates a clear commitment to sustainable science outreach. With further countries and organisations expected to join soon, and others invited to get involved, the worldwide particle-physics community has a strong partner at hand when reaching out to wider society in diverse ways that are adapted for every target audience.

The post Reaching out in the era of big science appeared first on CERN Courier.

As far back as 1939, the US educator Abraham Flexner penned a stirring paean to basic research in Harper’s Magazine under the title “The usefulness of useless knowledge.” Flexner, perhaps being intentionally provocative, pointed out that Marconi’s contribution to the radio and wireless had been practically negligible. He went on to argue that the 1865 work of James Clerk Maxwell on the theoretical underpinnings of electricity and magnetism, and the subsequent experimental work of Heinrich Hertz on the detection of electromagnetic waves, was done with no concern about the practical utility of the work. The knowledge they sought, in other words, was never targeted to a specific application. Without it, however, there could have been no radio, no television and no mobile phones.

The history of innovation is full of such examples. It is practically impossible to find a piece of technology that cannot be traced back to the work of scientists motivated purely by a desire to understand the world. But basic research goes further. There is something primordial about it. Every child is a natural scientist imbued with curiosity, vivid imagination and a desire to learn. It is what sets us apart from any other species, and it is what has provided the wellspring of innovation since the harnessing of fire and the invention of the wheel. Children are always asking questions: why is the sky blue? What are we made of? It is by investigating questions like these that science has advanced, and because it can inspire children to grow up into future scientists or scientifically aware citizens.

Education and training are among CERN’s core missions. Over the years we have developed programmes that reach everyone from primary-school children to professional physicists, accelerator scientists and computer scientists. We also keep tabs on the whereabouts of young people passing through CERN, and it is enriching to follow their progress. Around 1000 people per year receive higher degrees from universities around the world for work carried out at CERN. Basic research therefore not only inspires young people to study science, it also provides a steady stream of qualified people for business and industry, where their high-tech, international experience allows them to make a positive impact.

Turning to the UN’s admirably ambitious Global Goals for Sustainable Development, which officially came into force on 1 January 2016 and will last for 15 years as part of the Agenda 2030 programme, the focus on science and technology is positive and encouraging. It testifies to a deeper understanding of the importance of science in driving progress that benefits all peoples and helps to overcome today’s most pressing development challenges. But Agenda 2030’s potential can only be fulfilled through sustained commitment and funding by governments. If we are to tackle issues ranging from eliminating poverty and hunger to providing clean and affordable energy, we need science and we need people to be scientifically aware.

Places like CERN are a vitally important ingredient in the innovation chain. We contribute to the kind of knowledge that not only enriches humanity, but also provides ideas that become the technologies of the future. Some of CERN’s technology has immediate impact on society, such as the World Wide Web and the application of particle accelerators to cancer therapy and many other fields. We also train young people. All this is possible because governments support science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education and basic research, but we should do more. The scientific community, including CERN, urged Agenda 2030 to consider a minimum GDP percentage devoted by every nation to STEM education and basic research. This is particularly important in times of economic downturn, when private funding naturally concentrates on short-term payback and governments focus on domains that offer immediate economic return, at the expense of longer-term investment in fundamental science.

Useless knowledge, as Flexner called it, is at the basis of human development. Humankind’s continuing pursuit of it will make the UN’s development goals achievable.

The post The usefulness of ‘useless’ knowledge appeared first on CERN Courier.

CERN has announced the 4th edition of its Beamline for Schools Competition, which will see two winning teams of students undertake an experiment of their design at a fully equipped CERN beamline next year. The 2017 competition, which is made possible thanks to the Alcoa Foundation, is open to teams of high-school students aged 16 or older. A maximum of nine students per winning team will be invited to CERN, and teams can be composed of pupils from a single school or a number of schools working together.

Previous winners have tested webcams and classroom-grown crystals in the beamline, and also studied how particles decay and investigated high-energy gamma rays. Interested schools can pre-register their team to receive the latest updates, and further information about how to apply can be found at cern.ch/bl4s. The deadline for submissions is 31 March 2017.

The post Beamline competition calls all schools appeared first on CERN Courier.

The economic model is largely inspired by the well-established practice in scientific article publishing, and several publishers have expanded their catalogues to include OA books. Under an appropriate licensing system, the authors retain copyright but the content can be freely shared and reused with appropriate author credit.

The ebooks system, in addition to expanding the diffusion of knowledge, overcomes the production and distribution costs of paper books that result in high prices for titles often acquired only by libraries. OA ebooks are also the ideal outlet for the publication of conference proceedings, maximising their visibility, and with great benefits for library budgets.

Five key works written or edited by CERN authors are already profiting from the impact that comes from their free dissemination.

Three of them are already accessible online:

• Melting Hadrons, Boiling Quarks – From Hagedorn Temperature to Ultra-Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions at CERN: With a Tribute to Rolf Hagedorn by Johann Rafelski (ed), published by Springer (link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-17545-4).

• 60 Years of CERN Experiments and Discoveries by Herwig Schopper and Luigi Di Lella (eds), published by World Scientific (dx.doi.org/10.1142/9441#t=toc).

• The High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider: The New Machine for Illuminating the Mysteries of Universe by Lucio Rossi and Oliver Brüning (eds), published by World Scientific (dx.doi.org/10.1142/9581#t=toc).

Two further OA titles will appear in 2016:

• The Standard Theory of Particle Physics: 60 Years of CERN by Luciano Maiani and Luigi Rolandi (eds), published by World Scientific.

• echnology Meets Research: 60 Years of Technological Achievements at CERN, Illustrated with Selected Highlights by Chris Fabjan, Thomas Taylor and Horst Wenninger (eds), published by World Scientific.

Members of the organising committee of a conference, looking for an OA outlet for the proceedings, and authors who are planning to publish a book, are invited to contact the CERN Library, so that the staff there can help them to negotiate conditions with potential publishers.

The post Open access ebooks appeared first on CERN Courier.

Interest in CERN has evolved over the years. At its inception, the Organization’s founding member states clearly saw the new institution’s potential as a centre of excellence for basic research, a driver of innovation, a provider of first-class education and a catalyst for peace. After several decades of business as usual, CERN is again on the radar of its member-state governments. This is spurred on partly by the public interest that has made CERN something of a household name. But whether in the public spotlight or not, it is incumbent on CERN to spell out to all of its stakeholders why it represents such good value for money today, just as it did 60 years ago. Even though the reasons may be familiar to those working at CERN, they are not always so clear to government officials and policy makers, and it’s worth setting them out in detail.

First and foremost, CERN has made major contributions to how we understand the world that we live in. The discovery and detailed study of weak vector bosons in the 1980s and 1990s, and the recent discovery of the Higgs boson, messenger of the Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism, have contributed much to our understanding of nature at the level of the fundamental particles and their interactions: now rightfully called the Standard Model of particle physics. This on its own is a major cultural achievement, and it has taught us much about how we have arrived at this point in history: right from the moment it all began, 13.6 billion years ago. Appreciation of this cultural contribution has never been higher than today. More than 100,000 people visit CERN every year, including hundreds of journalists reaching millions of people. None leave CERN unimpressed, and all are, without a doubt, culturally enriched by their experience.

Educating and innovating

CERN’s second major area of impact is education, having educated many generations of top-level physicists, engineers and technicians. Some have remained at CERN, while others have gone on to pursue careers in basic research at universities and institutes elsewhere, therefore contributing to top-level education and multiplying the effect of their own experience at CERN. Many more, however, have made their way into industry, fulfilling an important mission for CERN – that of providing skilled people to advance the economies of our member states and collaborating nations. More than 500 doctoral degrees are awarded annually on the basis of work carried out at CERN experiments and accelerators. In 2015, more than 400 doctoral, technical and administrative students were welcomed by CERN, usually staying for between several months and a year. The CERN summer-student and teacher programmes, which provide short stints of intensive education, also welcome hundreds of students and high-school teachers every year.

A third important contribution of CERN is the innovation that results from research that requires technology at levels and in areas where no one has gone before. The best-known example of CERN technology is the World Wide Web, which has profoundly changed the way that our society works worldwide. But the web is just the tip of the iceberg. Advances in fields such as magnet technology, cryogenics, electronics, detector technology and statistical methods have also made their way into society in ways that are equally impactful, although less obviously evident. While the societal benefits of techniques such as advanced photon and lepton detection may not seem immediately relevant beyond the realms of research, the impact they have had in medical imaging, for instance, is profound.

Often not very visible, but no less effective in contributing to our prosperity and well-being, developments such as this are a vital part of the research cycle. CERN is increasingly taking a proactive approach towards transferring its innovation, knowledge and skills to those who can make these count for society as a whole, and this is generally well appreciated. Recent initiatives include public–private partnerships such as OpenLab, Medipix and IdeaSquare, which provide low-entry-threshold mechanisms for companies to engage with CERN technology. In return, CERN benefits through stimulating the kind of industrial innovation that enables next-generation accelerators and detectors.

The recent Viewpoint by CERN Director-General, Fabiola Gianotti (CERN Courier March 2016 p5) gives a superb outline of the opportunities and challenges for particle physics during the coming years. Clearly it will require great dexterity to juggle the continuation of a state-of-the-art research programme at the LHC and a diverse range of other facilities, with greater engagement with important activities beyond CERN, such as the US neutrino programme, while at the same time preparing for future accelerators and detectors. This will stretch CERN’s capabilities to the limit. But it is precisely this challenge that will motivate the Organization to do better and innovate in all areas, with inevitable benefits for society. Scientific culture and societal impacts advancing hand-in-hand through cutting-edge research: it is this that makes CERN worthy of the support it receives from governments worldwide.

The post The CERN effect appeared first on CERN Courier.

I first came to CERN as a student in the mid 1980s, and spent an entrancing summer learning the extent of my lack of knowledge in the field of physics (considerable!) and meeting fellow students from across Europe and further afield. It was a life-changing experience and the beginning of my love affair with CERN. On graduation I returned as a research fellow working on the Large Electron–Positron collider, but at the end of three wonderful years I reluctantly came to the realization that the world of research was not for me. I moved into a more commercial world, and have been working in the field of investments for more than 20 years.

However, as the saying goes, you can take the girl out of CERN but you can’t take CERN out of the girl. I stayed in touch, and when, a few years ago, I met Rolf Heuer, the current director-general, and heard his vision of creating a foundation that would expand CERN’s ability to reach a wider audience, I was keen to be involved.

Science is, in some respects, a field of study that is open largely to the most privileged only. To do it well requires resources – trained educators, good facilities, textbooks, access to research and, of course, opportunity. These are not available universally. I was fortunate to become a summer student at CERN, but that is possible for a lucky few only, and there are many places in the world where even basic access to textbooks or research libraries is limited or non-existent.

And to those outside of the field of science, there is not always a good understanding of why these things matter. The return on a country’s investment in science will come years into the future, beyond short-term electoral cycles. There can appear to be more immediate and pressing concerns competing for limited spending, so advocacy of the wider benefits to society of investment in science is important.

The case for pure scientific research is sometimes difficult to explain. This is not just down to the concepts themselves, which are beyond most of us to understand at anything but a superficial level. It is also because the most fundamental research does not necessarily know in advance what its ultimate usefulness or practicality might be. “Trust me, there will be some” does not sound convincing, even if experience shows that this generally turns out to be the case.

Communication of the tangible benefits of scientific discovery, which can occur a long time after the initial research, is an important part of securing the ongoing support of society for research endeavours, particularly in times of strained financial resources.

After many months of hard work, the CERN & Society Foundation was established in June 2014. Its purpose is “to spread the CERN spirit of scientific curiosity for the inspiration and benefit of society”. It aims to excite young people in the understanding and pursuit of science; to provide researchers in less privileged parts of the world with the tools and access they need to enable them to engage with the wider scientific community; to advocate the benefit of pure scientific research to key influencers; to inspire cultural activities and the arts; and to further the development of science in practical applications for the wider benefit of society as a whole, whether in medicine, technology or the environment. The excitement generated by the LHC gives us a unique opportunity to contribute to society in ways that cannot be done within the constraints of dedicated member-state funding.

To translate this vision into reality will, of course, take time. The foundation currently has a three-person board, made up of myself, Peter Jenni and the director-general. It has benefited from some initial generous donations to get it off the ground and allow us to fund our first projects.

The foundation benefits from the advice of the Fundraising Advisory Board (FAB), which ensures compliance with CERN’s Ethical Policy for Fundraising. It filters through ideas for projects looking for support, and recommends those that are likely to have the highest impact. The FAB, chaired by Markus Nordberg, consists of CERN staff who help us to prioritize the areas on which to focus. In our early years, we have three main themes where we are looking for support: education and outreach; innovation and knowledge exchange; and culture and the arts. With the help of CERN’s Development Office, we are seeking support from foundations, corporate donors and individuals. No donation is too large or small.

Matteo Castoldi, heading the Development Office, has been instrumental in the practical side of the foundation, and is a good person to contact if you have ideas for a project, want help in formalizing a proposal for FAB or would like to discuss any aspect of the CERN & Society Foundation. Our website is up and running – please take a look to find out more, and if you would like to make a donation just click on the link. Thank you in advance for your support.

The post Helping CERN to benefit society appeared first on CERN Courier.

The International Masterclasses (IMCs) began in 2005 as an initiative of what was then the European Particle Physics Outreach Group (EPPOG). Since then, EPPOG has become the International Particle Physics Outreach Group (IPPOG), and the masterclasses have grown steadily beyond a group of IPPOG member countries. This year, the 10th edition of the IMCs included 200 institutions in 41 countries worldwide. Several of the initiatives have attracted new partners, including some from the Middle East and Latin America, enabling IMCs to be held in diverse locations – from Israel and Palestine to South Africa, and from New Zealand to Ecuador – in addition to the many sites in Europe and North America. Now, well into the LHC era, the masterclasses use fresh data from the world’s biggest particle accelerator, as collected by the four big experiments.

All of the LHC collaborations involved acknowledge the potential – and the success – of educational programmes that bring important discoveries at the LHC to high-school students by providing large samples of the most recent data. For example, 10% of the 8-TeV ATLAS “discovery” data are available for students to search for a Higgs boson; CMS approved 13 Higgs candidates in the mass region of interest, which are mixed with a more abundant sample of W and Z events, for “treasure hunt” activities; ALICE data allow students to study the relative production of strange particles, which could be a tell-tale signal of quark–gluon plasma production; LHCb teaches students how to measure the lifetime of the D meson; and particles containing b and c quarks are studied extensively to shed light on the mystery of antimatter in the universe.

Students quickly master real event-display programmes

Students quickly master real event-display programmes – such as iSpy-online, Hypatia and Minerva – software tools and analysis methods. First, they practice particle identification by exploiting the characteristic signals left by particles in various detector elements, where electrons, muons, photons and jets are recognizable. They go on to select and categorize events, and then proceed with measurements. Typically, two students analyse 50–100 events, before joining peers to combine and discuss data with the tutors at their local IMC institution. Then they join students at several other locations to combine and discuss all of the data from that day in a video conference from CERN or Fermilab (see table 1).

The IMCs make five measurements available. Typically, a local institution selects one that their physicists have deep knowledge of, guaranteeing that experts are available to talk to the students about what they know best.

The ATLAS Z-path measurement relies on invariant mass for particle identification. It is first applied to measure the mass and width of the Z boson, and of the J/ψ and ϒ mesons. These parameters are all inferred from the decay products – pairs of e⁺e^– or μ⁺μ^– leptons. When a hypothetical new heavy gauge boson, Z´, is mixed with the data, the simulated signal shows up in the dilepton mass distribution. The students apply the same technique to di-photons and pairs of dileptons to search for decays of a Higgs boson to γγ and ZZ^*, leading to a four-lepton final state.

The ATLAS W-path deals with the structure of the proton and the search for a Higgs boson. Students look for a W-boson decaying into a charged lepton and a neutrino (missing energy), and build the charge ratio N_W+/N_W–. The simple view of a proton structure of uud quarks leads to a naive approximation of N_W+/N_W– = 2. The presence of sea quarks and gluons complicates the picture, bringing the ratio down to around 1.5, compatible with the measurements by ATLAS and CMS. The next challenge is to study events containing W⁺W^– pairs, which are characterized by two oppositely charged leptons and neutrinos. Decays of a Higgs boson to W⁺W^– would enhance the distribution of the azimuthal angle between the charged leptons at low values.

The CMS measurement is called “WZH” for the W, Z, and Higgs bosons. Based on the signatures of leptonic decays, students determine whether each event is a W candidate, a Z candidate, a Higgs candidate, or background. For W bosons, they use the curvature of the single measurable lepton track to decide if it is a W⁺ or W^– and so derive the charge ratio of W-boson production. They can also characterize events as having a muon or an electron to measure the electron-to-muon ratio. For Z and Higgs candidates, students put the invariant masses of lepton and dilepton pairs, respectively, in a mass plot. They discover the Z and Higgs peaks, including a few other resonances they might not have expected.

ALICE’s ROOT-based event-display software enables students to reconstruct strange particles (K_s, Λ, Λ) decaying to ππ and pπ. As a second step, they analyse large event samples from lead collisions in different regions of centrality, and normalize to the mean number of nucleons participating in the collision for each centrality region. Data from proton collisions and from lead-ion collisions lead to a measurement of the relative production of strangeness, which the students compare with theoretical predictions.

All of these educational packages are tuned and expanded to follow the LHC’s “heartbeats”

The LHCb measurement allows students to extract the lifetime of the D⁰ meson after having studied and fitted an invariant-mass distribution of identified kaons and pions. The next step is to compare and discuss properties of D⁰ and D⁰ decays.

All of these educational packages are tuned and expanded to follow the LHC’s “heartbeats”. The intention is for the IMCs to bring measurements for new discoveries in the coming years.

A model for science education

The IMCs have led to other masterclass initiatives. National programmes bring masterclasses to students in areas far from the research institutes that host the international programme. In several countries, programmes for teachers’ professional development include masterclass elements, as does CERN’s national teacher programme. Masterclasses also reach locations other than schools, such as science centres or museums, and other fields of physics, including astroparticle and nuclear physics, have embarked on national and international masterclass programmes.

The largest national programme is the German four-level “Netzwerk Teilchenwelt”, which has been active since 2010. In its basic level, more than 100 young facilitators, mostly PhD and Masters’ students from 24 participating universities and research centres, take CERN’s data to schools. Throughout the year, on at least every other school day, a local masterclass takes place somewhere in Germany. Annually, about 4000 students are invited to further qualification and specialization levels in the network, which can lead to their own research theses. Another example is the Greek “mini-masterclasses” at high-schools, which are usually combined with virtual LHC visits where students link with a physicist at the ATLAS or CMS experimental areas.

Elements of particle-physics masterclasses for teachers’ professional development have become standard in most of the national teacher programmes at CERN and in countries such as Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Italy and the US. Masterclasses for the general public have taken place in science centres in Norway and Germany.

Other physics fields are also using the masterclasses as a model for physics education and science communication. For example, in the UK, nuclear-physics masterclasses cover nuclear fusion and stellar nucleosynthesis. Astroparticle physics is also joining the masterclass scene. In Germany, the Netzwerk Teilchenwelt hosts masterclasses that use data from the Pierre Auger Observatory to reconstruct cosmic showers or energy spectra, or data on cosmic muons that the students take themselves using Cherenkov or scintillation detectors. Since 2012, students at the Notre Dame Exoplanet Masterclass in the US have used data and tools from the Agent Exoplanet citizen science project run by the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network to measure characteristics of exoplanets from their effects on the light curves of stars that they orbit during a transit. New international masterclasses on the search for very high-energy cosmic neutrinos at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole will connect three countries in May 2014, with more countries joining in 2015.

Behind the scenes

An international steering group manages the IMCs in close co-operation with IPPOG. Co-ordination is provided through the Technische Universität (TU) Dresden and the QuarkNet project in the US, and funding is provided by institutions in Europe (CERN, the European Physical Society and TU Dresden) and the US (the University of Notre Dame and Fermilab). While the co-ordination based at TU Dresden is responsible for the whole of Europe, Africa and the Middle East, co-ordination through QuarkNet covers North and South America, Australia and Oceania and the Far East. Co-ordinators are in close contact with all of the participating institutions. They issue circulars, create the schedule, maintain websites, provide orientation and integrate new institutions into the IMCs. As QuarkNet is a US programme for teachers’ professional development, the co-ordination also includes visiting and preparing educators at schools and at IMC institutions.

One of the highlights of the IMCs is the final video conference, where students present and combine their results

One of the highlights of the IMCs is the final video conference, where students present and combine their results with other student groups and moderators at CERN or Fermilab. Co-ordinators take special care to create the schedule so that every video conference is an international collaboration that lets the students explore part of the daily life of a particle physicist, doing science across borders. Young physicists at CERN and Fermilab moderate the sessions and represent the face of particle physics to the students. The co-ordinators maintain excellent collaboration with the moderators, for example arranging training and monitoring video conferences.

IPPOG – an umbrella for more

The IMCs in the LHC era are a major activity of IPPOG, a network of scientists, educators and communication specialists working worldwide in informal science education and outreach for particle physics. Through IPPOG, the masterclasses profit from scientists taking an active role, conveying the fascination of fundamental research and thereby reaching young people. IPPOG offers a reliable and regular discussion forum and information exchange, enabling worldwide participation. In addition to organizing the IMCs and hosting a collection of recommended tools and materials for education and outreach, IPPOG facilitates participation in a variety of activities such as CERN’s new Beam Line for Schools project and the celebrations for the organization’s 60th anniversary.

IPPOG is poised to support recommendations outlined in the 2013 update to the European Strategy for Particle Physics and the US Community Summer Study 2013, to engage a greater proportion of the particle-physics community in communication, education and outreach activities. This engagement should be supported, facilitated, widened and secured by measures that include training, encouragement and recognition. Many individuals, groups and institutions in the particle-physics community reach out to members of the public, teachers and school students through a variety of activities. IPPOG can help to lower the barriers to engagement in such activities and make a coherent case for particle physics.

The organizers of the IMCs expect and welcome new partners. For more about the programme, visit http://physicsmasterclasses.org/. For more about IPPOG, see http://ippog.web.cern.ch. For the Netzwerk Teilchenwelt, visit www.teilchenwelt.de; for the Mini-Masterclasses, see http://discoverthecosmos.eu/news/87; and for QuarkNet, see http://quarknet.fnal.gov/.

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Eleven publishers of high-quality international journals are participating in SCOAP³. Elsevier, IOP Publishing and Springer, with their publishing partners, have been working with the network of SCOAP³ national contact points. Reductions in subscription fees for thousands of participating libraries worldwide have been arranged, making funds available for libraries to support SCOAP³.

The objective of SCOAP³ is to grant unrestricted access to articles appearing in scientific journals, which so far have been available to scientists only through certain university libraries, and generally unavailable to the wider public. Open dissemination of preliminary information, in the form of pre-peer-review articles known as preprints, has been the norm in high-energy physics and related disciplines for two decades. SCOAP³ sustainably extends this opportunity to high-quality peer-review service, making the final version of articles available within the open-access tenets of free and unrestricted dissemination of science with intellectual property rights vested in the authors and wide re-use opportunities. In the SCOAP³ model, libraries and funding agencies pool resources that are currently used to subscribe to journals, in co-operation with publishers, and use them to support the peer-review system directly instead.

• Partners in the following countries have formalized their participation in SCOAP³: Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and the United States of America. Partners in the following countries are completing the final steps to formally join SCOAP³: the Czech Republic, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Korea, the Netherlands, Spain, South Africa and Turkey.

The following publishers and scientific societies are participating in SCOAP³ with 10 high-quality peer-reviewed journals in the field of high-energy physics and related disciplines: the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft, Elsevier, Hindawi, Institute of Physics Publishing, Jagellonian University, Oxford University Press, Physical Society of Japan, SISSA Medialab, Springer, Società Italiana di Fisica.

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Today, the Particle Physics Masterclasses are so well established that they seem always to have been there. As many as 10,000 school students in 37 countries participate each year at an international level. Perhaps those who are involved in these events that enthuse and inform the younger generation never wonder about how they started. But there was a time when there were no such things as masterclasses in particle physics and they had to be invented.

The start can be dated precisely: it was in a discussion between Ken Long and myself that took place during a coffee break at the committee meeting of the UK Institute of Physics (IOP) High-Energy Particle Physics (HEPP) group on 17 October 1996. We were frustrated at difficulties with outreach – or the public understanding of science, as it was then called – to schools. Particle physics had a great story to tell, with fine pictures and enthusiastic speakers, but schools were slow to respond to our offers to visit and give talks. Our words and pictures could not compete with the colour and noise of chemists and the experiments they included in their lectures. Surely it was impossible to show real particle physics in the classroom? As Ken and I talked, bits of the answer came together and more followed over e-mail discussions in the succeeding weeks:

• Rather than go to schools and talk to a dozen pupils, we would invite them to come to us, in university lecture theatres that could accommodate hundreds of people.

• A full-day event would make the trip worth their while and allow time for a range of topics and activities.

• We would run the event from local universities but consider it a national event and organize publicity centrally using the IOP.

• Most important, we would use the new computer clusters that were being installed for undergraduates but not used much outside of university term time.

The computer clusters could run serious software experiments directly related to real particle physics – participants could learn through doing. The World Wide Web, which was new at that time, could be used for distributing the programs and data. Today, we just point and click, but in the early days we had to be concerned with network speed, so the programs were painstakingly pre-loaded to each PC before the sessions.

I suggested the name “Masterclasses” with some hesitation because it seemed pretentious: we were not offering one-to-one violin tuition with Yehudi Menuhin. However, it did capture something of what we were trying to do and the name has stuck. At the meeting of the IOP HEPP group committee in January 1997, Ken and I presented our plans for Imperial College and Manchester University (where I worked then), and people liked them. Christine Sutton at Oxford, Mike Pennington at Durham and Tim Greenshaw at Liverpool decided to take part. These were the individual enthusiasts but we also received tremendous support from many colleagues, both in the particle-physics groups and from the computing staff.

We decided that although we could not provide a big-name speaker for every session, we could distribute a video of a public session arranged as part of the IOP HEPP group conference, which in 1997 was to be held in Cambridge to celebrate the centenary of J J Thomson’s discovery of the electron at the Cavendish Laboratory. Ken arranged for video recording (with all of the legal and copyright details) of the talks given by Stephen Hawking and Frank Close. The videos were shown at the masterclasses just a few days later and each participating school was given a copy to take home.

While Ken was arranging the video, I was organizing the universities. On 13 February we had a planning meeting in Manchester, with Swansea and Lancaster joining as well. We also discussed publicity, arrangements and the provision of “goody bags” for pupils and teachers. We tried out the software, which included the Lancaster relativistic-kinematics package and Terry Wyatt’s web-based “Identifying Interesting Events at LEP”.

The real thing

Terry’s package was revolutionary in that it gave school students real particle-physics data and real tools, and asked them to make decisions. Presented with simple Z decays from the OPAL experiment at CERN’s Large Electron–Positron (LEP) collider, the students had to classify them as electron, muon, tau or quark decays, according to the patterns in the detector. The only difference from actual analysis was that such a classification would not be done by a physicist, but by a program using criteria devised by a physicist. Terry and I had spent a lot of time puzzling over the OPAL event display to understand the detector for the first muon-pair results, so I can certify that this exercise was close to real research.

After the annual IOP conference in Cambridge I came back to Manchester, and the next day – 11 April – we ran our first Particle Physics Masterclass. In my journal I wrote “nice talks, kids co-operate and teachers are enthusiastic and appreciative”. The only glitch was that we under-estimated appetites and lunch ran out. We learnt our lesson and the following year we provided smaller plates. The other pilot sites were similarly positive. There was high demand from the schools – some places ran a second day – and both pupils and teachers who attended were enthusiastic afterwards.

The basis for the masterclasses was “Think globally, act locally”. It was a national campaign – we always specifically referred to it as the National Particle Physics Masterclass – with central publicity and preparation of materials. However, the shows were run by local groups, in their own way and with local variations. They could plug their own institution as much as they pleased – the Oxford website managed to include the word “Oxford” six times on one small page – and adapt the material freely, using events from the DELPHI experiment, rather than OPAL, for example.

The scheme was written up in the HEPP group newsletter (January 1998), stressing what we saw as the key parts of the scheme:

• It is not just talks. Using PC clusters can get the participants involved in an activity that is not far from real research.

• A central organization spreads the administrative load.

• A national scheme spreads the publicity.

• It runs every year at the same time, linked to the annual IOP HEPP group conference in the spring vacation, so there is no problem in deciding when to do it.

The idea snowballed, so that in 1998 nearly every university particle-physics group in the UK ran a masterclass – and have done ever since. The national Rutherford and Daresbury labs joined a year or so later.

There was continued strong support from the IOP HEPP group

The Particle Physics Masterclasses have flourished. There was continued strong support from the IOP HEPP group – Val Gibson took over the co-ordination when I came off the committee – and from the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, where Andrew Morrison did a splendid job of liaison. They provided co-ordination and literature, respectively, but not money. We received repeated offers of financial assistance but turned them down as the scheme basically cost nothing. It was run by enthusiast particle physicists who did not need extra support.

Onwards and upwards

The masterclasses have adapted with time. The LEP events were replaced by ones from the Tevatron and from the LHC. The number of pupils who have attended the classes must be into the tens of thousands. A prime minister has been photographed with participants, and the masterclasses idea has spread to continental Europe and across the Atlantic.

I think this success comes from a combination of many factors. Particle physics has, of course, a great story to tell. Masterclasses are run by enthusiasts who do it purely for fun and because they want to, and they treat the material with familiarity rather than respectful awe. We grasped the technical development of the university PC clusters for analysis and the power of the web for distribution at the right moment.

This success has brought benefits: applications to study physics in UK universities are rising, and the public and the media are interested and excited about the LHC and the Higgs boson. Agreed, the masterclasses cannot claim all of the credit for this, but they can certainly claim some of it.

Now, the Particle Physics Masterclasses face the challenge of evolving as technology moves on and people – especially young people – change with it. I hope they see continued success by building on the basic ideas that they started with, and that they will continue to provide fun for students and organizers for many years to come.

The post How the Particle Physics Masterclasses began appeared first on CERN Courier.

On 29 August 2013, on the ground floor of Building FST01 of the Faculty of Pure and Applied Sciences at the University of Cyprus in Nicosia, 31 students filed silently into the two classrooms of the CERN School of Computing and took a seat in front of a computer. An hour later they were followed by a second wave of 31 students. They were all there to participate in the 12th occasion of a unique CERN initiative – the final examination of its computing school.

The CERN School of Computing (CSC) is one of the three schools that CERN has set up to deliver knowledge in the organization’s main scientific and technical pillars – physics, accelerators and computing. Like its counterparts, the CERN Accelerator School and what is now the European School of High-Energy Physics, each year it attracts several-dozen participants from across the world for a fortnight of activities relating to its main topic.

How and why was the CSC set up? On 23 September 1968, future director-general Léon van Hove put forward a proposal to the then director-general, Bernard Gregory, for the creation of a summer school on data handling. This followed a recommendation made on 21 May 1968 to the Academic Training Committee by Ross MacLeod, head of the Data and Documents Division, the forerunner of today’s Information Technology Department. The proposal recommended that a school be organized in summer 1969 or 1970. The memorandum from van Hove to Gregory gave a visionary description of the potential audience for this new school: “It would address a mixed audience of young high-energy physicists and computer scientists.” Forty-five years later, not a word needs to be changed.

The justification for the school was also prophetic: “One of the interests of the Data Handling Summer School lies in the fact that it would be useful not only for high-energy physicists but also for those working in applied mathematics and computing. It would be an excellent opportunity for CERN to strengthen its contacts with a field which may well play a growing role in the long-range future.” With the agreement of Mervyn Hine, director of research, Gregory approved the proposal on 15 November 1968 and on 20 December MacLeod proposed a list of names to van Hove to form the first organizing committee. Alongside people from outside CERN – Bernard Levrat, John Burren and Peter Kirstein – were Tor Bloch, Rudi Böck, Bernard French, Robert Hagedorn, Lew Kowarski, Carlo Rubbia and Paolo Zanella from CERN.

The first CSC was not held at CERN as initially proposed but in Varenna, Italy, in 1970. It was realized quickly that the computing school – with the physics and accelerator schools – could be effective for collaboration between national physics communities and CERN. Until 1986 the CSC was organized every other year, then yearly starting with the school in Troia, Portugal, in 1987. To date there have been 36 schools, attended by 2300 students from five continents.

Ten years ago, I took over the reins of the school and proposed a redefinition of its objectives as it entered its fourth decade: “The school’s main aim is to create and share a common culture in the field of scientific computing, which is a strategic necessity to promote mobility within CERN and between institutes, and to carry out large transnational computing projects. The second aim is the creation of strong social links between participants, students and teachers alike, to reinforce the cohesion of the community and improve the effectiveness of its shared initiatives. The school should be open to computer scientists and physicists and ensure that both groups get to know each other and acquire a solid grounding in whichever of these domains is not their own.”

Moreover, the new management proposed three major changes of direction. First, they vowed to reinvigorate the resolutely academic dimension of the CSC, which during the years had gradually and imperceptibly become more like a conference. Conferences are necessary for scientific progress – they are forums where people can present their work, have their ideas challenged, have fruitful discussions about controversial issues and talk about themselves and what they do. The interventions at conferences are short, sometimes redundant or contradictory. The transmission of facts and opinions becomes more prominent than the transfer of knowledge. I took the view that this should not be the primary role of the CSC, since conferences such as the Computing in High-Energy Physics series serve this purpose perfectly. The academic dimension was therefore progressively re-established through the implementation of three principles.

Three principles

The first academic principle concerns the organization of the teaching. A deliberately limited number of teachers – each giving a series of lessons of several hours – ensures coherence between the different classes, avoids redundancy and delivers consistent content, more than a series of short interventions. Moreover, for several years now all of the non-CERN teachers have been university professors. This is not the result of a strict policy but it is worthy of note that the choice of teachers has been consistent with this academic ambition.

The second principle for restoring the academic dimension concerns the school’s curriculum. The main accent is on the transmission of knowledge and not of know-how. In this way, the CSC differs from training programmes organized by the laboratories and institutes, which are focused on know-how. The difference between knowledge and know-how is an important principle in the field of learning sciences. To get a better understanding of this distinction, the management of the school established relations with experts in the field at an early stage, particularly at the University of Geneva.

Knowledge is made up of fundamental concepts and facts on which additional knowledge is built and developed to persist over time

What are the differences? Knowledge is made up of fundamental concepts and facts on which additional knowledge is built and developed to persist over time. Moreover, the student acquires knowledge, incorporates it into his or her personal knowledge corpus and transforms it. Two physicists never have the same understanding of quantum mechanics. On the other hand, know-how – which includes methods and the use of tools – can generally be acquired autonomously with few prerequisites. With the exception of physical skills – such as knowing how to ride a bike or swim – which we tend not to lose, know-how requires regular practise so that it is not forgotten. Knowledge is more enduring by nature. Finally – and this is one of the main differences – knowledge can be transposed more readily to other environments and adapted to new problems. That at least is the theory. In practice, the differences are sometimes less clear. This is the challenge with which the CSC tries to get to grips each year when defining its programme – are we really operating mainly in the field of knowledge? The school is made up in equal parts of lectures and hands-on sessions, so do the latter not relate more to know-how? Yes, but the acquisition of this know-how is not an end in itself – it provides knowledge with a better anchorage.

The third principle of the academic dimension is evaluation of the knowledge acquired and recognition of the required level of excellence with a certificate. Following requests from students who wanted the high level of knowledge gained during the school to be formally certified, the CSC Diploma was introduced in 2002 to recognize success in the final exam and vouch for the student’s diligence throughout the programme. To date, 671 students have been awarded the CSC Diploma, which often figures prominently in their CVs. But that’s not all. Since 2008, the academic quality of the school, its teachers and exam has been formally audited each year by a different independent university. Each autumn, the school management prepares a file that is aimed at integrating the next school into the academic curriculum of the host university. The universities of Brunel, Copenhagen, Gjøvik, Göttingen, Nicosia and Uppsala have analysed and accepted CERN’s request. As a result, they have each awarded a formal European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) certificate to complement the CERN diploma.

This academic reorientation of the school is one of the three main renewal projects undertaken during the past 10 years. The second relates to the school’s social dimension. The creation of social links and networks between the participants and with their teachers has become the school’s second aim. This is considered to be a strategic objective because not only does it reinforce the cohesion of the community, it also improves the efficiency of large projects or services, such as the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, through improved mutual understanding between the individuals contributing to them.

The main vehicle chosen for socialization is sport. Every afternoon, a large part of the timetable is freed up for a dozen indoor and outdoor sports. Tennis, climbing or swimming lessons are given, often by the school’s teachers. Each year, participants discover an activity that is new to them, such as horse riding, sailing, canoeing, kayaking, scuba diving, rock climbing, cricket and mountain biking. The sport programme is supported by the CERN Medical Service and is associated with the “Move! Eat better” initiative. A second vehicle for socialization – music – is being considered and could be introduced for future schools. The intention is to give those who are interested the opportunity each afternoon to take part in instrumental music or choral singing or to discover them for the first time, with the same aim as for sport of “doing things together to get to know each other better”.

The third renewal project is plurality. In contrast to CERN’s high-energy physics and accelerator schools, which have organized several annual events for a number of years, the CSC has long remained the organization’s only school in the field of computing. However, since 2005 the CSC management has organized the inverted CSC (iCSC, “Where students turn into teachers”) and starting in 2013 the thematic CSC (tCSC). The idea behind the inverted school is simple – to capitalize on the considerable amount of knowledge accumulated by the participants in a school by inviting them to teach one or more lessons at a short school of three to five half-days, organized at CERN at the mid-point between two summer schools. To date, 40 former students have taught at one of these inverted schools.

It should be noted that the academic principle is still predominant. The goal is not to talk about oneself or one’s project but to present a topic, an innovative one if possible. This is not always easy, so each young teacher who is selected is assigned a mentor who follows the design and production of the lesson across three months. The inverted school has another aim – it is also a school for learning to teach. It represents the second link in a chain of training stages for new teachers for the main school. The first link, for those who are interested, is to give a short academic presentation while attending the main school. After the iCSC, i.e. the second link, some are invited to give an hour’s lesson at the main school before the last stage – their full integration into the teaching staff. This process generally takes several years.

During the latest CSC in Nicosia, five out of the 11 teachers were younger than 35. Three of them had passed through the CSC training chain. Along with their forthcoming colleagues, they are the future of the school. Leaving the CSC after 11 years as its director, I am confident that the next generation is ready to take up the baton.

The post CERN School of Computing: 10 years of renewal appeared first on CERN Courier.

CERN Open Days 2013 saw 70,000 people visit more than 40 activities on the surface across CERN’s Meyrin and Prévessin sites, with 20,000 of them able to see something of the accelerators and detectors underground. Highlights for visitors included seeing one of the large experiments on the LHC – ALICE, ATLAS, CMS or LHCb – or operating robotic arms and forklift trucks, or even making superconducting magnets levitate. A taskforce of 2300 volunteers acted as guides and helpers, explaining the variety of activities at CERN – from particle physics and computing to logistics and firefighting – to enthusiasts young and old.

As well as the public open days on Saturday and Sunday, events before and after made this a weekend to remember. On Friday 27 September, CERN welcomed local officials and industrial contacts from throughout its member states for exclusive tours of the laboratory. In the evening – and to celebrate European Researchers’ Night – CERN and the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica organized “Origins 2013”, an event that included simultaneous activities at CERN, Paris and Bologna, with participation from UNESCO, ESA, ESO and INFN. During a webcasted event in the Globe of Science and Innovation at CERN, those onstage took questions both from the audience and online.

There was also a flurry of activity on social media. Online events began with a CERN tweetup on Friday, when 12 lucky people visited CERN as citizen journalists to share their exclusive preview of the open days with the world via Twitter.

Lastly, on the following Monday, the whirlwind of events culminated with “Bosons and More” – a celebration for CERN people.

• Max Brice, the CERN photographer, led a team of 26 photographers recording the open-days’ events, with Anna Pantelia, Fons Rademakers, Laurent Egli, Mike Struick, Didier Steyaert, Mathieu Augustin, Pierre Gildemyn, Matthias Schroder, Dmytro Kovalskyi, Lelia Laureyssens, Sylvain Chapeland, Jan Fiete Grosse-Oetringhaus, Antonella Vitale, Jean-Francois Marchand, Neli Ivanova, Olga Driga, Doris Chromek-Burckhart, Sebastian Lopienski, Tomek photographe, Nicolas Voumard, Erwin van Hove, Stephan Russenschuck, Ilknur Colak, Laura Rossi and Alban Sublet. A selection of photographs is shown here, for many more, see http://cds.cern.ch/collection/Open Days 2013 Photos.

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The original CERN Schools of High-Energy Physics were established in the early 1960s at the initiative of Owen Lock, who played a leading role in their development over the next three decades. The first schools in 1962 and 1963 were one-week events organized at St Cergue in Switzerland, near CERN. However, from 1964 onwards the annual events – by then lasting two weeks – took place in other countries, generally in member states of CERN.

Starting in 1970, every second school was organized jointly with the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), CERN’s sister organization in the Soviet Union. This collaboration between East and West, even during the Cold War, exemplified how a common interest in science could bring together people from different nations working in harmony with the common goal of advancing human knowledge.

With the changes in the political scene in Europe, and after discussions and an exchange of letters in 1991 between the directors-general of CERN and of JINR, it was agreed that future schools would be organized jointly every year and that the title should change to the European School of High-Energy Physics. In each four-year period, three schools would take place in a CERN member state and the fourth in a JINR member state.

In 1993, the first European School took place in Poland, a country that was a member both of CERN and JINR. The following three schools were held in Italy, Russia and France, with the event in Russia being considered the first to be organized in a JINR member state. The full list of host countries for the first 20 European Schools is shown in the box (overleaf). With the new schools series, Egil Lillestøl replaced Owen Lock as the director of the CERN Schools of Physics, continuing in this role until the 2009 event in Germany, after which he handed over responsibility to the current director, Nick Ellis.

Theory and phenomenology

The target audience for the European Schools is students in experimental high-energy physics who are in the final years of working towards their PhDs. Most of the courses teach theory and phenomenology, concentrating on the physics concepts rather than the details of calculations. This training is highly relevant for the students who will use it in interpreting the results of physics-data analysis, e.g. as they complete the work for their PhD theses. Even if experimental physicists do not usually perform advanced theory calculations, it is of great importance that they can follow and appreciate the published work of their theory colleagues and also have the necessary background to discuss the phenomenology. This last aspect is addressed particularly through the discussion sessions at the schools.

The scientific programme of the European Schools consists of typically four and a half hours of lectures each day (three lectures, each 90 minutes in duration, including questions), complemented by discussion sessions in groups of about 15–20 students with a discussion leader. The programme includes a poster session where many of the students present their own research work to the other participants, including the teachers and organizers. This way, students get to discuss their own work with some of the leading experts in the field.

A new development in the programme since the 2011 school is the inclusion of projects in which the students from each discussion group collaborate as a team to study in detail an experimental data analysis. With this, on top of the rest of the programme, the students say that they have to work really hard; nevertheless they still seem to enjoy the schools a great deal.

The focus of the schools is mainly on subjects closely related to experimental high-energy physics, so there are always core courses on topics such as field theory and the electroweak Standard Model, quantum chromodynamics, flavour physics and CP violation, neutrino physics, heavy-ion physics and physics beyond the Standard Model. Since 2009 there have also been lectures on practical statistics for particle physicists, which are particularly relevant to the day-to-day work of many of the students.

The core courses are complemented by some more topical lectures, including in recent years the latest results from the LHC and their implications. The programme generally also includes lectures related to cosmology, given the important interplay with particle physics, e.g. in connection with dark matter. Last but not least, the directors-general of CERN and JINR often attend in person and give lectures on the scientific programmes of their respective organizations and their outlook for the coming years; this also gives them an opportunity to meet and discuss informally with some of the most promising young physicists in the field.

The scientific programme, including the choice of subjects to be covered and the selection of the lecturers and discussion leaders who will teach at the school, is decided by a small international organizing committee with representatives from CERN and JINR, together with the person from the host country who will serve as the local director for the school. The same body is in charge of selecting the students who will attend the school, based on the applications and letters of recommendation from the professors or supervisors of the candidates.

Beyond the purely scientific objectives of the schools, the organizers aim to foster cultural exchange and “networking” between participants from different countries and regions. For this reason the students are assigned to shared twin-room accommodation, mixing people from different countries and regions. Similarly, the discussion groups are chosen to have a good mix of nationalities.

The collaborative student projects that were introduced in 2011 go beyond learning about a specific data analysis. Each group of students, with a little assistance from their discussion leader, has to select a published paper describing the analysis that they are to study; they then have to organize themselves to share the work with different individuals or sub-groups addressing distinct aspects of the analysis; they have to work as a team to prepare and rehearse a short talk summarizing what they have learnt; and they have to select a speaker to represent them. All of these skills are important for young physicists working in large international collaborations such as those that run the LHC experiments.

Geographical enlargement

The European Schools have served as a model for similar series that are now organized in other parts of the world. Since 2001 there have been schools every two years in Latin America, catering for the growing high-energy-physics community there. The most recent event was held on 6–19 March this year in Arequipa, Peru.

A second new series of schools – the Asia-Europe-Pacific School of High-Energy Physics – started last year. The first event was held in Japan and the next one is planned for India in 2014. As with the Latin-American Schools, these events will be held every second year, with a programme that is similar to the model of the European Schools.

Thus, the European Schools have inspired other series catering for the needs of young physicists in other parts of the world. This is part of CERN’s policy of geographical enlargement and its mission to support scientists from other parts of the world to increase their participation in high-energy physics in general and their collaboration with CERN in particular.

The European Schools continue to attract a large number of applications from highly qualified candidates, despite the emergence of many other excellent schools that offer alternative training. For example, the 2013 school, which takes place on 5–18 June in Hungary, was oversubscribed by more than a factor of two compared with the target of around 100 students. This implies a rigorous and highly competitive selection process, focusing on students with the most promise for an outstanding career in high-energy physics and who are at the optimum stage in their studies to benefit from the school.

Critical to the success of the schools are the lecturers and discussion leaders who teach there, selected for their qualities as first-class researchers and also as teachers. They come from institutes in many countries, including ones that are not member states of either CERN or JINR. The European Schools have benefited from the strong support, and often the presence as lecturers, of successive directors-general of both CERN and JINR. The organizers are extremely grateful to the many people from the worldwide high-energy-physics community who every year contribute to the success of the schools, a success that can be judged from the positive feedback received from the students who participate.

The post Training young physicists: a 20-year success story appeared first on CERN Courier.

As the field of high-energy physics moves inexorably towards full open access, under the SCOAP³ agreement, it is worth noting a fact that is often overlooked by the scientific community, namely the concomitant affirmation of the role of scientific journals. Indeed, journals will continue to stand – if not for primary dissemination of information, for the continued, independent and, yes, competitive and occasionally controversial quality assessment. An ecosystem of dedicated journals is precisely what this requires, on top of open pre-“print” archives of equally undisputed role.

Yet, looking at the broader landscape of physics and beyond, open access has quite naturally also brought other changes, namely the emergence of “community journals”. By including a variety of kinds of article, these break with the traditional scheme of long established journals, which are typically devoted to single article types, such as letters, regular articles, technical papers or reviews. To promote and foster this development is precisely the aim of The European Physical Journal C – Particles and Fields (EPJC), where all types of publications relevant to the field of high-energy physics (including astroparticle physics and cosmology) are considered.

EPJC has recently seen a series of significant changes in its editorial board. Since January, Jos Engelen (a former research director at CERN) is the new editor-in-chief of the “Experimental Physics” section. He succeeds Siggi Bethke, who successfully co-ordinated this section of the journal until the end of 2012. A few months earlier, the board of theoretical physics editors of EPJC was significantly enlarged. In addition to the traditional board of editors covering the area of “Phenomenology of the Standard Model and Beyond” (now called Theory-I), which Gino Isidori has co-ordinated since the end of 2011, Ignatios Antoniadis (the current head of the Theory Unit at CERN) has taken charge of a largely new board of editors covering the areas of gravitation, astroparticle physics and cosmology, general aspects of quantum field theories and alternatives (Theory II).

The latter developments take into account in particular the ongoing rapid “merger” of accelerator-based particle physics with astroparticle physics and cosmology. The next step for our journal will thus be to reach out to experimental non-accelerator physics to provide a first unified platform as a “community journal” in this further extended sense.

Next to letters, regular articles and reviews (tutorial, specialist, technical, topical scientific meeting summaries), EPJC is particularly keen to develop its “tools” section. Neither theory nor experiment in the traditional sense, this section is a platform for publishing computational, statistical and engineering physics of immediate and close relevance for understanding technical or interpretational aspects of theoretical and experimental particle physics.

Last but not least, there is another aspect by which EPJC wishes to stand out, namely in terms of quality assessment. Taking a lead from Karl Popper, science is a social enterprise and humans react quite differently depending on whether they are solicited personally to comment on quality and relevance or just passively, e.g. as recipients of mailing lists or other automated systems.

At EPJC, three independent levels exist to ensure quality control, each mediated by direct communication as peers in the field: the editors-in-chief, the editorial board and the referees. All of them will have been involved in the assessment and decision-making process for every single paper, ensuring a personal, unbiased and fair implementation of the refereeing process, which remains at the core of the activity of any reputable journal.

The post The changing world of <i>EPJC</i> appeared first on CERN Courier.

In the hands of skilled presenters, information can be carefully packaged as entertainment so that the attention needed to digest it is minimal. The trick is to mask the effort with compelling emotional appeal and a floppy boy-band haircut. However, the need to pay attention is still there; in fact, absorbing even the most trivial information demands a modicum of attention. How many of us, when leaving a cinema, have had the nagging feeling that although the film made great entertainment some details of the plot remained less than crystal clear?

The existence of a minimum level of attention suggests that it is, in some sense, a quantum substance. This means that under close examination, any apparently continuous or sustained effort at paying attention will be revealed as a series of discrete micro-efforts. However, while attention can be chopped up and interleaved with other activities, even tiny pulses of attention demand full concentration, to the exclusion of all other voluntary activities. Any attempt at multitasking, such as using a mobile phone while driving a car, is counterproductive.

The incomprehensibility principle plays a major role in education, where it is closely linked to the learning process. Because of the subject matter and/or the teacher, some school lessons require more time to assimilate than others. This trend accelerates in higher education. In my case, a hint of what was to come appeared during my third year of undergraduate physics, when I attended additional lectures on quantum mechanics in the mathematics department at Imperial College London.

My teacher was Abdus Salam, who went on to share the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979. Salam’s lectures were exquisitely incomprehensible; as I look back, I realize he was probably echoing his own experiences at Cambridge some 15 years earlier at the hands of Paul Dirac. But he quickly referred us to Dirac’s book, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics. At a first and even a second glance, this book shone no light at all but after intense study, a rewarding glimmer of illumination appeared out of the darkness.

Motivated by Salam’s unintelligibility, I began postgraduate studies in physics only to find that my previous exposure to incomprehensibility had been merely an introduction. By then, there were no longer any textbooks to fall back on and journal papers were impressively baffling. With time, though, I realized that – like Dirac’s book – they could be painfully decrypted at “leisure”, line by line, with help from enlightened colleagues.

The real problem with the incomprehensibility principle came when I had to absorb information in real time, during seminars and talks. The most impenetrable of these talks always came from American speakers because they were, at the time, wielding the heavy cutting tools at the face of physics research. Consequently, I developed an association between incomprehensibility and accent. This reached a climax when I visited the US, where I always had the feeling that dubious characters hanging out at bus stations and rest stops must somehow be experts in S-matrix theory and the like, travelling from one seminar to the next. Several years later, when I was at CERN, seminars were instead delivered in thick European accents and concepts such as “muon punch-through” became more of an obstacle when pointed out in a heavy German accent.

Nevertheless, I persevered and slowly developed new skills. The incomprehensibility principle cannot be bypassed but even taking into account added difficulties such as the speaker’s accent or speed of delivery – not to mention bad acoustics or poor visual “aids” – it is still possible to optimize one’s absorption of information.

One way of doing this is to monitor difficult presentations in “background mode”, paying just enough attention to follow the gist of the argument until a key point is about to be reached. At that moment, a concerted effort can be made to grab a vital piece of information as it whistles past, before it disappears into the obscurity of the intellectual stratosphere. The trick is to do this at just the right time, so that each concentrated effort is not fruitless. “Only cross your bridges when you come to them”, as the old adage goes.

By adopting this technique, I was able to cover frontier meetings on subjects of which I was supremely ignorant, including microprocessors, cosmology and medical imaging, among others. Journalists who find themselves baffled at scientific press conferences would do well to follow my example, for the truth is that there will always be a fresh supply of incomprehensibility in physics. Don’t be disappointed!

• Gordon Fraser. Gordon, who was editor of CERN Courier for many years, wrote this as a ‘Lateral Thought’ for Physics World magazine but died before the article could be revised (see obituary). It was completed by staff at Physics World and is published in both magazines this month as a tribute.

The post The incomprehensibility principle appeared first on CERN Courier.

In the SCOAP³ model, funding agencies, research institutions, libraries and library consortia pool resources that are currently used to subscribe to journal content and they use them to support the peer-review system directly. Publishers then make electronic versions of their journals open access. Articles funded by SCOAP³ will be available under a Creative Commons, CC BY licence, meaning that they can be copied, distributed, transmitted and adapted as needed, with proper attribution.

Representatives from the science-funding agencies and library communities of 29 countries were present at the launch. The publishers of 12 journals, accounting for the vast majority of articles in particle physics, have been identified for participation in SCOAP³ through an open and competitive process. With a projected SCOAP³ budget of SwFr36 million over three years, more partnerships with key institutions in Europe, America and Asia are foreseen as the initiative moves through the technical steps of organizing the re-direction of funds from the current subscription model towards a common internationally co-ordinated fund. SCOAP³ expects to be operational for articles published as of 2014.

• For more information, see http://scoap3.org/.

The post Peer-reviewed particle physics for all appeared first on CERN Courier.

It all started a year ago over dinner with a good bottle of wine in front of us. Steve Gourlay of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Stuart Henderson of Fermilab and myself talked about the future of accelerator R&D in the US and what could be done to promote it.

We had no idea that an opportunity would present itself so quickly, that it would require such fast action or that blogging would be a central part of carrying out our mission.

A 2009 symposium called “Accelerators for America’s Future” had laid out some of the issues and obstacles, and in September 2011 the US Senate Committee on Appropriations asked the US Department of Energy (DOE) to submit a strategic plan for accelerator R&D by June 2012.

The DOE asked me to lead a task force to develop ideas about this important matter: what should the DOE do, over the next 10 years, to streamline the transfer of accelerator R&D so that its benefits could spread out into the larger society?

We were ready to go by October. The task force would have until 1 February 2012 – just four months – to identify research opportunities targeted to applications, estimate their costs and outline the possible impediments to carrying out such a plan. Based on this information, DOE officials would draw up their strategic plan in time for the congressional deadline.

It was a huge job. The 15 members of the task force, who hailed from six DOE national laboratories, industry, universities, DOE headquarters and the National Science Foundation, would need to gather facts, opinions and ideas from a range of people with a stake in this issue – from basic researchers at the national laboratories to university and industry scientists, entrepreneurs, inventors, regulators, industry leaders, defence agencies and owners of businesses both small and large.

We quickly held a workshop in Washington, DC, followed by others at the Argonne and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, where we presented some of the major ideas. And to gather the most feedback from the most people in the shortest amount of time, I did something that I like to do: I started a blog.

Now, anyone who has been around high-energy physics for a while knows that blogs and other forms of cutting-edge social media are nothing new. We particle physicists, after all, started the World Wide Web as a way to share our ideas, and what became known as the arXiv to distribute preprints of our research results. Many physicists are avid bloggers, and a number of laboratories – from CERN to Fermilab and KEK – operate blogs of their own; you can see a sample of these blogs at www.quantumdiaries.org. But it’s not as usual to incorporate a blog into the work of a task force – although, for the life of me, I don’t know why you would not want to do it.

One of the first things that I did when I came to SLAC two years ago was to start a blog aimed at fostering communication among people in the Accelerator Directorate. A blog is a great way to talk about topics that are burning under our fingernails – although sometimes one needs to overcome a certain amount of cultural resistance to get people talking freely. Instead of filling various inboxes with chains of e-mails, “electronic blackboards” are easy to read and easy to post on, and they even have the added convenience of notifying you when a new post goes up.

In the good old days you could have everyone come to one place and have a panel discussion or an all-hands meeting – an easy, free-flowing exchange of ideas. A blog can be just such a thing: open and inviting.

Our task force invited literally thousands of people to comment on the issues at hand. What can be done to move the fruits of basic accelerator research and development more quickly into medicine, energy development, environmental cleanup, industry, defence and national security? What good could flow from such a movement? What are the barriers – especially between the national laboratories, where most of this research is done, and the industries that could develop it into products – and how can they be overcome?

Not everyone answered, but many did. More than half of the responses that we got came in through the blog rather than as e-mail messages. Within a couple of days it became clear just from the people who blogged that the medical community is starving for facilities and infrastructure to develop radiation therapy further, mainly with heavy-ion beams. The people talked to us and among themselves. So it’s no surprise that the report we write will describe opportunities for the DOE to make its infrastructure available for researchers who want to pursue this line of work.

Others talked about the difficulties that they had in working with government agencies or national laboratories and how this could be made easier – a worthwhile read during an easy afternoon.

So, blogging is not just fun; it’s a great way to gather information and encourage dialogue. Once our task force finalizes its report, the site will be up for a while, and then, when the next issue arises, the blackboard will get cleaned and I will start a new one.

• To see the blog, go to https://slacportal.slac.stanford.edu/sites/ad_public/committees/Acc_RandD_TF_Blog/default.aspx.

The post It’s good to blog appeared first on CERN Courier.

On 1 August, 65 students arrived at the National Institute for Theoretical Physics (NITheP) in Stellenbosch, South Africa. They were there to participate in the first African School on Fundamental Physics and its Applications (ASP2010). More than 50 participants had travelled from 17 African countries, fully supported financially to attend the intensive, three-week school. Others, from Canada, Germany, India, Switzerland and the US, helped to create a scientific melting pot of cultural diversity that fused harmoniously throughout the duration of the school.

ASP2010 was planned as the first in a series of schools to be held every two years in a different African country. It was sponsored by an unprecedentedly large number of international physics institutes and organizations, indicating the widespread interest that exists in making high-energy physics and its benefits the basis of a truly global partnership by reaching out to a continent where increased participation needs to be developed. The school covered a range of topics: particle physics, particle detectors, cosmology and accelerator technologies, as well as some of the applications, such as computing, medical physics, light sources and magnetic confinement fusion.

The courses were taught by physicists from around the globe, but included a significant number from South Africa, which has relatively well established research and training programmes in these areas of physics. The picture throughout the rest of Africa, in particular the sub-Saharan region, is rather different. As an example, consider the facts about African researchers at CERN. Currently, only 51 researchers of the 10,000 researchers registered at CERN have African nationalities, and only 18 of them currently work for African institutes. As CERN’s director-general, Rolf Heuer, points out: “When I show people the map of where CERN’s users come from, it’s gratifying to see it spanning the world, and in particular to see southern-hemisphere countries starting to join the global particle-physics family. Africa, however, remains notable more for the number of countries that are not involved than for those that are.” John Ellis, CERN’s adviser for relations with non-member states and one of the school’s founders, confirms that “sub-Saharan African countries are under-represented in CERN’s collaborations”.

“This new series of schools will strengthen existing collaborations and develop current and new networks involving African physicists,” explains Fernando Quevedo, director of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, one of the sponsors of the school. He said: “This activity was a big success in all respects: lecturers of the highest scientific level, a perfect example of close collaboration among several international institutions towards a single goal and, most importantly, bringing the excitement and importance of the study of basic sciences to a community with great potential. The standard set for future activities is very high.” ICTP, with its 46 years of experience in training, working and collaborating with scientists in developing nations, is committed to the ASP2010 wholeheartedly. The aims and mission of the school fit perfectly with ICTP’s mission to foster science in Africa. The knowledge, relationships and collaborations that will result from it will enhance ICTP’s existing programmes in Africa.

“An extraordinary opportunity”

A strikingly new aspect of the school was that a large number of national and international organizations and institutes collaborated to make it happen, thereby demonstrating a common belief in its importance and worth. These included Spain (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), France (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique/IN2P3, Institut des Grilles, Commissariat à l’énergie atomique), Switzerland (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Paul Scherrer Institute), South Africa (NITheP, National Research Foundation), and the US (Fermilab, Department of Energy, Brookhaven, Jefferson Lab, National Science Foundation), as well as the international institutions CERN and ICTP. On top of this, the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics offered travel grants to five female students. The number of involved organizations is set to increase in future editions of the school. Steve Muanza, a French experimental physicist of Congolese origin and also a founder of the school, says that in particular, “early support from IN2P3 was crucial for involving the other organizations in this new type of school in Africa”.

The 65 students were selected from more than 150 applicants. Among them were some of the brightest aspiring physicists in the continent, who represent the future of fundamental physics and its applications in Africa. Chilufya Mwewa, a participant from Zambia, summarizes what the school meant for her: “Attending ASP2010 was such an extraordinary opportunity that it had a huge positive impact on my life. The school indeed enhanced my future career in physics. Thanks to you and other organizers for opening us up to other physics platforms that we never had a chance to know about in our own countries.” Ermias Abebe Kassaye, a student from Ethiopia, underlines these aspects: “I have got a lot of knowledge and experience from the school. The school guides me to my future career. I obtained the necessary input to disseminate the field to my country and encourage others to do research in this field. I am working strongly to achieve my desire and to shine like a star, and your co-operation and help is essential to our success.”

Apart from highlighting established research in fundamental physics in South African universities and research institutes, ASP2010 also emphasized the role of high-energy physics in the innovation of medicine, computing and other areas of technology through the “applications” aspect of the programme. The iThemba Laboratory for Accelerator Based Sciences (iThemba LABS), situated between Cape Town and Stellenbosch, is a significant player in this area. “As well as being an important producer of radioisotopes, it is the only laboratory in the southern hemisphere where hadron therapy is performed with neutron and proton beams, which have to date treated more than 1400 and 500 patients, respectively,” explains Zeblon Vilakazi, director of the iThemba LABS.

Participating students had the opportunity to perform two practical courses in which they became acquainted with the use of scintillation detectors and performed measurements of environmental radioactivity. Laser practicals and a computing tutorial for simulations using the GEANT4 toolkit were also available at the University of Stellenbosch. The breaks between lectures provided the opportunity for many informal discussions to continue. “In these discussions, practical information was given to the students about opportunities for fellowships for further education, research positions and other schemes, such as Fermilab International fellowships, the CERN summer student programme and the ICTP Diploma Programme,” explains Ketevi Assamagan, a Brookhaven physicist of Togolese origin and a member of the ASP2010 organizing committee.

A number of additional demonstrations and talks were also incorporated into the programme. A video conference with Young-Kee Kim, Fermilab’s deputy-director, provided a vision of science on a planetary scale; a webcast that connected the students to the CERN Control Centre enabled them to experience a live demonstration of proton acceleration; and special talks by John Ellis, Albert De Roeck and Philippe Lebrun of CERN, and Jim Gates, of the University of Maryland (and a scientific adviser to President Obama), also made big impressions on the students. In parallel, several of the school’s lecturers gave public lectures in Cape Town. Anne Dabrowski, a former South African physics student, provided a role model to support the dream of African participation in high-energy physics. Now an applied physicist in the Beams Department at CERN, she was a member of the local organizing committee.

South Africa has recently formed a programme for collaboration with CERN and has become the second African country to join the ATLAS collaboration. “We are ready to do our best to assist any deserving student or postdoc to become involved via one of our member universities or national facilities that are participating in activities at CERN,” says Jean Cleymans, the director of the SA-CERN Programme. “Students are welcome to visit our SA-CERN website or the ASP2010 website for further information and to get in contact with us.” From discussions with the students, it was clear that several were keen to take advantage of these opportunities.

Several high-profile South African scientists and government officials participated in the last day of the school. This outreach and forum day reviewed the practical aspects of fundamental physics, which could be used as a gateway to innovation and to enhance future collaborations. The inspirational enthusiasm of the students at ASP2010 indicates that overall the future of fundamental science and technology on the African continent is in very good hands.

• For more about ASP2010, see http://AfricanSchoolofPhysics.web.cern.ch/.

The post Into Africa – a school in fundamental physics appeared first on CERN Courier.

The Craft of Scientific Communication by Joseph E Harmon and Alan G Gross, Chicago University Press. Hardback ISBN 9780226316611, $55. Paperback ISBN 9780226316628, $20. E-book ISBN 9780226316635, $7–$20.

Communication takes many forms, each with its own “how to” manual. Peer-to-peer, communication with the media, reaching exhibition visitors and the public in general: all now have their guides. Each audience deserves particular attention, but the ground rules are always the same: define your objectives, work out a strategy for achieving those objectives and then plan your tactics. This approach comes across loud and clear in these two very different books.

Physicists Çiğdem IŞsever and Ken Peach give a practical guide to preparing a talk, while science communicators Joseph Harmon and Alan Gross take a rather more academic look, focusing on the craft of writing a scientific paper.

IŞsever and Peach deserve high praise not only for producing this book, but also for recognizing that communication skills are important enough to be taught to science students: their book is based on a course they deliver at the University of Oxford. Their key message is to be prepared: know who your audience is, why you are talking to them and what messages you want them to carry away. “The aim,” they write, in bold text, “is to get your message across to your audience clearly and effectively.”

The book walks its readers through the steps towards achieving that goal, urging would-be speakers to research the event that they’ll be talking at and the audience they’ll be talking to, before giving advice on how to prepare the ubiquitous PowerPoint presentation. “The purpose of the slides,” reads chapter two, “is to help the audience understand the subject. Once you start to relax on this and make the slides serve some other purpose (like being intelligible to those who were not there) you risk confusing the audience.” In other words, choose your message, package it for your audience and stick to it. It’s good advice.

Later chapters develop key themes. Chapter three talks about structure: tell people what you’re going to say, say it and then remind them of what you’ve said. Chapter four develops the theme of understanding the audience’s needs, while chapter five addresses style: if you’re talking to an audience of particle physicists, for example, you’ll adopt a different style from what you would choose for school pupils.

IŞsever and Peach are somewhat disparaging about the use of corporate image, arguing that it takes up too much space and leaves little for content. In corporate communication, this is often the case, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Whether we like it or not, the word “branding” has entered the lexicon of communication in particle physics: we’re all jostling for a place in the public’s consciousness, and brand identity helps. Establishing the brand has been a key ingredient of CERN’s communication, for example, throughout the start-up phase of the LHC. Partly as a result, CERN and the LHC are fast becoming household names, providing a strong platform on which to build scientific and societal messages.

The book winds up where it began: reminding readers that the key to success is thorough preparation. Like much of the book’s advice, this applies equally well to any form of communication, be it with lab visitors, journalists or even your neighbours.

Harmon and Gross take an altogether more academic approach, analysing and dissecting the scientific paper through the ages to identify and codify what works and what doesn’t. It is the classic textbook to IsŞsever and Peach’s field guide, each chapter ending with exercises for the student.

It’s a bold thing to attempt to improve on some of the most successful papers of the 20th century, but on page 22 Harmon and Gross do just that, while being careful to point out that their book was not subject to the same length constraints that a journal imposes. The point they make is that each part of a paper has a specific role to play, and by respecting that rule you’ll craft a better paper. A typical abstract, they argue, tells the reader what was done, how it was done and what was discovered. On page 22, they add a fourth element: why it matters. In doing so, the abstract becomes not only informative but also persuasive.

Harmon and Gross go on to apply the same rigorous approach to communications, ranging from grant proposals to writing for the general public, inevitably arriving at the subject of PowerPoint. In a chapter that resonates strongly with IŞsever and Peach, they point out a common failing of PowerPoint presentations: their creators often forget that audiences have only a minute or two to view each slide. Their key message? A PowerPoint slide is not a page from a scientific paper.

The book concludes with a final thought that, while most of us will never scale the intellectual heights of the great names of science, we can all aspire to approach them in terms of the clarity of our communication. These are two very different books on science communication, but their authors share a common belief that good science communication is a craft that can be learnt. Either one is a good place to start.

The post Presenting Science: A Practical Guide to Giving a Good Talk and The Craft of Scientific Communication appeared first on CERN Courier.

School is where students study what is in textbooks and university is where they start doing research. Or so most people think. It therefore comes as a surprise to discover that teenagers still at school can participate in a research programme that allies space science and earth science. While sceptical educators would argue that in a normal situation teachers have no time, energy, motivation or money for such projects, Becky Parker at Simon Langton Grammar School in the UK has proved that the opposite can be true.

Inspired during a visit to CERN in 2007, she decided to bring leading-edge research to her school. Instead of going back with a simple presentation about how CERN works, Becky took back a real detector and started sowing ideas about how to set up a real research programme, which she called CERN@school. Her ideas fell on fertile ground as her school in Canterbury, in the county of Kent, is one of the most active in implementing innovative ways of teaching science in the UK. One of the school’s declared goals is to “provide learning experiences which are enjoyable, stimulating and challenging and which encourage critical and innovative thinking”. Students at Simon Langton Grammar School do not just study science, they do it.

“During one of my visits to CERN, I had the opportunity to meet Michael Campbell of the Medipix collaboration, and his young enthusiastic team,” recalls Becky. “They showed me the Timepix chip that they were developing for particle and medical physics. I thought that something like this could be used in schools for conducting experiments with cosmic rays and radioactivity.”

Cross-collaboration

The Timepix chip is derived from Medipix2, a device developed at CERN that can accurately measure the position and energy of single photons hitting an associated detector. The most recent success of the Medipix collaboration is the Medipix3 chip, which is being used in a project to deliver the first X-ray images with colour (energy) information. Initially designed for use in medical physics and particle physics, the Timepix chip now has applications that include beta- and gamma-radiography of biological samples, materials analysis, monitoring of nuclear power-plant decommissioning and electron microscopy, as well as the adaptive optics that are used in large, ground-based telescopes.

The students at Simon Langton Grammar School use the Timepix chip by connecting it directly to their computer via a USB interface box. “The box was developed by the Institute of Experimental and Applied Physics in Prague,” explains Becky. “They also developed the Pixelman software that we use to read out the data.” The chip and the box have a certain material cost but the software is made available for free by the Medipix collaboration.

Given the simple set-up and its relatively low cost, Becky’s idea can potentially be transferred to many other schools across the UK and elsewhere in Europe. “Collaboration is a key factor in modern research,” confirms Becky. “And, like in a real scientific collaboration, we are going to involve as many schools as possible in our project. We have received funding from Kent to put 10 Timepix chips into the county’s schools to create a network. This will allow us to show students how you do things at CERN and in other big laboratories.”

By setting-up a network, schools will collect large amounts of data on cosmic rays. “In the future we hope to have Timepix detectors in schools across the world. Participating schools will be able to send data back to us because we have powerful IT facilities and we can store large quantities of data,” says Becky. “We know that in other countries, such as Canada, Italy and the Netherlands, there are similar school programmes that collect data on cosmic rays. It would be ideal if we could all join our efforts and integrate all of the collected data together.”

Timepix in space

Nothing is out of reach for Becky’s ambitious teaching methods, not even deep space. In 2008 the school’s students decided to enter a national competition run by the British National Space Centre to design experiments that will fly in space. Next year, Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd will fly the Langton Ultimate Cosmic ray Intensity Detector (LUCID), a cosmic-ray detector array designed by Langton’s sixth-form students, on one of its satellites. “The students are learning so much from working on LUCID with David Cooke at Surrey Satellite Technology Limited and Professor Larry Pinsky from the University of Houston,” says Becky.

In LUCID, four Timepix chips are mounted on the sides of a cube (figure 1). Students have demonstrated that the four chips allow for the largest active area without breaking power and data transmission limits. A fifth chip, mounted horizontally on the base of the cube, will be modified to detect neutrons. LUCID’s electronics, including a field-programmable gate array for read-out, will be on printed circuit boards attached to the chips.

The Timepix detectors produced at CERN do not qualify for use in space. “At one of the last stages of the competition, we were told that our project would go through if we could raise the additional £60,000 needed to qualify the Timepix detectors for space,” Becky recalls. Thanks to the support of the South East England Development Agency and Kent County Council the money was found and LUCID could go into space. LUCID will be mounted outside the spacecraft’s fuselage, housed in a 3 mm (0.81 g cm^–2) or 4 mm (1.08 g cm^–2) enclosure. Components will mostly be on an inside face of the board offering a further 0.25 g cm^–2 of shielding. The detector will also have to be qualified to withstand a vibration level of 20 g_rms.

Under Becky’s plans, data from LUCID will be compared with data collected by detectors installed on Earth, thus providing information about cosmic rays. “We expect terabytes of data each year from space. We will receive support from the UK Particle Physics Grid (GridPP) to use the Grid. It is a whole research package!,” she says.

The CERN@school project is not the only scientific project that Simon Langton Grammar School students are carrying out. “We collaborate with Imperial College on a research project in plasma physics. One of our students won the ‘Young Scientist of the Year’ prize and published a paper in a proper scientific journal. Others participate in a scientific project for the observation of exoplanets using the Faulkes Telescopes in Hawaii and Australia,” says Becky.

In addition the school hosts special projects in biology and in other branches of science, and also has its own research centre, the Langton Star Centre. This facility, still under construction, will have laboratories and training and seminar rooms. “We will be able to train teachers and students from other schools who want to take part in CERN@school and our other projects,” explains Becky. The centre’s website will include pages where data and analysis results from the network of participating schools will be shared.

These innovative teaching approaches benefit both students and teachers. The school’s philosophy is that 30% of the activities carried out must be beyond the official syllabus. The outcome is that the school provides about 1% of the total number of students studying for physics and engineering degrees at British universities. At the same time, motivating the teachers becomes much easier when they have the prospect of participating in real research programmes in collaboration with CERN, for example.

Many young people at school do not know what it would be like to study physics or engineering at university and do forefront research. However, when they get to work with the real scientists, they discover how amazing this is and readily jump aboard ambitious programmes. “If teachers let students take control in these kinds of projects, they will not mess around – they are going to do all of this properly because they know that this is serious stuff,” assures Becky. “With my students, I am quite rigorous. I tell them that they are going to do it like real scientists. And because this is really an amazing thing to be involved with, they do it properly and with a lot of enthusiasm.”

Becky’s attitude to “her” students, whom she calls “sweethearts”, is a far cry from that of teachers who say how difficult it is to control behaviour in schools and motivate students every day. So why is Becky’s experience so different? “I am in a lovely school,” she explains. “The cool thing to do at my school is physics. A 12 year old came to me last year and said: ‘Miss, we would like you to teach us quantum physics’ and so I did it.”

Becky’s initiative to foster the knowledge of “cool” physics in the region includes the “Langton Guide to the Universe”, in which parents are invited to attend physics lectures on modern and exciting physics. “Families come and receive a first input on things like quantum mechanics. Some kids who attended those lectures when they were very young later joined the school and set up the ‘quantum working group’, which produced a guide to how to teach quantum mechanics to the youngest. They have entered a national competition and reached the final.” These are the sort of expectations that you can have when you go to Simon Langton Grammar School. As Becky explains: “Our philosophy is that if students are interested in doing a scientific project, however ambitious, they can come and talk to us. This is your world, take the initiative and make it successful!”

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If you ask 10 people working at CERN how they would describe what CERN is in a single sentence, the chances are that you will get 10 different answers.

Most people think of CERN, first and foremost, as an accelerator “factory” and a provider of facilities for the experiments. Some would state that it is a high-profile research organization, as well as a formidable training centre. Others will emphasize that it is an attractive and responsible employer. Finally, some may point out that CERN is, among other things, a strong, internationally recognized “brand”.

They are all correct in some way because CERN is a complex system with manifold activities and worldwide impact, to an extent that is sometimes hard to appreciate from an in-house perspective. Personally, I like to think of CERN as a “knowledge hub”. In fact, despite people’s different views on what CERN is, they are all part of its knowledge-exchange network.

Knowledge from universities, research institutes and companies flows into CERN through the people who come to participate in its activities. New knowledge is generated at CERN and knowledge then flows out, for example through R&D partnerships and technology transfer and through those who leave.

CERN is actually more than a hub because it plays the role of an active “catalyser” in the exchange of knowledge. As a concrete example, in February 2010 the “Physics for Health in Europe” workshop took place at CERN. It brought together more than 400 participants – both medical doctors and technology experts from the physics community. Medical experts attending expressed their appreciation that CERN had organized the workshop, acknowledging the need for such cross-cultural and interdisciplinary events, which cannot easily be organized at a national level. The value of CERN both as a provider of technologies and as a catalyst for the community was widely recognized. There are, of course, many other activities where CERN makes similar contributions towards global endeavours, for example, the Open Access initiative and the deployment of a computing Grid infrastructure in Europe.

Some of the knowledge exchanges taking place across CERN’s network are structured, explicit and therefore easy to track. This is the case, for example, with technology-transfer activities, which are typically formalized through contracts that give third parties access to CERN’s intellectual property portfolio. Other knowledge-exchange processes are tacit or informal. For example, knowledge transfer through people’s mobility from CERN towards European companies is hard to track in a systematic way.

The CERN Global Network aims to facilitate knowledge exchange across the various groups described above and to improve the visibility of partnership opportunities related to CERN’s activities. It will also enable CERN to gather data on knowledge transfer through mobility.

This Global Network will welcome former and current members of the CERN personnel (including users), companies from CERN’s member states, universities and research institutes. It will deliver a database of members and a dedicated website, providing information about partnership and knowledge-sharing opportunities (training, new R&D projects, transferable technologies, jobs etc) across the community. It will also foster the creation of special interest groups and organize events at CERN.

The scope of the Global Network is broader than a typical “alumni” association because it aims to build and reinforce links between all of the key players in the knowledge-exchange process – be they individuals or institutions. Interactions between individuals will generate a CERN-specific social and professional network, while interactions between individuals and institutions will create value in areas such as recruitment by linking job seekers with potential employers. Finally, interactions between institutions will enable the exchange of best practice in specific thematic areas.

As a last point, I would like to stress that the importance of knowledge transfer through day-to-day exchanges with the general public cannot be overemphasized. No doubt most readers of this article are routinely asked by ordinary citizens to explain what CERN is. In these circumstances we are all acting as ambassadors for CERN, endowed with the responsibility to remove misconceptions about our field and to explain the role of fundamental research as a driver for innovation.

Contributing to communication with the general public is everyone’s responsibility – the CERN Global Network will provide its members with information about the CERN-related projects that make an impact on society and that can be used to illustrate how CERN concretely delivers value to the community, in addition to its contribution to the advancement of basic science.

Facilitating and catalysing knowledge exchanges are among the most valuable benefits that we at CERN can deliver to society. A few words from George Bernard Shaw suffice to illustrate why: “If you have an apple and I have an apple, and we exchange these apples, then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”

• For more about the CERN Global Network, see http://globalnetwork.cern.ch.

Claudio Parrinello, head of knowledge and technology transfer, CERN.

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In 1609 Galileo Galilei made the first recorded telescope observations of the night sky – an event that is being celebrated all through 2009 in the International Year of Astronomy. He soon ran into trouble with the ecclesiastical authorities, partly because he used Italian instead of Latin in many of his letters and books, which gave people access to his new scientific interpretation of the world. Fortunately things have changed since then and today the scientific community and the relevant authorities on scientific policies share a general consensus on the importance of conveying to society the main results and general consequences of research.

Take high-energy physics as an example: over the past few years, dedicated working groups and projects have been set up to develop outreach activities. A good example of an annual activity of this kind, aimed at young students in physics and high-school teachers, is the EPPOG Masterclasses, which involves the participation of some 80 research institutes and universities across Europe. Recently several African and American institutes joined the project.

Permanent or travelling exhibitions are another interesting means for the “large-scale” dissemination of high-energy physics information, showing the public the still-unresolved mysteries of the universe and the gigantic equipment needed in particle accelerators (such as the LHC), detectors and computing systems (such as the Grid).

These valuable initiatives have been unquestionably successful but their real reach to society is limited because of the relatively reduced number of participants and the competition from other fields (scientific or not) already on the market, such as websites, video games and so on. We can think of taking advantage of these more loosely related activities such as the film adaptation of Dan Brown’s bestselling novel, Angels & Demons, currently in cinemas around the world. While artists should be allowed creative freedom and their view on science should not be rejected, they sometimes risk being somewhat misleading. I am not particularly enthusiastic about spreading the idea that a bomb made of antimatter stolen from CERN could destroy the Vatican (or any other city). Nonetheless, the association of physics (and more generally, science) with other social and cultural manifestations should be mutually beneficial and deserves closer attention.

Despite the universality of its principles, methodology and objectivity of results, the advancement of scientific knowledge has proved to be socially dependent, from the golden age of Pericles and the “invention” of democracy to the Renaissance and the rise of humanism together with the birth of modern science. Society itself may fuel scientific advancement in a particular direction: thermodynamics was driven by the need for building more efficient heat engines at the beginning of Industrial Revolution, thereby decisively contributing to the foundations of classical physics in the 19th century.

As an example from particle physics, CERN was created as a free forum for nuclear science in a Europe devastated by the Second World War “to encourage the formation of research laboratories in order to increase international scientific collaboration&ellip;” (as stated at the Fifth UNESCO Conference in Florence, 1950). The CERN convention was gradually ratified during 1953–54 by the 12 founding member states, while the Treaty of Rome that founded the European Union was signed in 1957. Science often goes ahead of society.

In this regard the Web – born at CERN – has represented a dramatic democratization of knowledge, teaching and information. Virtually free for everybody on the planet (wherever electricity is available), it was an almost direct consequence of the free circulation of scientific data among researchers. More generally, big scientific collaborations are genuine examples of worldwide co-operation between different scientists and technicians regardless of their age, gender, religious beliefs or nationality.

Social needs, in turn, continuously demand technological achievements that ultimately stem from fundamental research. Nuclear and particle physics, for instance, have provided crucial tools for medical diagnosis, from the discovery of X-rays to modern medical-imaging techniques.

Undoubtedly outreach must convey to society the excitement of scientific discovery and the importance of technological returns. However, in my opinion, the message from science should not stop there. Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius (Sidereal Messenger) was heralding in 1610 not only the existence of mountains on the Moon or satellites around Jupiter, but also the dawn of a new epoch. Indeed, the social impact and controversy turned out to be much greater than with De revolutionibus by Nicolaus Copernicus (1543) or Johannes Kepler’s Astronomia nova (1609) – because it was easier to read.

We are currently witnessing crucial developments of society globally, from a more just economy to extended human rights, environmental protection and nature conservation. While keeping the possible misuse of scientific and technological applications in mind as a warning, we should ensure that the virtues that are traditionally associated with “Big Science”, historically entangled in the social progress of humanity, are praised as an example to counteract ignorance, obscurantism and fanaticism.

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It could probably enhance the spectrum of its technological impact by paying more attention to the management of technological learning and by fostering more-explicit exchanges of new technological developments outside the needs of just the purchasing sphere. This is particularly important today because developments in high energy physics can take up to 20 years before their impact is felt outside the field.

The basis for the study

A recent study by Helsinki University and CERN, entitled Knowledge Creation and Management in the Five LHC Experiments at CERN: Implications for Technology Innovation and Transfer, has made a detailed analysis of knowledge transfer in the context of the LHC experiments ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, LHCb and TOTEM. This both conceptualizes and confirms with quantitative data CERN’s role in the creation of knowledge.

Each year hundreds of young people join CERN as students, fellows, associates or staff members taking up their first employment. This continuous flow of people – who come to CERN, are trained by working with CERN’s experts and then return to their home countries – provides a useful example of knowledge and technology transfer through people. The new study provides evidence that the social process of participation in meetings, the acquisition of skills in different areas and the development of interests through interaction with colleagues are key elements in the learning process.

The study analysed 291 replies to a questionnaire handed out during LHC-experiment collaboration meetings, which asked questions concerning individual perception and assessment of knowledge acquisition and transfer, as well as the means used to communicate knowledge. The respondents consisted of CERN users (79%) and staff members (21%), with 80% of them physicists. Some 70% of respondents were younger than 40.

Figure 1 illustrates the model for the pattern of knowledge acquisition and transfer on which the study was based. It is important to underline that within this scheme, and indeed in general, only individuals can create knowledge, which expands from tacit-to-explicit knowledge through social interaction. Tacit knowledge is essentially individual and cannot necessarily be communicated and shared in a systematic or logical manner. It has to be converted into words or numbers that are understood easily enough to be shared and become explicit. However, not all individual tacit knowledge becomes explicit. Explicit knowledge is something more formal and systematic. It can be expressed in words and numbers, is easily communicated and shared in the form of written and spoken language, hard data, scientific formulae and codified procedures.

For organizations to be effective in the process of knowledge transfer they must provide a context in which individuals can hold both formal and informal discussions to steer new ideas as well as foster collective learning. Economists and sociologists see this knowledge generation as being particularly important because it underlies societal and technological innovation and is of relevance to the industrial and wider world. One of CERN’s core assets is individual and organizational learning – the latter being the social process where a group of people collectively enhance their capacities to produce an outcome. The creation of organizational knowledge amplifies the knowledge that is created by individuals who spread it at the group level through dialogue, discussion, experience sharing or observation.

Learning benefits

Large experiments, such as those at the LHC, form the hub of an institutional and organizational network. The interactions between individuals – both among teams and within teams that share a common interest – as well as between experiments, are important routes for knowledge transfer, according to the study (figures 2a and 2b).

Such interactions are enabled by the organizational structure of the collaboration and by the frequent use of modern communication tools, such as e-mail and websites. Furthermore, the results indicate that knowledge acquisition in the multicultural environment plays a mediating role in the interaction between social capital constructs (social interaction, relationship quality and network ties) and outcomes related to competitive advantage (invention development and technological distinctiveness). In short, the fertile environment of the LHC experiments fosters a dynamic, interactive and simultaneous exchange of knowledge both inside and outside the collaborations (figure 2c).

Individuals can create and expand knowledge through the social process, which also involves industry at various phases of project development. The study was unable to assess the interaction with industry completely because it was carried out towards the end of the installation phase, when R&D was over and most of the important, challenging orders had already been placed. There was, therefore, not much need of follow-up and contact with industry. Nevertheless, the respondents generally agreed that they had benefited from relationships with and knowledge of industry (figure 2d). It was clear that only a select group of people had been in charge of relations with industry; the scarcity of data (for the reasons explained previously) did not allow their profile to be characterized.

The study also assessed the personal outcomes of knowledge transfer, which were found to be substantial in all of the experiments. These were evaluated in terms of the widening of scientific interests and knowledge; the expansion of social networks; and the enhancement of scientific skills at many different levels (planning, data analysis, paper writing) with the acquisition of new technical and technological skills. These positive outcomes span a wide age-range, demonstrating a benefit to both young and experienced physicists. The domains of useful technological learning ranged from physics to detector technologies, electronics, information technologies and management. The many innovative developments can be categorized as follows: 41% in detector technologies; 33% in computing; 25% in electronics: and 1% in other areas.

The results also show the importance of management in large physics collaborations (94 of 291 respondents had a management and co-ordination role in addition to their physics or engineering functions). Almost 50% of the respondents underlined the positive effect on their career of having performed managerial functions.

The development of these personal skills, which fall into four categories (learning technical skills, learning scientific skills, improving social networking, and increasing employment potential in the labour market) should be managed, used and catalysed to target individual development to improve opportunities in the labour market for individuals working in high-energy-physics environments. The researchers who responded to the study also showed a certain amount of entrepreneurship, with a positive approach towards going to work for companies or towards creating their own company (˜6%). Of those who would consider going to work for a company, about half are below the age of 55. These results should encourage further research studies into how best to foster learning and innovation of “big science” enterprises.

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This landmark publication is probably the first time for a major new accelerator project to be documented in such a comprehensive, coherent, and up-to-date manner prior to going into operation. The papers should for many years to come serve as key references for the stream of scientific results that will begin to emerge from the LHC after the first collisions next year. They provide a much-needed update of the Technical Design Reports, some of which are now 10 years old.

Although published in a refereed scientific journal, the articles are completely free to download and read online under an Open Access scheme, without requiring a journal subscription. JINST is an online-only journal published jointly by the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, and the IOP Publishing in Bristol, under the scientific direction of Amos Breskin from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. Since commencing in 2006, it has quickly become popular in the LHC community as a platform for publishing techincal papers.

With 1600 pages authored by 8000 scientists and engineers the special issue is the most significant manifestation of CERN’s Open Access policy thus far. It is an important milestone on the road to converting all particle-physics literature to Open Access under the initiative of the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP³).

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The libraries of CERN, DESY, Fermilab and SLAC recently analysed the status of HEP information systems. A subsequent poll revealed that community-based services are overwhelmingly dominant in the research workflow of HEP scholars, whose needs are not met by existing commercial services. The poll found that HEP researchers attach paramount importance to three axes of excellence: access to full-text, depth of coverage and quality of content, possibly extended to connecting fields outside HEP.

Based on these results, the management of the laboratories seized the opportunity to build INSPIRE, a community-based and user-driven, next-generation information system, fully exploiting a new technological environment. It is being built by combining the successful SPIRES database, curated at DESY, Fermilab and SLAC, with the Invenio digital library technology developed at CERN. INSPIRE will offer the functionalities and quality of service that the HEP user community has grown to expect from SPIRES, an indispensable tool in their daily research workflow. It will develop long-awaited features, providing access to the entire body of HEP literature with full-text, Google-like search capabilities and enabling innovative text- and data-mining applications.

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What is the main idea behind the project?

This project is meant to be the most extensive experiment to detect muon showers induced by extremely energetic primary cosmic rays (protons or nuclei) interacting in the atmosphere. Ultimately, it will cover a million square kilometres of Italian and Swiss territory. It would have been very expensive to implement such a large project without involving existing structures, namely schools all over Italy and part of Switzerland. This “economic” strategy also has the advantage of bringing advanced physics research to the heart of the new generation of students.

How will the experiment detect cosmic-ray showers?

The EEE telescopes, distributed over an immense area, will be tracking devices, capable of reconstructing the trajectories of the charged particles traversing them. These particles are the secondary cosmic rays produced in the showers, and are mostly muons at sea level. The project is based on a very advanced detector unit: the multigap resistive plate chamber (MRPC) (Cerron-Zeballos et al. 1996). An EEE telescope comprises three layers of MRPCs. We have developed these chambers for the ALICE time-of-flight detector at CERN’s LHC (Akindinov et al. 2004). Their performance in terms of detection efficiency and time resolution is outstanding.

However, the EEE Project also aims to bring science into high schools (Zichichi 2004). This is why the plan was for all of the MRPCs to be built by teams of school pupils supervised by their teachers at CERN or in the nearest laboratory (located in the closest university or research institute). After the MRPC construction phase, school pupils participate in the installation, testing and start-up of the EEE telescope in their school, then in its maintenance and data-acquisition, and later in the analysis of the data. Of course the scientific and technical staff of the universities and research institutes collaborating in the project coordinate and guide everything.

The telescopes will be coupled to GPS units and interconnected via a network. A dedicated PC will locally acquire the MRPC signals produced by each telescope and will then transfer them to the largest Italian computer centre in Bologna for analysis using Grid middleware.

How much does the project cost and how is it funded?

The cost is minimal because we install our detectors at existing structures (schools). The EEE Project was funded in 2005 by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research, and by Italian research institutes such as INFN and the Enrico Fermi Centre. The cost of an EEE unit (that is, a complete telescope, including PC, laboratory equipment, cables, gas system, etc.) is about €50,000. CERN, the World Federation of Scientists, the Italian National Research Council and many Italian universities are also participating in the project. Owing to the success of the project and to its undoubted impact on education and research potential, we expect more funding in the coming years.

What is the status of the project? How many schools are involved so far and what is the next step?

In one year, pupils from more than 20 high schools have built more than 70 MRPCs at CERN. Nine pilot sites are equipped with EEE telescopes: at CERN, at the INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory, at the INFN Frascati Laboratory and in the INFN sections in Bologna (central Italy), Cagliari (Sardinia, central-western Italy), Catania (Sicily, southern Italy), Lecce (south-east Italy) and Turin (north-west Italy). The remaining MRPCs are currently moving from Geneva to Italy for the other high schools that are involved so far. We foresee that all of these telescopes should soon be collecting data. Meanwhile the construction of other MRPCs at CERN continues, thanks to a new wave of pupils from other Italian high schools. More than 50 schools are already queuing up to be part of the EEE Project.

The next stage of the project is to continue expanding, increasing its coverage and involving as many high schools as possible in this frontier experimental research in fundamental physics.

What do you believe the project contributes to education?

The direct involvement of young pupils in the project is the most efficient way to contribute to their learning while doing advanced research in physics. The pupils will be personally involved in advanced research and will acquire a deeper knowledge of particle and astroparticle physics, experimental tools, data-acquisition systems, software, networks, etc. They will gain direct access to the data and to the working methods typical of modern research work.

How does EEE differ from schools projects in other countries?

When I started to speak about the project I knew of no other proposals. Now some educational cosmic-ray projects have been proposed in other countries. The detectors are groups of scintillation counters, typically on the school’s roof, and not in the building as with the EEE telescopes. These projects don’t use tracking devices.

What will the project contribute to research?

There are short- and long-range time coincidences between close (within the same city) and distant telescopes, and the tracking capabilities of the telescopes will determine with good precision the direction of the incoming primary cosmic ray. Therefore, the EEE Project can study not only large showers of muons originating from a common vertex, but also correlations between separated showers that might be produced by bundles of primaries. The project thus allows a large variety of studies, from measuring the local muon flux in a single telescope, to detecting extensive air showers producing time correlations in the same metropolitan area, to searching for large-scale correlations between showers detected in telescopes tens, hundreds or thousands of kilometres apart. When complete – that is, equipped with at least 100 telescopes – the EEE Project will compete strongly with other high-energy cosmic-ray experiments searching for extreme-energy extended air showers.

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Des atomes exotiques pour comprendre des questions fondamentales. Un atelier d’été, tenu à Trente, s’est attaché à étudier l’apport des expériences sur les atomes exotiques, les formes kaoniques fortement liées et l’antihydrogène pour explorer la physique fondamentale à basse énergie. L’atelier a rassemblé des experts dans le domaine des atomes et noyaux exotiques, afin d’examiner l’état actuel des expériences et de la théorie et de déterminer quels sont les sujets les plus prometteurs. Le programme, très fourni, allait des variétés pioniques, kaoniques et antiprotoniques des atomes exotiques à l’antihydrogène, et aux clusters nucléaires exotiques, plus généralement appelés de nos jours noyaux kaoniques fortement liés. Les participants ont pris connaissance des derniers résultats obtenus par de nombreuses expériences sur ces atomes exotiques, et ont discuté de projets futurs fondés sur des techniques d’expérimentation améliorées.

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The journalists who tell our story will have wildly varying backgrounds, skills and points of view. Their pieces will cover the spectrum of science journalism. They will define and describe; compare and contrast; make judgements and express opinions; and praise and criticize. Writing in language that is accessible to their readers, they will at times seem wanting in their grasp of scientific subtleties. Sometimes they will appear to lack appreciation for something that we care deeply about; occasionally they may even give more credit than we deserve.

It is accepted wisdom that the press almost always get it wrong. Actually, in our experience, ultimately they get it just about right. In the months and years ahead, the majority of journalists who tell the story of 21st-century particle physics will do an excellent job. From time to time, inevitably, they will get it wrong – at least as we see it. A true test of our character as a field is how we react to this level of media coverage.

At a time of extraordinary scientific opportunity in particle physics, we must keep our eyes on the science and enjoy the privilege of taking part in discovering how the universe works. We should equally enjoy the opportunity afforded by the media’s interest.

In the past, there have been occasions when our field has devolved into warring camps, reading each new press article with suspicion, quick to take offence at every real or imagined slight or bias. It’s time to change this model. Do we want to be seen as a fractious, contentious community beset by invidiousness, or as a unified community of committed scientists confronting a golden age of discovery? We have the choice. We can set a tone of respect and admiration for all projects and experiments that lead to discovery – or one that begrudges every word of praise for others’ work. Without fail, the media will pick up on our tone. So will our colleagues, our students, scientists in other disciplines and we ourselves. It will be part of what defines the kind of field that we are.

Competition will always exist, and this is a good thing. People care passionately about their work. Of course they want to see it recognized, and defend it if it is unfairly criticized. But we have everything to gain by maintaining perspective. There will be hundreds of stories during the years ahead. Today’s lukewarm review will be tomorrow’s encomium – and vice versa. We should take them all in our stride, because we are in this together for the long haul. We all want to discover how the universe works. It’s a big universe with room, and credit, enough for everyone.

• This article is being published simultaneously in the October issues of CERN Courier and symmetry (see
www.symmetrymag.org).
Members of InterAction, a collaboration of particle-physics communicators from laboratories around the world (www.interactions.org): Roberta Antolini, INFN Gran Sasso; Peter Barratt, PPARC; Natalie Bealing, CCLRC/RAL; Stefano Bianco, INFN Frascati; Karsten Buesser, DESY; Neil Calder, SLAC; Elizabeth Clements, ILC; Reid Edwards, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Suraiya Farukhi, Argonne National Laboratory; James Gillies, CERN; Judith Jackson, Fermilab; Marge Lynch, Brookhaven National Laboratory; Youhei Morita, KEK, ILC; Christian Mrotzek, DESY; Perrine Royole-Degieux, IN2P3, ILC; Yves Sacquin, DAPNIA CEA; Ahren Sadoff, Cornell University LEPP; Maury Tigner, Cornell University LEPP; and Barbara Warmbein, ILC.

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Open access is currently a hot topic at universities, publishing houses and governments, as digitized documentation and electronic networking become more mainstream. The particle-physics community has already implemented one of the possible ways for open access to work, whereby institutional libraries, such as CERN’s, make their own information available on the Internet. The other approach is to work directly with scientific publishers to develop open access to the journals.

The aim of open access is to bring greater benefit to society by allowing electronic access to journals to be free to the public, while being paid for by the authors. The time-honoured practice consisted of publishers financing journals through reader subscriptions and ensuring quality by peer review; however, this model favours the wealthier universities and institutions as they can afford the expensive costs of the journals. The challenge for open access is to maintain the quality guaranteed by academic publishers, while broadening access to the information.

The creation of an open-access task-force comes at a crucial time for the world particle-physics community as 2007 brings the launch of a new major facility, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

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We are in Kitzbühel, a peaceful town with green and beautiful surroundings in south-west Austria, to witness a curious learning experience and to contribute to its spirit as much as we can. The first evening’s dinner sweeps away any clouds of anxiety we might have, and observations of the first encounters have provided more than 5σ evidence of a great event.

On the first morning, just as rain is refreshing the beauty of the mountains outside, the overhead projector starts to light up the first fields and interactions on the screen. Wilfried Buchmüller from DESY provides us with the most fundamental piece of knowledge we will ever need – the Standard Model itself. The school’s academic programme is like a perfect PhD Student’s Guide to High-Energy Physics, as if to advise “don’t panic” in the wide and diverse realm of this exciting subject, “we will show you the route”.

Our appetite for learning grows as cosmology slowly makes peace with precision in the lectures by Rocky Kolb from Fermilab. He calmly strides through the whole universe, from its brilliant but furious past to its settled and gloomy present, from its simply overwhelming dark side to its modest but comforting light side.

Then enters Larry McLerran from Brookhaven, who introduces us to the colour glass condensate and the quark-gluon plasma, which happen to be two rather unusual forms of strongly interacting matter. He tells us the ancient tales of the good old days when quarks and gluons used to enjoy their freedom, and how the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider came along at Brookhaven with the aim of capturing a few memories of such eras. On the other hand, Gerhard Ecker from Vienna draws a somewhat more familiar portrait of strong interactions as he systematically goes through quantum chromodynamics, explaining the usual quarks and gluons, and showing the remarkable detail hidden behind even the simplest approaches in this theory.

The evenings call for our creativity in the discussion sessions (which might also be considered as gentle warnings for us to stay awake during the lectures). Having received our daily lecture notes we are divided into six discussion groups, where we are supposed to make an account of the day’s learning and remove any obscurities in the lectures. Encouraged by the friendly attitudes of our discussion leaders, who are all young and willing theorists, and of the visiting lecturers, any shyness disappears and the first hints of inspiration begin to appear as ideas, questions and comments bravely make their way into the discussions.

It is now Thursday night and the poster session begins, transforming modest students into proud physicists who share the outcomes of their current research with great skill and enthusiasm. As well as discovering new ideas, we also see some different approaches to familiar subjects. For example, as someone who wrote an MSc thesis on the analysis of miniature black holes in the CMS experiment at CERN, I am delighted to come across a poster on a similar study for ATLAS. I discover that our friends from Oxford suffered the same problems we did, and so over discussions we decide to support each other in any future studies of these ruthless objects. Best of all though, is to have the vision that through all of these diverse contributions the goals of physics today can indeed be fulfilled.

The sound of music

But it’s not all work. We also have enough time to answer the irresistible call of the great Alps or to relax in the pleasant atmosphere of the historic town of Kitzbühel. On Saturday we visit Salzburg, the town enchanted by the graceful hand of Mozart.

The second week brings new lectures and new lecturers. After convincing us that Buchmüller’s Standard Model is fine but definitely insufficient, John Ellis from CERN goes on to reveal the vast worlds beyond, which are ruled by brilliant scientific imagination, with of course some rightful emphasis placed on the unavoidable elegance of supersymmetry. His presence is an invaluable gift, especially for me, as my current research happens to be on supersymmetric dark matter. Inspired by his lectures, as devoted experimentalists, we even go on a dangerous quest for dark matter on the nearby Schwarzsee at night.

Later, Robert Fleischer, also from CERN, explains how a nasty complex phase destroyed the beautiful CP symmetry and introduced some excitement into our universe, which would otherwise be less interesting; and how it also caused a few headaches among the physicists trying to explore the rich phenomenology of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix and its unitarity triangles. We then discover some “CP violating terms” in the local organizing committee as two of its members from Vienna, Manfred Jeitler and Laurenz Widhalm, in addition to their efforts to offer us an outstanding experience, present lectures on experimental aspects of B- and K-physics, respectively. Then Manfred Lindner from Munich describes the ghostly neutrinos and the many consequences of their mischievous behaviour, and gives a long list of the global endeavours to discover their nature experimentally.

There are even some lectures not on particle physics. Wolfram Müller from Graz gives instructions on the physics of ski jumping, which seems quite appropriate in Kitzbühel, and Herbert Pietschmann from Vienna shows us our fate on the way to knowledge in his delightful lecture on physics and philosophy.

Meanwhile, the interactions increase, just as predicted by the famous “Summer Student Group Theory”. Although we have grown up under the strict hands of scientific work, the children within us still seek fun and adventure. We make the most of a colourful international community formed without prejudices and borders. The coffee breaks, which seemed a little long in the beginning, now fly swiftly by with cheerful conversations. I feel a significant improvement in my debating skills, especially after all the “SUSY and beyond” discussions with several expert theorist friends.

Grand finale

However, the inescapable end is close. In order to avoid becoming too melancholy and to create a glorious finale, we amalgamate all our creativity in preparing an unforgettable farewell night. This time we are on stage, giving so-called lectures on “serious subjects” (that cannot be mentioned here!), singing, acting and doing all sorts of things to entertain our audience. But finally we have to say difficult goodbyes to all of our friends (yes, we are friends now), and leave the cosy Hotel Kitzhof, where our hosts, through their patience and goodness, have somehow managed to survive our two-week occupation.

I know that all of us share the same feeling of gratitude towards everyone who made this school possible. I am especially indebted, as a student coming from an observer state who had the privilege of being supported through the generosity of CERN. We are greatly thankful for the endless support and kindness we received from Egil Lillestøl (CERN schools director), Danielle Métral (CERN schools secretary), Tatyana Donskova (JINR schools secretary), all the local organizers plus all the other representatives of CERN and JINR who were with us during the school. We have been thoroughly enriched as a result of their sincere efforts. This worthy tradition must continue, as long as physics has new puzzles to offer us and as long as we can respond through willing fresh minds.

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Particle-physics masterclasses began in the UK in 1997, the centenary of J J Thomson’s discovery of the electron. It was then that Ken Long of Imperial College and Roger Barlow of Manchester devised a series of one-day events for 16- to 19-year-old pupils and their teachers. Run by particle physicists at various institutes all over the UK and coordinated by the High Energy Particle Physics Group of the Institute of Physics, each year the programme offers a very popular combination of exciting talks and hands-on experience of the interactive graphical display programs that particle physicists use at CERN. More recently, the concept of the particle-physics masterclasses has been successfully adopted by several institutes in Belgium, Germany and Poland on a regular basis.

The World Year of Physics 2005, commemorating Einstein’s annus mirabilis, was the inspiration for the particle-physics masterclasses to spread even further. It was just enough to mention the idea of a Europe-wide version of this programme for all the members of the European Particle Physics Outreach Group (EPOG) to come on board and try to get institutes in their countries involved. EPOG promotes the outreach activities of particle-physics institutes and laboratories in CERN’s member states and acts as a forum for the exchange of ideas and experiences related to particle-physics outreach. Fifty-eight institutes in 18 countries across Europe, from Athens to Bergen and from Lisbon to Helsinki, participated in the masterclass event, which was centrally coordinated at Bonn University.

The basic idea of the pan-European event was to let the students work as much as possible like real scientists

As with the original masterclasses, the basic idea of the pan-European event was to let the students work as much as possible like real scientists in an authentic environment at a particle-physics institute, not only to feel the excitement of dealing with real data, but also to experience the difficulties of validating the scientific results. After lectures from practising scientists they performed measurements on real data from particle-physics experiments, and at the end of each day, like in an international collaboration, they joined in a videoconference for discussion and combination of the results.

The measurement of the branching ratios of Z boson decays at CERN’s Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP) was chosen as the main common task at all sites. For this the students had to identify the final states of quark-jets, electron pairs, muon pairs and the notoriously difficult tau pairs from the tracks and signals in various components of LEP detectors. Interactive computer material for this task was available using data from OPAL in the Identifying Particles package from Terry Wyatt at Manchester, or alternatively using DELPHI data in A Keyhole to the Birth of Time by James Gillies and Richard Jacobsson at CERN or in the well known Hands-on-CERN package developed by Erik Johansson of Stockholm.

To simplify students’ access to the unfamiliar world of particle physics, EPOG and the national institutes undertook the immense effort of translating the material into various languages. By the beginning of March, each package was available in at least one of 16 languages, with Hands-on-CERN now covering 14 languages, from Catalan to Slovak. This material, including real data for performing the measurements and several extra teaching and learning packages, lays the basis for regularly performing masterclasses at a European level, and is also of valuable use outside the masterclasses. It is available on the Internet and on a CD that was given to each masterclass participant.

The skills required to become a “particle detective” were taught in the morning lectures at each institute. Since in most countries particle physics is not normally taught at school, the talks had to go all the way from basic explanations to the world of quarks and leptons. “Easy-to-follow explanations of scientific research” was the immediate reaction of one of the students at Berlin. After some brief training by young researchers from the institute, the students made the fascinating discovery that they were indeed able to identify the elementary particles on the event displays themselves, at least in most cases; it was even more fascinating for them to learn that professional scientists cannot be completely sure either on an event-by-event basis that their identification is right. The exercise was in fact usually performed quite quickly: “What next?” was a frequent demand once the Z-decays were measured.

Another innovative idea of the EPOG European Masterclasses was to hold an international videoconference at the end of each day using the same Virtual Room Videoconferencing System (VRVS) technology as practising scientists. CERN’s IT Department and the Slovak group of the Caltech VRVS team provided valuable technical help for the many institutes that had never used this tool before. The link-up was centrally moderated by two inspiring young researchers at CERN: Silvia Schuh from ATLAS, and Dave Barney from CMS (who recently received the 2005 Outreach Prize of the High Energy and Particle Physics Division of the European Physical Society). Using English as a common language, the students discussed why, for instance, classes in Helsinki and Vienna found significantly more taus than those in Innsbruck, Heidelberg, Bonn or Bergen. They then assigned systematic errors derived from the differences and ended up with combined measurements, confirming (happily!) the results from LEP. In addition invited scientists at CERN were ready to answer further questions on topics ranging from antimatter and Big Bang cosmology to the daily life of a CERN researcher.

The videoconferences made the students aware that the masterclasses were taking place in other countries, and created the feeling of an international collaboration of researchers. It was “interesting to learn how scientific information is exchanged around the globe”, according to one of the comments on the feedback questionnaires, which are currently being evaluated by the Leibniz Institute for Science Education (IPN) at the University of Kiel.

How was it for you?

The first results from the evaluation show that, independent of country and gender, some 70% of about 400 female and 900 male students felt strongly or very strongly that they had learned at the masterclasses how scientific research is organized and carried out. More than 81% liked the masterclasses “much” or “very much”, again independent of gender. Moreover, there was significantly higher enthusiasm in Finland, Portugal and the Czech Republic with 96% choosing “much” or “very much”, which can mostly be attributed to particularly interesting lectures and a bigger increase in knowledge of particle physics.

The impact on the student’s interest showed greater spread between the countries. On average 58% of both male and female students felt that they were generally more interested in physics after the masterclasses, and only 6% were less interested. Again, the masterclasses had a significantly stronger impact in Portugal and Finland, with 86% and 95% of students respectively reporting increased interest. In two countries the female participants benefited especially. While the male participants showed no significant deviation from the average, 78% of the Italian girls and all seven female students in Sweden reported an increased interest in physics. The Swedish girls unanimously marked the highest possible increase in their knowledge of particle physics, and felt more strongly than average that they had learned about the organization of scientific research. For all students both factors correlated very strongly with positive answers to the question on increased general interest in physics (see figure 1). Apart from this, the reactions of the female and male students to the masterclass programme were nearly identical, although in all countries the girls said they thought they knew significantly less about physics than the boys and were significantly less familiar with computers.

Finally, regardless of whether they like their current physics lessons at school, 65% of the students thought that modern physics, like particle physics, should play a bigger part in their science lessons (see figure 2). This question showed the largest variation between the countries. The majority was significantly higher, for example, in Germany, with 75% of the students responding positively, and Portugal with 91%. In Switzerland and Norway, by contrast, not even 30% of the students clearly supported this statement. In the latter two countries more than half of the students found the level of the masterclasses rather difficult, while on average only 19% shared this opinion.

“I got the feeling that I did something which physicists do every day in their experiments, and I felt involved.” This statement from a 17-year-old girl shows that the authentic surroundings and the measurements with real data were indeed able to bring modern physics close to the hearts of young people.

• For more details about the event and materials see http://wyp.teilchenphysik.org. The European Masterclasses were sponsored by the High Energy Physics Board of the European Physical Society and the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF), and received organizational help from the German Science-on-Stage Executive Office. The EU has acknowledged the success of the first European Masterclasses by nominating the project leader, Michael Kobel, for a Descartes Prize for Excellence in Science Communication for 2005. The project is now competing with 22 other nominees for up to five Descartes Communication Prizes, to be awarded in December in London.

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In the past, ties between European and Latin American particle physics had been very strong, involving well known physicists such as Cesar Lattes, José Leite Lopez, Roberto Salmeron and many others. Lately, however, Latin American experimental physicists had turned to the US, and Fermilab in particular, as their main point of contact in particle physics. The US had opened up to them and to their students under the enlightened action of Nobel prize-winners such as Richard Feynman, whose stay in Brazil had an enormous influence on the development of fundamental physics there, and Leon Lederman. On the other hand, theoretical physicists in Latin America had always considered CERN as one of their main poles of interest (together with the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste) with physicists of the calibre of John Ellis, Alvaro de Rújula and Luis Alvarez Gaumé being particularly friendly to Latin Americans.

The first step towards rebuilding the relationship with Latin America was launching a biannual CERN-Latin American school of physics. I discussed the matter with Egil Lillestol at the 1999 European School of High-Energy Physics in Bratislava, and we concluded that the conditions were right to go ahead. The first Latin American school, modelled on CERN’s long-standing European School of High Energy Physics, was held two years later in Itacuruça, Brazil. It was a clear success, demonstrating the interest of the younger Latin American generation in European physics, CERN and the LHC.

At the same school, I also saw first-hand a strong interest going in the other direction, with European physicists curious about the Pierre Auger Observatory, the ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray detector being built in Argentina. Indeed, as I learned at Itacuruça, the sum of contributions to the project from CERN member states was already larger than the contribution made by the US via the Department of Energy, a nation historically considered the main partner of Latin American countries.

The first Latin American School of High Energy Physics marked the beginning of a new collaboration, but during the following years the problem was how to keep the collaboration going, in view of the difficulties that were arising from financing the LHC. In late summer 2003, Philippe Busquin, the EU commissioner for research whom I had asked for support, pointed out that a programme from the EU Commission, América Latina – Formación Académica (ALFA), was the natural framework for stabilizing relations between CERN and Latin America, by taking advantage of the potential for training young physicists that the LHC offered.

Rubio and I quickly got the message and started to prepare an application to ALFA. Fortunately, another lucky circumstance made the enterprise possible. Verónica Riquer, a former student of Marcos Moshinsky (a well known nuclear theorist from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, UNAM), was a postdoctoral fellow in CERN’s theory division. A good friend of Rubio, Riquer somehow knows everybody doing physics anywhere in Latin America, and even has a clear idea of what they are actually doing.

Riquer enthusiastically adopted the project that was going to have a big impact on her for the next few years (“HELEN nos va matar” she warned me in the difficult periods – “HELEN is going to kill us!”). Indeed, she proved the crucial person to connect with high-energy physics groups in Latin America, to get them involved in the hard work of preparing a valid application to the (notoriously difficult) EU Commission and, finally, to convince so many people on a different continent to persuade 22 rectors to sign an agreement with the EU at very short notice. Eventually, the full application was finished during the night of 29 April 2004, and taken by hand to Brussels the following morning, complying exactly with the deadline of 30 April 2004. Riquer left CERN to see her family in Mexico, and Rubio and I could relax. The High Energy Physics Latin-American-European Network (HELEN) now existed.

HELEN is a big project. Over three years, it will involve stays in Europe totalling 1002 months (70% at CERN) for students and young researchers from 22 institutions across eight countries in Latin America, and stays in Latin America totalling 164 months for physicists from seven European countries (about 50% at the Pierre Auger Observatory). In addition, some 15% of the budget is dedicated to visits from professors in the network, to give seminars, oversee students and start new collaborations. Each institution has one reference person (the “interlocutor”), among them Arnulfo Zepeda in Mexico, Alberto Santoro in Brazil and Teresa Dova in Argentina. All in all, we expect a whole new generation of Latin American physicists to be trained in particle physics at the most advanced facilities in the world, and to establish new ties with their European peers.

On a happy day last February, we received the news that HELEN had been approved and that we could start discussing the practical implementation of the contract. In fact, at the time I was in Mexico, spending two months at the Centro de Investigación y Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politécnico Nacional (CINVESTAV). There, I could see first-hand the enthusiasm that HELEN was raising in Latin America. In the few months since HELEN’s approval, we have had to refine the project and make it suitable for a contract between the EU and the Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, the coordinating institution of HELEN. However, at last, the contract was signed on 28 July and the project officially started on 1 August.

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Outside of space exploration, it is sometimes assumed that large populations are not interested in science, but the International Linear Collider (ILC) is an accelerator that will collide particles of matter and antimatter to help solve some of the true mysteries of the quantum universe. So how can the public be involved in the design of such a complex facility?

In August, I was among the nearly 700 participants in the 2005 International Linear Collider Physics and Detector Workshop held in Snowmass, Colorado. A number of my colleagues around the world engaged in the global design effort have been studying the technical issues and understanding the limitations of the proposed facility for some years. Now, in addition to the physics, a communications group is focusing on how this facility will affect the public when completed, and how physicists should communicate our work to decision-makers and the public.

In many scientific disciplines, the research community often communicates to the public on laboratory experiments by reporting the benefits after the designs are completed, during the building of the apparatus (if any), and after the research results are assembled. For the ILC project, communication was a high priority from the very beginning. At the ILC workshop, Judy Jackson of the Fermilab Office of Public Affairs and a member of the ILC Communication Group invited Douglas Sarno, head of The Perspectives Group, Inc. of Alexandria, Virginia, to lead a seminar on the public-participation process.

At the seminar, Sarno instructed us on elements of the process: identify members of the public and the “stakeholders”; examine and include the public values; and seek input from all sides when issues arise. He helped us recognize the benefits of this effort in general, and showed how real participation in the process leads to decisions.

There can be a range of participation in this process, from minimal participation where the public is informed only of the general scientific goals and information, to the other end of the spectrum where the final decision on the project implementation is in the hands of the public. The former can be accomplished by reading materials, websites, public lectures and personal contacts, while the latter might additionally require ballots, elections, citizen referendums or chief-executive initiatives. For the ILC, the specifics of the ideal public-participation process lie somewhere in between, and of course input from the public is required to find the right level. When we think about access to materials, land use, ecology and economic impacts due to the resources that are required, large scientific projects are never isolated from the public.

I am now convinced that the ILC project will benefit from a high level of public participation. Because of the very long tradition of international participation in particle-physics research, and the international character of this project, the public-participation process should include all the countries and regions contributing to the project, taking into account the role of local communities. I believe our discussion helped those participating in this seminar gain a broader view of how the decisions concerning the ILC might include a public perspective, independent of region.

However, the ILC is a complex facility and the science that motivates the need for this facility is equally complex, which of course means that decisions are multifaceted and interwoven primarily with physics issues. Nevertheless, a host of other considerations and opportunities will include resource and design issues, communication, organization, a construction timeframe, the world-community effort and – usually before any actions – a decision. The level at which the public is included in this decision process could also be viewed as a complex question.

My experience in public communication leads me to conclude that involving the public early in the design and description of our scientific research, and continuing that involvement, is crucial to an effective partnership between the public and the scientific proponents of our research. Although it is a noble goal to teach particle physics to the public and government leaders, this may not always be necessary. It is important to convey the excitement and the impact of the ILC project on society, and to earnestly listen to the response of policy-makers and members of the public about all of our science. It is vital to gain and sustain the trust of the public, so that the inevitable changes in this research project will be embraced and perhaps even understood as a regular component of fundamental research.

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The scientific articles published in journals under the traditional publishing paradigm are paid for through subscriptions by libraries and individuals, creating barriers for those unable to pay. The ever-increasing cost of the traditional publishing methods means that many libraries in Europe and the US – even the CERN Library, which is supposed to serve international researchers at a centre of excellence – are unable to offer complete coverage of their core subjects.

In 2003 the Berlin Declaration on open access to knowledge in the sciences and the humanities was launched at a meeting organized by the Max Planck Society. Six months later, the first practical actions towards implementing the recommendations of the declaration on an international level were formulated at a meeting held at CERN in May 2004. So far the declaration has been signed by 61 organizations throughout the world, which are now taking concrete measures for its implementation.

An obvious prerequisite for open access is that institutions implement a policy requiring their researchers to deposit a copy of all their published works in an open-access repository. The Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils’ library committee in the UK sponsored such a project, ePubs, with the aim of achieving an archive of the scientific output of CCLRC in the form of journal articles, conference papers, technical reports, e-prints, theses and books, containing the full text where possible.

The feasibility study, carried out from January to March 2003, demonstrated the business need for this service within the organization. The data, going back to the mid-1960s, can be retrieved using the search interface or the many browse indices, which include year, author and journal title. In addition the ePubs system is today indexed by Google and Google Scholar. The scientific content of the system has further led Thomson ISI (the provider of information resources including Web of Knowledge and Science Citation Index) to classify ePubs as a high-quality resource.

The next step is to encourage the researchers – while of course fully respecting their academic freedom – to publish their research articles in open-access journals where a suitable journal exists.
In recent years new journals applying alternative publishing models have appeared in the arena. The problem so far is that none of these journals have a long-term business model. They are sponsored either by a research organization or by other titles in the publisher’s portfolio, or enjoy sponsorship that will not last forever.

Scientific publishing has a price and will continue to have a price, currently mainly covered by academic libraries through subscriptions. Moving to an open-access publishing model should dramatically reduce the global cost for the whole of the academic community. The publication costs should be considered a part of the research cost and the research administrators should budget for these when the research budgets are allocated. However, a change must not take place without safeguarding the peer-review system, which is the guarantor of scientific quality and integrity.

Outside biology and medicine, few journals that support open access are given the same academic credits as the traditional journals. This situation is further reinforced if there is a direct coupling between research funding and the “impact factors” of journals where results are published. However, by taking the risk and publishing important work in new journals that implement the open-access paradigm, the impact factor will automatically be enhanced.

The example of the Journal of High Energy Physics (JHEP) is striking. This relatively new journal was launched by the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste in 1997. Today some studies give it an impact factor close to that of Physical Review Letters in publishing papers on high-energy physics. JHEP was launched ahead of its time and was forced, because of the lack of financial support, to become a subscription journal. However, with the support of the main physics laboratories, it would be possible in the present climate for this successful journal to enter the open-access arena once again.

If a change is wanted, it is up to us. Particle physics cannot change the world alone, but a clear position among our authors and our members of editorial boards will have a strong synergy with our colleagues pulling in the same direction in other fields.

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An estimated 32,000 visitors, from across Europe and beyond, flocked to the laboratory for a day of tours, displays and presentations. The majority of events were in experiment halls and workshops that are normally closed to the public. The last open day was in 1998, and this one attracted so many people that visitors had to wait in long lines at the main events.

Some of the biggest attractions were the huge detectors under construction for the Large Hadron Collider. Such tours helped the visitors gain a sense of the scale of CERN’s work – and even those who already had some notion of CERN were awed by the gigantic detectors, caverns, and tunnels.

Some of the attractions gave visitors a more direct feel for the science and technology behind research at CERN. In one hall, volunteers revealed the strange properties of matter at low temperatures with a miniature train levitated by a superconducting magnet, and demonstrated superfluidity in liquid helium. At the GridCafé, visitors could surf the Web and learn about the networks of computer centres that CERN is helping to organize. At another site, visitors gained hands-on experience assembling their own working cosmic-ray detectors.

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Science and technology play an increasingly important role in our everyday lives, and many of life’s decisions now depend on some sort of scientific or technical knowledge. At the same time, advances in modern science occur quickly as each subject evolves and entirely new subjects are created, so it is often difficult for the general public and for teachers to keep up with scientific discoveries and technological innovations. However, science can be made more accessible and interesting to students, teachers and the public if they are exposed to the exciting ideas and discoveries of the latest research, for example in the field of high-energy particle physics.

Research in particle physics involves advanced technology, such as the large-scale use of superconductivity, precision particle detectors, and state-of-the-art electronics and computing systems. The technology of particle accelerators and detectors can also be applied to medicine and many other areas of science and industry, bringing alive the “appliance of science” to everyday life. Moreover, research has led to advances in information technology, such as the World Wide Web, which can bring about a “high tech” approach to learning about science. Aspects of classical physics, such as electromagnetism, optics and kinematics, can also be given a new lease of life through examples from modern physics, as compared with traditional teaching.

It is now generally agreed that education and awareness in science have to be strengthened in modern society. Indeed during the past few years increasing efforts have been made to improve awareness in the general public – especially young people in schools – of the importance of natural science to everyone. Scientific outreach, which promotes awareness and an appreciation of current research, has become an essential task for the research community and for many scientists.

As a result of an increased awareness of the importance of outreach activities, the European particle-physics community created the European Particle Physics Outreach Group (EPOG) in 1997 to promote outreach activities in particle physics. EPOG members represent the particle-physics communities of the 20 member states of CERN and, more recently, the US, together with the major laboratories of CERN, DESY and INFN. The group has received its mandate from the High Energy Particle Physics (HEPP) division of the European Physical Society (EPS) and the European Committee for Future Accelerators (ECFA). EPOG aims to help make scientific results and discoveries accessible to schools and the general public, and to introduce modern science into the school curricula.

Since its inception, the members of EPOG have both learned from each other and worked together on joint activities. There are many particle physicists active within their own countries who are working on a variety of initiatives, such as the development of new teaching materials, the translation of materials, workshops and masterclasses for both students and teachers, and visits to CERN. This work is often undertaken on a voluntary basis, with little or no official funding, and is dependent on the goodwill of the hardworking contributors and their institutions.

To be really successful though, outreach activities have to be done in a professional manner. Leading scientists who have a specialist knowledge in their subjects can form a powerful team with educators and those familiar with modern techniques in disseminating information to large groups of people. However, as we are competing with television and other leisure pursuits, outreach activities also require proper funding to be able to produce an attractive and engaging image of the natural sciences.

For this reason EPOG, together with ECFA and the EPS HEPP division, has written to a number of science research councils and other funding bodies in various countries to encourage them to recognize scientific outreach as an important and natural part of the research process, and to make financing available to the scientists for professional outreach activities. As we say in the letter, we realize that in some countries the importance of scientific outreach activities has already been recognized and is regarded as a natural part of the research activity. A particularly good example is the awareness in the US, which has resulted in organized funding. In many other countries, however, this is still not the case, and we believe that proper funding is crucial for an increased interest in and awareness of science and technology.

In summary, it is important that outreach activities are taken seriously by the bodies that fund our research. They should be recognized as a natural and logical part of research, and as an important link between research and society. With appropriate funding we could have the opportunity to make our mark and, who knows, to make a real difference.

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On 8 and 9 December 2003, CERN hosted a conference on The Role of Science in the Information Society (RSIS), immediately prior to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). Our efforts to organize this conference were stimulated by a challenge that the UN secretary-general Kofi Annan made to the world scientific community. Last March in the magazine Science, he wrote that “recent advances in information technology, genetics and biotechnology hold extraordinary prospects for individual well-being and humankind as a whole,” but noted that “the way in which scientific endeavours are pursued around the world is marked by clear inequalities.” Annan called on the world’s scientists to work with the UN to extend the benefits of modern science to developing countries.

The open exchange of information, made possible by the World Wide Web and other information technologies, has revolutionized everything from global commerce to how we communicate with friends and family. We live in the age of the “information society”, but without science there would be no such thing; it was basic science that made the underlying technologies possible. Moreover, continuing scientific research is necessary to underpin the future development of the information society – through the sharing of distributed computing resources via the Grid, for example.

The information society has the potential to empower scientists from regions of the world that have not been prominent in recent scientific research, but have valuable human resources and original perspectives on many of the problems we all face. This could create, in the words of Adolf Ogi, special advisor to the Swiss Federal Council on WSIS, “science sans frontières”, making use of what Adama Samassékou, president of WSIS PrepCom, described as “indigenous knowledge”.

Prior to the conference CERN conducted an online forum where scientists, policy makers and stakeholders from around the world reviewed the prospects that developments in science and technology offer for the future of the information society, especially in education, health, environment, economic development and enabling technologies. These issues formed the basis for discussions in five parallel sessions at RSIS, which complemented the plenary sessions. The result is a vision for how information and communication technologies can be applied for the greater benefit of all.

Education is a key element for development. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are vital for learning at all stages of life. Here, south-south co-operation is as important as north-south co-operation. In the area of health, ICTs can help in priority public-health areas by promoting the dissemination of health information, enhancing capacity-building and permitting telemedicine. In the case of environmental issues, planners and decision-makers need accurate, local and timely information – global collaboration is vital to ensure access to appropriate environmental data. To accelerate economic development, education and the dissemination of scientific knowledge and technological know-how through ICTs is a critical component of local and national development. It is important for scientists in all countries to unite to define their local needs in terms of ICT infrastructure and content.

Through these examples in particular, RSIS was able to formulate a vision of how ICTs can be applied to benefit all. The following themes emerged as guidelines and received clear support at RSIS: that fundamental scientific information be made freely available; that the software tools for disseminating this information be also made freely available; that networking infrastructure for distributing this information be established worldwide; that the training of people and equipment to use this information be provided in the host nations; that general education underpins all these goals and is an indispensable basis for the information society.

Several of the objectives defined at RSIS are already making headway. In particular, the WSIS draft Declaration of Principles recognizes that “science has a central role in the development of the information society.” Moreover, the WSIS draft Action Plan aims to promote high-speed Internet connections for all universities and research institutions; the dissemination of knowledge through electronic publishing and peer-to-peer technology; and the efficient collection and preservation of essential scientific data.

In hosting the RSIS conference, CERN took a bold step forward into the policy arena. Since scientific research underpins the past and future development of ICTs and thereby the information society, we scientists have a particular moral responsibility to prevent the “digital divide” from further increasing the gap between rich and poor. Moreover, the information society offers scientists from all parts of the world the opportunity to contribute to the global scientific adventure of which CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is just one example.

It is vital that the global scientific community engages fully in the policy arena, through the development of new and affordable technologies to overcome the digital divide. The scientific community should commit its best efforts to implementing the WSIS Action Plan and to demonstrating real progress by the time of the next WSIS meeting in Tunis in 2005.

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The first HST programme was held in 1998, and since then has continued under the direction of Michelangelo Mangano and Mick Storr from CERN. In addition, Gron Jones from the University of Birmingham in the UK lectures on bubble chambers each year and is a workgroup director.

The increasing interest and success of the programme has helped to expand the number of participants from nine teachers in 1998 to 40 this year. Altogether, 170 teachers from 29 countries have participated over the six years. The programme is advertised by word of mouth, through national organizations and via CERN’s teachers’ website (see “Further reading”). During the past year, a total of 110 teachers applied to participate in the 2003 programme, with applications coming from CERN member states and from Algeria, Bahrain, China, India, Japan, Mongolia, Pakistan, Slovenia and the US. Among the non-member states, teachers from China, Mongolia, Slovenia and the US were then invited to attend HST 2003.

All of the applicants are high-school physics teachers who are selected on the basis of their English-language competency, their activity in scientific organizations and publications, and their skills in the use of a PC. They are selected by a committee, which also looks for a diversity of cultures, teaching experience and educational backgrounds in the screening process.

During the past five years of the HST programme, a group from the US has also joined as part of the Research and Education for Teachers (RET) initiative, sponsored by Northeastern University in Boston. The RET initiative was founded in 1999 by Steve Reucroft at Northeastern and is funded by the US National Science Foundation. The teachers participating under the RET initiative spend additional time with a researcher at CERN to learn about a specific project. This year six teachers attended, not only from the Boston area, but also from Texas and Washington State, and they “shadowed” researchers during the week following the programme.

This year’s programme, HST 2003, included attending lectures hosted by CERN’s summer student programme, special lectures specifically for the HST participants, projects created in small working groups, presentations of completed projects, site visits and cultural interchange events, the highlight of which was a final gathering featuring native culinary dishes.

A “hands on” workgroup was introduced for the first time this year, in which participants built demonstration accelerator models for the classroom. A second group helped in the organization of CERN’s “Ask an expert” website, and two other groups worked on organizing the materials produced by former HST groups and on producing formal lesson plans.

An additional feature in this year’s programme was the Alumni working group. Participants from previous years were invited to CERN and were asked to conduct a survey among their HST colleagues on the usefulness of the programme in their teaching and other related work. From the results of this survey, and from information provided by the returning workgroup members, suggestions were then made to the directors for improvements and for the future direction of the programme.

The HST programme has now ended for another year, but the results, like any teaching endeavour, will only be seen in time. This investment in the future by CERN and by the HST participants has the potential not only to sway popular opinion toward scientific endeavour, but also to sow the seeds for the development of some great future scientists.

Shared experiences

“Participating in the HST programme was a great experience. Being the only physics teacher at my school, I normally don’t have the opportunity to exchange all kinds of information concerning physics. Suddenly, I had the chance to share my experiences with more than 35 physics teachers from more than 20 nationalities!”

Vanessa van Engelen (HST 2002 and HST 2003) – seen here working on a demonstration model of a linear accelerator – teaches physics and mathematics at K A Schoten in Belgium. She also worked at the University of Antwerp for two years on a programme called “Brugproject”.

Broadening horizons

“My experience at CERN as a participant in HST 2001 has been, without doubt, one of the most important and memorable of my life! I am still processing the educational, scientific and cultural ramifications of those seven weeks, and probably will for years to come. For my own personal enjoyment and enrichment, the friendships made with people from other countries, and the opportunity to travel during free time, broadened my cultural horizons as much as the work at CERN itself expanded my view of major research enterprises.”

Alan Kaufman (HST 2001 and RET 2001) – seen here on the far right in the 2001 group photo – teaches at Malden Catholic High School in Malden, Massachusetts, US.

A unique opportunity

“Remarkable. That is the best description I can give to the CERN HST programme. I have been exposed to the most advanced physics laboratory in the world. The opportunity of being lectured by outstanding researchers in the field of particle physics is an experience that I will always tell my students in the years to come. I knew that this workshop would be a unique opportunity for me, but it has, in many ways, exceeded my expectations.”

Jesus Hernandez (HST 2003) – seen here during the workshop on building accelerator demonstration models – is a physics teacher at Lawrence High School, Lawrence, Massachusetts, US. Born in Venezuela, he has been living in the US for 12 years, and has a Masters degree in Physical Chemistry of Polymers. He decided to become a teacher when he learned about the Massachusetts Institute for New Teachers programme.

Transferring knowledge

“My feeling about the HST programme is that it must continue to be mainly addressed to young or inexperienced teachers, for three main reasons. It is a powerful way of transferring knowledge as it puts secondary school teachers and scientists in direct contact in real research surroundings; it addresses the most modern areas of physics, which are extremely interesting and challenging for everyone, and above all for youngsters of the 21st century; and it is a clever way of motivating teachers to transmit their knowledge and enthusiasm to their students.”

Anabela Bastos Tibúrcio Martins (HST 2003) from Portugal – seen here, on the left, with Margarita Lorenzo Cimadevila from Spain – has a PhD in Science Education, with In-service Science Teacher Training, at the Royal Danish School of Educational Studies, Copenhagen, Denmark.

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The proceedings of the 10th school, which was held from 29 July – 9 August 2002, will be published this year by AIP.

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JACoW came into being following the Web publication of the proceedings of the fifth European Particle Accelerator Conference (EPAC’96) when Ilan Ben-Zvi, chair of the US Particle Accelerator Conference (PAC’99) Program Commit- tee, proposed the idea of a joint PAC/EPAC website for the publication of the proceedings. Since then it has pioneered electronic publications in the accelerator field. The CYCLOTRONS, DIPAC, ICALEPCS and LINAC series of conferences have all joined the collaboration, with more in the pipeline. While the number of published proceedings now stands at 17, the project for scanning PAC conference proceedings from the pre-electronic era is rapidly swelling this number.

Because JACoW is not simply a list of URLs to other websites, each conference series is required to deliver a full set of files prepared in portable document format (PDF), according to JACoW specifications. A unique feature of the JACoW site is the custom interface that allows full Boolean searches in the metadata (the hidden fields in the PDF files), in addition to the standard full text search, across all papers presented at all major accelerator conferences.

The JACoW collaboration is now turning its attention to the database infrastructure requirements to run the scientific programmes of conferences – covering all actions from submission of abstracts through to submission of papers, with automated procedures for the preparation of files for publication on the Internet.

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The procedure for submitting a paper to JCAP is simple and straightforward, and is identical to that of JHEP. Software performs all the steps in the editorial procedure: the submission of papers, their assignment to the appropriate editors, the review by referees, the contacts between editors, referees and the Executive Office, the revision, proofreading and publication of papers, and the administration of the journal. Editors, referees and authors have personal Web pages, where they run the editorial procedure or check the status of the papers. The editorial work is carried out by the Executive Office based at SISSA. Accepted papers are then published on the IOPP website.

For the first year JCAP will be free for everyone, and will then be made available at a low subscription rate. In the case of JHEP, recent changes with the introduction of a low-cost subscription for institutions, mean that the costs of the journal will be spread over all countries that can contribute to its publication. ICTP pays a modest sum to ensure that developing countries get access to JHEP for free.

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Christine admits, however, that only time will tell just how deeply the whole programme has influenced her. Other students say that the experience at CERN helped determine what course their future studies will take; some have decided that they are more interested in theory than in experiment, while others say that the work they did over the summer has reaffirmed their love of the field.

Assessing the impact

Just as the students have to determine how their experiences in the programme have affected them, so the long-term impact of the programme itself must be assessed. Just how important are educational and research programmes of this sort, and what should their future be? It is often difficult to make these decisions when the programmes are still new, but now that the REU programme has reached maturity, we can begin to get a clearer sense of its value.

CERN has had a summer programme for undergraduate students for more than 40 years, but US students have only been able to participate since the REU programme was formed. Historically, only CERN member states have had the opportunity to send their students to experience what it’s actually like to work in a physics research group at the laboratory. In 1997, however, Stephen Reucroft, an experimental physicist at Northeastern University, sent a proposal to the US National Science Foundation (NSF) for funding to send US students to the summer student programme at CERN. Independently, Homer Neal of the University of Michigan made a similar proposal, and the NSF suggested that the two join forces. The result was the programme that exists today. CERN agreed to take 10 US undergraduates from the REU programme, starting in 1998.

After three years of running a joint programme, Reucroft and Neal split the programme in two and started sending 10 students each. The CERN summer student programme places half, and Northeastern University and the University of Michigan place the remainder. Additional funding has been provided by the Ford Motor Company, which now supports five students.

Participants in the REU programme are chosen from colleges all over the US, from small institutions as well as the larger, better-known universities. A committee of physicists chooses students with a strong academic record, an interest in physics, demonstrable creativity and a desire to take advantage of CERN’s culturally diverse environment. The social and cultural life of the programme is as important as the research and educational elements.

REU organizers brief successful candidates about what they can expect, and encourage them to network before they leave for Switzerland. There is a four-day orientation meeting for students in the US, and a programme administrator accompanies them to CERN and gives them a tour of the laboratory’s facilities. After they have settled in, the REU administration keeps in touch with the students throughout the summer. One of the programme’s coordinators, Artemis Egloff, says: “We try to keep a good balance between helping them and smothering them with too much attention. They like to be independent and we encourage them.”

While at CERN, the US summer students work with an assigned research group, supervised by a physicist who works with them and assigns them various tasks, allowing them to see what work as a particle physicist is like. Students perform research, take measurements, write computer programs, papers and reports, learn to use specialized software, build and test equipment, and inevitably do manual work. In short, they are expected to cover the entire range of activities that makes up experimental particle physics.

Students are expected to learn new skills on the fly – things that they don’t learn in the classroom. Their work is often disorganized and their days frequently unstructured, but as Reucroft points out, this is what research is often like. Students are often surprised at how much mundane manual labour is involved in science, such as connecting cables, and moving and stacking lead bricks.

Although hands-on work forms a large part of the activities at CERN, the students also attend lectures in experimental and theoretical physics, and in accelerator and detector techniques. Andrew Essin, a student at Reed College, Oregon, explains: “There were lectures on experimental high-energy physics, which allowed me to get a view of more than just mathematical formalism and phenomenology, to see the nitty-gritty of creating and detecting particles, accumulating and processing vast quantities of data and all that good stuff that I might miss if I simply concentrated on theoretical studies.” The CERN lectures focus on the detailed techniques of particle physics in both experiment and theory. Since the students are a mixture of potential experimentalists and theorists, the lecture material benefits all of them. In ordinary classroom lectures, most of what is taught about physics is historical information, neatly packaged.

The lectures often cover material that is too new to be taught to US physics undergraduates. As a consequence, some of the students find the lectures difficult. One, however, said that even the material he did not understand will be valuable to him eventually – either he will process it once it has had time to settle, or else the fact that he has already been exposed to it will make him feel more comfortable next time he comes across it.

International culture

The international atmosphere at CERN makes it an ideal place for US students to learn how scientists from different countries bring different approaches to physics. Students and advisors not only work together, but also get to know each other socially. Many returning students have remarked on the spirit of tolerance that reigns in CERN’s multicultural setting, with people choosing to pass over potentially awkward social situations rather than giving them too much weight or taking offence at unintended slights. Inevitably, this attitude is carried over into the work environment. The students learn how people in other countries are educated, and discover the strengths and weaknesses in the US system, as well as in others. It is one of the aims of the REU programme that as the students develop, they will keep in mind what they have learned, and perhaps bring good ideas back to the US system.

The vast majority of undergraduates participating in the REU programme have gone on to pursue PhDs in the sciences, including various aspects of physics, biophysics and aeronautical engineering. One became a Rhodes Scholar, and another went into business, although she changed her mind after a year and went back to physics because her experience at CERN was so good. One spent time developing computer simulations at a financial institution and is pursuing a Masters degree in architecture at MIT. He hopes to enter into a physics PhD programme after he has completed his Masters.

One of the main challenges of the REU programme is placing students with advisors. Even the best-intentioned researchers can find themselves unexpectedly busy by the time the summer arrives, and it is not uncommon for students to find themselves working largely independently. However, Reucroft says that experience has shown that if an advisor can motivate a student and give them a start, they frequently end up working happily and productively on their own.

Like the CERN summer student programme, the REU programme has a great potential impact. It helps students decide whether or not to pursue an advanced degree in physics. By ensuring that they are well informed about the nature of research before they embark on their career, it helps students find out whether experimental or theoretical physics – or even no physics at all – is right for them. It also attracts young people to science, exposing them to the demands and rewards of working at the leading edge of experimental physics, showing them how experiment and theory work together, and how particle physics impacts other branches of science. Perhaps most importantly, students also learn skills that are helpful in whatever career they choose to pursue, such as programming, problem solving and working with people from different backgrounds. All of the students who have participated in this programme say that they would recommend it to their friends. And it is safe to say that the majority will go on to be good ambassadors for science and for international collaboration, wherever their future careers take them.

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Now in its fourth year of operation, First Tuesday Suisse romande was founded to provide a forum for entrepreneurs, investors and all those interested in new technology. Its Geneva meetings are held on the first Tuesday of each month, and take the form of a few short presentations followed by an informal networking session. CERN’s director for technology transfer and scientific computing, Hans Hoffmann, plans to host more First Tuesday events at CERN. “The Large Hadron Collider project,” he explains, “is a goldmine of technological innovation, ideally suited for the kind of networking events First Tuesday holds.” This first event was broadcast on the Web to ensure a wider international audience could benefit.

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Young accelerator physicists converged on the Portuguese coastal town of Sesimbra in September for the 2002 CERN Accelerator School (CAS) introductory course on particle accelerators. Organized by CAS together with the Laboratório de Instrumentação e Física Experimental de Partículas of Lisbon (LIP), the course covered the basics of accelerator and particle physics, concluding with a series of lectures entitled “Putting it all together”. Thirteen European specialists, chosen for their teaching experience, made up the lecture team, while CERN and LIP shared the organizational responsibilities.

Students came from a range of countries – 13 from Germany, and 12 each from Italy and the UK. France, Canada and Russia each sent three students, and two came from South Korea. There were also students from Belgium, Brazil, Iran, Israel, the Netherlands and Poland, as well as 25 from CERN who were too international to declare a specific nationality, but who no doubt came from Europe. More than 60% of the students were under 35, and about the same percentage had a Masters degree, while fewer than 10% had PhDs. Two-thirds came from accelerator and public sector laboratories, with the remainder made up largely of people from universities.

CAS organizes one such introductory course every two years, interspersed with more advanced courses on specialist technology. It has organized more than 40 courses on accelerator physics and technology since its formation in 1983. Its aim is to train physicists and engineers who design, construct and operate accelerators in laboratories, universities, hospitals and in industry worldwide. Venues are in the European countries that contribute to CERN, and are usually at hotels with conference facilities, where bargain rates are to be had outside the tourist season. Typical attendance is between 50 and 80 students. Each new school produces one or two volumes of proceedings, and these have become the principal body of reference material for the field.

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The first International Committee on Future Accelerators (ICFA) regional instrumentation school was held in June at the new instrumentation centre at Istanbul Technical University, Turkey, marking a new departure for this traditional series of schools. ICFA instrumentation schools are normally held every two years to provide education in the field of nuclear instrumentation for students of all nationalities, with the particular aim of giving students from developing countries first-hand access to information and equipment that may not be available in their home institutes. The last school was held in 2001 at South Africa’s national accelerator centre near Cape Town, and 2002 would usually have been an off-year.

A new ICFA initiative, however, aims to establish regional schools that will have the same aims as the main schools, but will use local teachers and target a regional audience. The Istanbul school’s 29 lecturers came from high-energy physics institutes around the world, selected by the ICFA instrumentation panel under the chairmanship of Albert-Heinrich Walenta of Siegen University, Germany. Laboratory demonstrators spent several months before the school preparing experiments on a range of subjects including medical imaging, high-precision spectroscopy and silicon detector applications, so that the 91 students could gain real hands-on experience. Many of the institutes that provided practical demonstrations have donated equipment so that the school can be repeated with local tutors for students from Turkey and surrounding countries.

The Istanbul school was sponsored by the Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey, the US National Science Foundation and Department of Energy, the University of Siegen, Fermilab and ICFA. A second regional school organized along similar lines will be held in November at the University of Michoacan in Mexico.

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Applications will be considered by the CERN Fellowship Selection Committee at its meeting on 28 January 2003. An application must consist of a completed application form, on which “CERN-Asia Programme” should be written; three separate reference letters; and a curriculum vitae that includes a list of scientific publications and any other information regarding the quality of the candidate. Applications, references and any other information must be provided in English only.

Application forms can be obtained from: Recruitment Service, CERN, Human Resources Division, 1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland. Email Recruitment.Service@cern.ch, or fax +41 22 767 2750. The closing date for applications is 20 November 2002.

The CERN-Asia Fellows and Associates Programme also offers a few short-term Associateship positions to scientists under 40 years of age who are on a leave of absence from their institute. These are open either to scientists who are nationals of the East, Southeast and South Asian countries who wish to spend a fraction of the year at CERN, or to researchers at CERN who are nationals of a CERN member state and wish to spend a fraction of the year at a Japanese laboratory.

* Candidates are accepted from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, the Laos Republic, Malaysia, the Maldives, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.

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Up to now JHEP has been financed by SISSA with contributions from Italy’s Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, CERN and, more recently, other laboratories and universities. With the journal’s growing size and importance, however, this is no longer viable and from January 2003 JHEP will be available to institutions for an annual subscription of £600/$900. The 1997-2002 archive will remain free. See http://www.iop.org/journals/jhep.

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Belorussian, Catalan, Taiwanese, Afrikaans, Japanese, Persian, Russian, Mandarin, Hebrew, Italian, Tagalog, Croatian, Malayalam, Serbian, German, Korean, Swedish, Cantonese, Turkish, Arabic, Romanian, Gujarati, Welsh, Georgian, Lëtzebuergesch…

These are just some of the more than 60 languages spoken by collaborators on Fermilab’s CDF and D0 experiments, as determined by a quick and utterly unscientific survey in mid-July. A poll of collaborations at CERN, DESY, KEK or any of the world’s particle physics laboratories would reveal a comparable population of polyglots – men and women from every corner of the world who have come together to explore the nature of matter and energy, space and time. Particle physics is truly one community, without borders.

Moreover, when it comes to advances in research at the world’s handful of particle physics laboratories, we are all in this together, for better or worse. When CERN gets a cold, Fermilab sneezes, and vice versa. At the moment, the particle physics world is watching as Fermilab struggles to fulfil the promise of Run II at the Tevatron; and CERN’s current LHC budget and schedule challenges have strong implications for the future of every physics laboratory. On a brighter note, a physics discovery at laboratory A inevitably builds upon work at laboratories B and C. It all comes together in one worldwide particle physics enterprise.

Yet while particle physics collaborations are international, particle physics communication is not. For the most part, each region and each laboratory communicates for itself, with little coordination on issues, strategies, resources and messages. Does a press release from one laboratory (my own, for example) trumpeting a new experimental result give more than a nod to the work at other laboratories that made the result possible? It’s doubtful. With difficult news to break, does one laboratory seek support from the others? Provide a clue that it’s coming? Not likely. In planning communication strategies, do communicators coordinate their efforts? Probably not. Global Communication Network? Forget it. When it comes to communication, every laboratory is an island.

Standard model of communication

It is high time particle physics communication caught up with the reality of particle physics collaboration. To achieve the kind of future that particle physicists everywhere would like for their field, the Standard Model of Physics Communication will have to change.

In December 2001, communicators from six of the world’s physics laboratories met at DESY in Hamburg to form a worldwide collaboration for physics communication. The immediate stimulus for the meeting was a message from Petra Folkerts, communication director at DESY, to Fermilab on 12 September 2001:

“I want to say that we are all with you in these days. I myself can’t find the right words to express my feelings after this terrible 11 September. From my point of view now it’s absolutely important that we outreach people around the world will meet as soon as possible, not only to figure out how to help international particle physics stay alive, but how we, in our field of activity, can set visible footprints for the significance of peaceful collaboration across all borders.”

The message gave impetus to a project that communicators at particle physics laboratories had pondered for some time, and led to the formation of an international laboratory communication council. Membership has grown to 10 laboratories from five countries.

Initial actions of the council include the development of a particle physics image bank comprising the best photographs and graphic resources from the world’s laboratories, appropriately captioned and credited – one-stop shopping for reporters, physicists, students, teachers and policy makers who need outstanding graphics to tell the particle physics story. The image bank will live on a new website – interactions.org – devoted not to the support of any one laboratory or region, but to all. Advance coordination of press releases among member laboratories has already begun, not only to enhance the recognition of discoveries wherever they occur, but also to foster the recognition of the interconnected nature of advances in particle physics throughout the world. The collaboration plans staff exchanges, workshops and panels at international physics conferences.

The time has passed when one laboratory or one sector of the particle physics field could profit at the expense of another. Progress at every laboratory and in every region depends on the success of particle physics everywhere. As the early American experimental physicist Benjamin Franklin told his colonial colleagues in 1776: “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall hang separately.” The Quark Wars are over. The laboratory communication council represents a recognition of this reality by the world’s particle physics communicators. As Folkerts stressed in her message of September 2001, it is a collaborative endeavour.

Whether they speak Gujarati or Georgian, Swedish or Romanian, Tagalog or the Queen’s English, I hope that particle physicists everywhere will support this worldwide venture in physics communication.

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It was in 1962, when Victor Weisskopf was CERN director-general, that the laboratory’s summer student programme began. CERN’s administrative services division introduced the scheme as an offshoot of the fellows and visitors programme. The idea was to awaken the interest of undergraduates in CERN’s activities by offering them the chance of hands-on experience during their long summer vacation. Member-state delegations were asked to sound out potentially interested institutions in their home countries, and work began at CERN to identify activities for the incoming students. The idea met with some scepticism at first about the usefulness of inexperienced youngsters joining experiments for just a few weeks, but enough places were found for the scheme to begin. Some 500 applications were received in the first year, and 70 students were selected.

Applicants were sorted according to their declared interests, and CERN team leaders made their selections on the basis of recommendations from the students’ home institutes. Those selected came to CERN for 6-8 weeks, with travel and a daily stipend paid. Geneva University offered to house some of them in its student accommodation, while others were housed in the laboratory’s temporary barracks, which finally closed for business in the mid-1990s.

Many of the newcomers worked hard during their stay, covering for holiday absences. Others, however, found themselves with time on their hands. Because of this, the summer students’ lecture programme was started. This soon developed into a major activity, with physicists of Weisskopf’s calibre regularly giving lectures. Today, it is not unusual to see more experienced physicists sitting next to their undergraduate counterparts in the laboratory’s auditorium, brushing up on the basics.

For many alumni of the summer student programme, their stay at CERN was the first step on the ladder of a successful career in physics. David Plane, for example, was a summer student in the first year of the programme, and went on to become spokesman of the OPAL collaboration that studied collisions in CERN’s electron-positron collider, LEP. Distinguished Norwegian physicist Egil Lillestøl is another who can trace his career back to the programme.

Over the years, the summer student programme has flourished. In 2002, some 150 students are expected at the laboratory, and member-state students will be joined by colleagues from the US and Israel, funded by their home countries. In 1998, the programme was joined by a parallel initiative for high-school teachers, sharing the same lecture programme and bringing teachers together to work with physicists, exchanging ideas and developing new teaching materials. Information about these programmes is available at http://humanresources.web.cern.ch/ for the summer students programme and http://teachers.web.cern.ch/ for the teachers programme. The students’ view can be found at http://summerstudents.web.cern.ch/summerstudents/.

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The Rio de Janeiro-based Centro Latinoamericano de Física (CLAF) celebrated its 40th anniversary on 26 March. Founded under the auspices of UNESCO following the CERN model, CLAF was established to promote research in physics and provide postgraduate training to young physicists in the region. The physicists Juan José Giambiagi of Argentina, José Leite Lopes of Brazil and Marcos Moshinsky of Mexico were instrumental in its creation. Today, CLAF has 13 member states.

The celebrations took the form of a week-long international meeting in Rio that focused on CLAF’s international collaborations and looked at the long-term future of the centre. Speakers included Faheem Hussain of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, which has been involved in a programme of joint PhD work with Latin American institutions since 1997. Vladimir Kadyshevsky, director of the Dubna-based Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, and Pavel Bogoliubov, who is responsible for the institute’s international relations, spoke of a 4-year-old programme to train Latin American graduate students in Russia, and of the 25 MeV microtron built at Dubna to form the basis of a proposed regional laboratory in Havana, Cuba. CERN’s Juan Antonio Rubio, who is responsible for the laboratory’s education and technology transfer activity as well as links with Latin America, spoke of the agreement signed in 2001 between CERN and CLAF to organize a joint biennial school in Latin America. Staying with education, Ramón Pascual, former rector of the Universidad Autónoma in Barcelona, signed an agreement at the meeting allowing Latin American students to take part in the European Joint Universities Accelerator School.

Research was discussed by Ana María Cetto, coordinator of the Latin American Scientific Networks, who spoke of a project to foster greater Latin American use of observatories in Chile and the possibility of extending the facilities at Mount Chacaltaya in Bolivia.

Looking to the future, CLAF support for the second CERN-CLAF school to be held in Mexico in 2003 was confirmed at the meeting, and CLAF announced the creation of a biennial school in medical physics and synchrotron radiation. The centre is also promoting improvements in postgraduate education through the ICTP programme and by coordinating a regional Masters degree programme. In research, CLAF will assume a stronger role in coordinating Latin American efforts in medical physics, condensed-matter physics and optics. It will also examine the possibility of building a proton accelerator for cancer treatment. The meeting concluded with a request to the governments of Latin America to increase their percentage of GDP spending on science and technology.

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For more than 40 years, CERN’s library has collaborated with institutes and universities worldwide to collect carefully documented results of scientific research. Initially, this prodigious output was all on paper, and the CERN library regularly received papers from scientists at these institutes and universities via mailing lists. Because of its visibility, CERN received far more of this material than most institutes, and a major attraction of a visit to CERN was to peruse the latest pre-prints on view in the library.

With the advent of electronic publishing, more and more documents became accessible online. To complete the picture, documents still received on paper were scanned to offer Web access. Today this practice is diminishing as grey literature (library-speak for pre-prints and other material not published by a publishing house) in science, particularly in physics, is more widely available in electronic form.

Saving time and money

Having distributed documents for some years both on paper and electronically, many institutes have now chosen to use only the electronic route. This offers undeniable advantages: cost savings; quick and easy distribution; full text availability at a distance; the possibility of enriching the catalogue; and cheap online access, for example. The virtual library has become a reality. Paper documents are increasingly rare, and authors generally prefer to submit their papers electronically. Most major research centres also offer Web access to their documents and have ceased to send out paper copies via mailing lists, encouraging other scientific libraries and the researchers themselves to consult their Web pages and databases.

Faced with this evolution, library acquisition policies must be reconsidered and adapted to the new standards of scientific information dissemination.

The problem in this new context is the multiple consultation of databases. To find a document, a researcher must consult many resources, which is a time-consuming and tedious task with often dubious results. To facilitate searching and to offer users a single search interface, the CERN library chose to import as many electronic documents as possible. In 1999 the information support team introduced its Uploader program, which allows automatic importation of bibliographic records extracted from several sources. This has led to three main advantages: papers can now be found directly from institutes’ sites; the number of documents received from different research centres has increased; and new databases have been explored.

From any database or Web page, Uploader formats the records and adapts them to the cataloguing format used at CERN – Machine Readable Cataloguing (MARC). The program also updates existing records, searching for duplicates before importation. Which databases to explore was a difficult choice. First, the websites of all institutes from which CERN still received paper documents were consulted to see if the institutes offered the same documents online. This showed that more or less all institutes offer their publications on the Web in some form.

This study also revealed that CERN received, via mailing lists, only a third of the documents available on the Web. There are two possible explanations for this: perhaps for economic reasons research centres make a selection of which documents to send out; and mailing lists are not always kept up to date. The need for automatic importation of these documents from websites became obvious, but there were technical problems to overcome.

Diverse sources

Sources can be divided into two types: Web pages and online databases, which are handled differently. Medium-sized research centres and information sources that do not offer online databases generally offer Web pages presenting the work of their researchers (usually theses). Searching can be primitive if no real search engine is implemented. The number of documents is also often limited. This means that manual submission of the full text of the documents is the most efficient way of acquiring the documents. The constant evolution of Web pages also argues against automatic importation. Since alerting services for such sites are rare, the CERN library set up its own alert system for some 80 information sources at 30 institutes. This tells the librarians when the available information changes, allowing them to acquire new documents as they become available.

Online databases often allow multicriteria searching. In contrast to Web pages, however, it is usually impossible to put an alert on the search results. This means that for online databases that do not offer an alert system, a different approach is needed. The method adopted by the CERN library is a monthly or annual search.

The Uploader program helps CERN’s librarians to manage an effective document supply service, but the huge diversity of online information sources means that there is no shortage of work for the librarians. Document structure can vary from page to page, or even within the same page. In the majority of cases the pages are therefore presented as free text with no common structure. With virtually no constraints imposed by databases, no common import protocol is possible, and material must be input manually. Inconsistencies can arise when Web pages are not handled rigorously, causing confusion in bibliographic cataloguing – most frequently for authors’ names. Some databases allow external submission of documents and bibliographies, which results in many irregularities and loss of homogeneity in the presentation of the documents. Information can be presented in multiple forms. Pre-print numbers, for example, can appear as IUAP-00-xxx (number not yet attributed), CERN-TH-2K-1 (instead of CERN-TH-2000-1) or MPS15600 (instead of MPS-2000-156). Vital pieces of information, such as collaboration lists, are sometimes missing. All of these problems require traditional librarianship skills. CERN’s library aims to offer a coherent and homogeneous database, validation and improved metadata. Knowledge databases recognize retrievable work and provide links to relevant articles on the Web, while a computer program appends and corrects bibliographic data, keeping manual checking to a minimum.

Electronic advantage

There is no doubt that electronic uploading saves a considerable amount of time compared with manual submission. It has also greatly increased the number of documents made accessible and available at CERN. However, source databases must be carefully selected. The richer the database, the more time-consuming the procedure becomes. In addition, the volatility of Web pages requires close follow-up. Automatic importation has taken over from manual submission, but specialist monitoring remains essential.

The electronic approach was initially investigated at CERN on a test basis, to ascertain technical feasibility and to judge what the advantages would be. Since then, its use has spread and the laboratory has reached agreements with Cornell, Fermilab and several other information sources. Today, more than 90% of the material entering the CERN library database is imported or created electronically. Of this, only 8% comes from CERN.

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Occasionally, however, the interactions recorded by the detector are particularly simple, especially for collision scenarios like those at CERN’s LEP collider, which from 1989 to 2001 threw high-energy beams of electrons and positrons together.

Electrons and positrons, unlike protons, are truly elementary and contain no constituents (at least as far as we know). They are also particle and antiparticle of each other, and they can mutually annihilate to produce another particle-antiparticle pair, such as two oppositely charged muons. These rare but simple processes provide a direct window into the most basic interactions of nature.

The other tool that can be brought to bear is what CERN researcher Erik Johansson calls “topology”. The computers’ pattern-recognition programs can reveal regularities in the way the produced particles emerge. These patterns reflect the elementary particle interactions in a direct way.

If an underlying scheme is not clear, information quickly becomes baffling and incomprehensible. An example is the subway system of a large city like London or Paris. Street maps of big cities are fine for finding one’s way around on foot. They also usually show where the underground stations are, but this does not make clear how the lines are arranged, so it is not easy to plan an underground journey from such a map.

The key is to use a different map, in which the streets have been thrown away and the station dots are connected by different-coloured lines. Immediately, everything becomes clear – to get from A to B, take the red line and transfer at C onto the blue line. The detailed paths taken by the underground lines are not of vital importance to the traveller, only their general direction and interconnections, so such maps are often schematic. This simplification is a great help to understanding.

So it is with elementary particles. The most versatile elementary particles are the quarks, of which there are six varieties, or “flavours”, arranged in three pairs – up and down; strange and charmed; and beauty (or bottom) and top. Quarks are (as far as we know) the ultimate layer in the structure of matter. Substances are made up in turn of molecules, then atoms, then electrons and nuclei, the last being composed of protons and neutrons, and these in turn being built of quarks.

Quarks are different from all of the other constituents of matter. Molecules can be broken into atoms, atoms into electrons and nuclei, and nuclei into protons and neutrons. We know that protons and neutrons are built of quarks, but quarks cannot be isolated. Although we can see that protons or neutrons each contain three quarks, under ordinary conditions, quarks cannot exist on their own as free particles. How, then, can we explore them?

Mapping quark jets

When an electron and a positron annihilate, one possibility is for them to create a quark-antiquark pair (in fact the electron and positron first annihilate into a neutral Z boson, which within 10^_24 s materializes into the quark-antiquark pair.) However, because quarks and antiquarks cannot exist as free particles, the emergent quark-antiquark pair manifests itself as two narrow sprays (“jets”) of subnuclear particles. These jets, the progeny of the produced quarks, fly off back-to-back, each jet confined around the direction of the parent quark. Mapping these jets thus reveals how the parent quarks were produced.

An electron and a positron can also produce other quark and antiquark arrangements, both with and without accompanying gluons (the particles that transmit the forces between quarks). Each quark-gluon arrangement produces a characteristic jet pattern. For example, a quark-antiquark pair that is accompanied by a single gluon will produce three jets of subnuclear particles.

These jet patterns, particularly when emphasized by the use of colour, are the quark-gluon physics equivalent of the subway map.

It is rather like monitoring an underground/subway/metro system by watching how the passengers emerge above ground. A burst of passengers means that a train has recently stopped underground.

Johansson’s idea is to select LEP events and prepare them in a way that appeals to 15- to 18-year-old students. He uses electron-positron interactions recorded by the Delphi detector at LEP and presented via a special “Hands-on CERN” Web site. The Web site also contains introductory material and explanations, together with supplementary material about subjects such as particles and their interactions, particle accelerators and Nobel Prizes. The interactions have been “cleaned up” to delete information that is only of interest to physics researchers and optimized for Internet access.

From these displays, students can quickly see how nature works at the most fundamental level. The displays show basic information, such as collision energy, the various particles produced and their energy and momentum. Analysing these collisions does not require any knowledge of quantum chromodynamics or any other exotic concept. Simple billiard-ball kinematics, with maybe a pinch of relativity, is all that is needed.

In this way, students all over the world can access frontier research data, but nothing can substitute for a visit to a major accelerator laboratory. Only in this way can students fully appreciate what large and complex instruments are needed to probe the smallest constituents of matter. Special programmes of lectures and study are regularly arranged for Swedish students by the Swedish Research Council secretariat at CERN along with Swedish CERN researchers. During a short stay at CERN, students get first-hand experience of how science works. “That day I thought I found the Higgs boson,” remarked one recent visitor.

Following a suggestion from Johannson, an extra dimension was recently added to a visit during which students from the UK joined their Swedish counterparts at CERN – at a time in their careers that is useful for future networking. These special programmes aim to rectify the lack of exposure to modern physics in many of the school curricula.

Further information

A keyhole to the birth of time

Building on Johansson’s original idea, CERN’s James Gillies and Richard Jacobsson produced an educational CD-ROM physics analysis package for schools. Particle Physics – a Keyhole to the Birth of Time contains the same real data and analysis tools as the “Hands-on CERN” Web site and comes complete with a comprehensive and visually attractive tutorial package. The authors’ goal is to provide a stand-alone product that teachers can use in class without detailed prior knowledge of particle physics. Bielefeld computer scientist Olaf Lenz designed an easily navigable structure and award-winning American cartoonist Nina Paley created the characters – Malard Decoy and Phyllis Ducque – who act as guides through the content of the CD-ROM. The package is available free of charge to schoolteachers on request to the authors at CERN (e-mail James Gillies or Richard Jacobsson.

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A news magazine is about developments. As scientific developments have unfolded over time, the many issues of this magazine have helped to reveal the history of particle physics.

The rate of particle physics discoveries, which was tumultuous during most of the 20th century, has slowed down. In the final years of the 20th century our knowledge and understanding reached a plateau in the Standard Model (few physicists share Murray Gell-Mann’s passion for coining imaginative words where they matter).

From this plateau, the view has widened. High energy means high temperature, so that particle physics and astrophysics, and even cosmology, find themselves more and more on common ground, tracking the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang in a still-hot universe. Not that long ago it would have been inconceivable for particle physicists to be interested in what happens in the sky. Now the latest news on microwave background radiation, supernovae, black holes and gamma-ray bursters is followed enthusiastically at major particle physics meetings. Astrowatch is one of the most popular features of this magazine.

Technological stampede

The rate of pure particle physics breakthroughs may have slowed temporarily, but an accompanying rush of technological innovation continues and even accelerates. To seek the elusive particle signatures of tomorrow, large experiments involving thousands of ingenious researchers scattered across the globe are today exploiting new materials and pushing innovative techniques to achieve what seemed impossible only yesterday.

The World Wide Web is just one example. Take telecommunications, microelectronics, cryogenics etc. At no time in history has technology been advancing so rapidly. Fundamental science is the spring from which many of these developments flow. Physicswatch monitors this evolution.

Visiting CERN recently was Mike Lazaridis, the president and co-chief executive of Research in Motion of Canada. He is a leading designer and manufacturer of wireless communications equipment. As a great believer in the importance of fundamental physics for society, Lazaridis is personally funding the Perimeter Institute in Southwestern Ontario – an institute dedicated to theoretical physics.

Lazaridis said: “Theoretical physics gave rise to virtually all of the technological advances of present-day society. From lasers to computers and from cellphones to magnetic resonance imaging, the road to today’s technological developments was based on yesterday’s groundbreaking theoretical physics.”

A continuing theme at CERN is international collaboration. The universal culture of physics brings people and nations together, surmounting political and other barriers. CERN was the first example of scientific international collaboration in post-war Europe. As well as furthering research in its member states, CERN helped to catalyse new contacts further afield, where contact was difficult because of politics or recent history. Even in the depths of the Cold War, there was contact between scientists at CERN and their counterparts in the Soviet Union.

Dwarfs and giants

The Geneva laboratory has gone on to become an even wider stage. Building the detectors for CERN’s proton antiproton collider in the late 1970s and early 1980s demanded a major international effort, mainly in Europe. However, even this is being dwarfed by the operations now under way worldwide to construct the Large Hadron Collider and its mighty detectors. While G8 powers and lesser giants naturally play an important role, being part of this effort is a source of great pride for nations that would otherwise not be able to participate in such prestigious research.

Today’s Standard Model may be a plateau of understanding, but it is not the ultimate summit of knowledge. Particle physics is poised to enter the next act in a drama for which the script has yet to be written. To understand a universe of unfathomable complexity will demand fresh insight and imagination.

The new theories…cannot even be explained adequately in words at all.

Paul Dirac

Describing the ultimate physics is a continual challenge. Quantum mechanics pioneer Paul Dirac pointed out: “The new theories…cannot even be explained adequately in words at all.” And that was back in 1930.

Fundamental science attracts keen minds.Working with these intellects is rewarding, but demanding. Articles written for a wide audience are not always welcomed by specialists who quickly point to the verbal inadequacies anticipated by Dirac. In constructing the intellectual cathedral of science, attributing individual recognition is particularly difficult. The world’s great lasting monuments may have been designed by far-sighted architects, but they were built by protracted teamwork.

Words aid comprehension. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) wrote in Novum Organum: “The ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding.” In a field where terminology is not always adopted for its transparency (quark fragmentation means exactly the opposite of what it implies), CERN Courier is widely appreciated. Its decoding of physics jargon is particularly welcomed by the world’s media. Above all, it delights in its use of that supremely functional instrument – the English language – which remains highly resilient to the abuse heaped upon it.

From news editor to new editor

Starting with this issue, James Gillies takes over as editor of CERN Courier, succeeding Gordon Fraser, who has been a major contributor to the magazine since his arrival at CERN in 1977 and its official editor since 1986.

The new editor is no newcomer to physics or physics writing. He began his career as a graduate student at Oxford working on CERN’s EMC experiment in the mid-1980s. Moving on to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL), he then became increasingly interested in communicating science, working for a summer with the BBC World Service Science Unit; setting up a regular local radio science spot; and producing public information material for RAL.

In 1993 he left research to become the head of science at the British Council in Paris. After managing the council’s bilateral programme of scientific visits, exchanges, bursaries and cultural events for two years, he returned to CERN in 1995 as a science writer, and was soon installed as news editor of CERN Courier. He co-wrote, with Robert Cailliau of CERN, How the Web was Born – a history of the World Wide Web, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2000.

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CERN Courier magazine has come a long way since it was established as CERN’s house journal more than 40 years ago in 1958.

Soon after the magazine’s launch, it began to reflect particle physics developments worldwide, as well as what was happening at CERN. In 1975 a major world meeting of particle physics laboratory directors underlined the importance of the journal in serving the worldwide particle physics community, and the decision was taken to “go international”, with official correspondents in major research centres feeding in news, and with special arrangements for distribution in certain countries. Hence the paradox of a CERN magazine that is distributed all over the world.

This network of international correspondents is still in place and it is the lifeblood of the magazine. Another important aspect of CERN Courier is the distribution network that exists to get the magazine to its readers.

From printer to reader

CERN Courier is published 10 times a year in parallel English and French editions (the official languages for all important CERN documents). For each issue around 18,000 copies of the English edition and 5500 copies of the French edition are printed and distributed worldwide.

With a total of 23,500 copies, CERN Courier is read far beyond the particle physics community, which accounts for about half of the total. Reader surveys have shown that the additional readership is mainly scientist administrators, scientists in other fields and students, all of whom want to keep up with developments in basic physics without wanting to get too involved with details.

In the 1990s it became clear that the magazine could not continue to evolve while being published using CERN’s limited in-house resources. In 1998, responsibility for the production and distribution of the magazine passed to the Institute of Physics Publishing (IOP), in Bristol, England, which now publishes the magazine on CERN’s behalf. The editor at CERN retains responsibility for all of the editorial content, but the 1998 transition was a turning point in the magazine’s development.

A complex route

The task of distributing each edition of CERN Courier is both complex and challenging. The total print run of each issue weighs around 3 tonnes and has to be sent all over the world. Since IOP entered into a publishing partnership with CERN, it has been improving the distribution performance to shorten the time it takes for the journal to reach its readers. The magazine is available free of charge, so this distribution also has to be as economical as possible.

Readers can receive CERN Courier in two ways:

• via internal distribution at major research centres – to receive the magazine regularly, please check with your local distribution centre;
• via subscription (10,900 named subscribers, normally based at more isolated locations, receive individually mailed and addressed copies) – to become a regular reader via this route, see http://cerncourier. com/subscribe.html.

Coming off the press, each edition of CERN Courier splits into three separate routes:

• within the UK, where copies leaving he printer for individual readers in Europe and the rest of the world are polythene-wrapped and labelled for onward mailing;
• onwards to the US, where it is mailed and despatched to addresses in North America. For these readers, copies travel by truck from the printer to a freight handler, who books it onto a flight to New York. From there it goes on another truck to Illinois to be either enveloped and mailed, or packed in boxes and despatched to major research centres;
• bulk deliveries to major distribution centres in Europe and further afield, including Beijing, CERN, Hamburg, Frascati, Moscow, Seoul and 16 other destinations.

Plans for improvement

The Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in the UK, DESY in Hamburg and INFN in Frascati play a special role in the distribution of CERN Courier within their respective countries. Because of the logistics involved, RAL receives copies direct from the printer, while the other two centres currently receive their copies via Belgium. An initiative is already under way to establish closer links with these major distribution centres and to enhance the distribution performance further. CERN has a particularly heavy distribution load, sending copies all over the world as well as distributing them within the laboratory.

By the time the magazine arrives on a reader’s desk or is taken from a central pick-up point, its journey will have included rides on trucks, ferries and aeroplanes. It will have been scanned by customs officials and handled by international and national shippers, not to mention being sorted and distributed within major centres.

During 2001 we were able to reduce delivery times by, on average, four days for copies sent to individually mailed addresses. In a similar way, 4-10 days have been cut for those copies travelling to the US. There is still room for improvement, not least because of the rapidly changing world scene for postal and courier services. Soon we will implement a much-needed overhaul of some of the address lists. Readers who receive copies mailed from Europe should soon expect to receive a letter and a reply coupon as well as an issue of the magazine.

There are key people at the major distribution points who ensure that you receive your copy of CERN Courier each month. These are low-profile yet vitally important roles that ensure that mailing lists are up to date and that centres receive enough copies.

We are in contact with most of these key people, but not all. The magazine’s distribution network has in many cases developed by itself. A closer collaboration will help to improve the distribution of the magazine continuously, so if you have a role in this, please contact me.

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For the first time since its inception nearly 40 years ago, the European School of High-Energy Physics was held in Switzerland at Beatenberg in the Bernese Oberland. Running from 26 August to 8 September, it attracted 95 students from 30 countries. This year’s event was organized in association with the University of Bern, with Klaus Pretzl as school director. Funds for students from former Soviet Union countries came from the INTAS international association.

These schools have become a major event in the particle physics calendar. The tradition began in 1962 with a one-week course at St Cergue, Switzerland, for young students and senior physicists using the emulsion technique at CERN. The 1963 school also took place at St Cergue, but with the emphasis on physics rather than on techniques.

In 1964 the courses moved outside Switzerland and the programme was extended to include bubble chamber as well as emulsion techniques. By 1965 the focus had switched to teaching theoretical elementary particle physics to young experimentalists, where it has remained ever since.

International participation widened in 1970 when the school was held in Finland, in collaboration with the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), which is based in Dubna, near Moscow. The following year, JINR organized a school in Bulgaria, in collaboration with CERN, after which biennial joint schools continued up to and including 1991, when the last JINR-CERN school has held in the Crimea in the USSR.

With the changed political scene in Europe, schools continued to be organized jointly every year, but under the title European School for High-Energy Physics, and with a four-year cycle consisting of three annual schools in CERN member states and the fourth in a JINR member state.

In 1993 the first such school took place, appropriately, in Zakopane, Poland, a member state of both CERN and JINR. Since then the school has been held in Sorrento, Italy (1994); Dubna, Russia (1995); Carry-le-Rouet, France (1996); Menstrup, Denmark (1997); St. Andrews, Scotland (1998); Bratislava, Slovakia (1999); Caramulo, Portugal (2000); and Beatenberg, Switzerland (2001).

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The first school of high-energy physics organized jointly by CERN and CLAF (Centro latinoamericano de física), Rio de Janeiro was held in Itacuruçá, Brazil on 6-19 May and it hopefully marked the opening of a close collaboration between CERN and physicists in Latin America.

This new series of biennial schools is modelled on the school of physics organized by CERN and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna near Moscow, which was, and continues to be, instrumental in fostering relations between CERN and former socialist countries.

Some 71 students attended the inaugural CERN-CLAF school, 56 of them coming from eight Latin-American countries (17 from Mexico, 16 from Brazil, 11 from Argentina and 12 from other countries), 13 from Europe and two from the US.

The Latin-American students were centrally funded for all of their travel, board and lodging, while other students were funded by their home institutes. Financial support came from CERN, Spain, France, Portugal and Italy, in addition to Brazil, Mexico and CLAF.

The students were accommodated in twin and triple rooms with students from different countries and regions sharing the same room. This was an important factor contributing to the success of the school.

The 11 lecturers came from Europe, Latin America and the US. The lectures, which were in English, were complemented by daily discussion sessions led by seven physicists from Latin America. The students presented their work in an enthusiastic poster session.

A survey carried out at the end of the school revealed that:

* the school was an undisputed success;

* the level of the students was high, and all profited from the lectures, in spite of minor language problems;

* the mixing of nationalities was important, and students were convinced that contact with other students and with lecturers of international reputation would be significant for their future careers as well as in building up an inter-regional network of young physicists;

* the contacts made at the school were also believed to be important in strengthening the collaboration between individuals and institutions inside Latin America;

* there was a unanimous wish for the school to be continued, and the Mexican physics community and authorities expressed their willingness to host the next event in 2003.

At the conclusion of the school, a meeting with representatives from CERN, several Latin-American countries (Argentina, Brazil and Mexico) and funding agencies discussed strategies for continued and possibly permanent support for the CERN-CLAF School and for strengthening the collaboration between Latin-American countries and CERN. The following actions, mainly in the context of CERN’s LHC project, were agreed:

* to continue the biennial CERN-CLAF School;

* to promote the existing and potential collaborations by developing ad hoc protocols between Latin-American funding agencies and CERN, to ensure a stable financial framework for the long timespans of current high-energy physics activities;

* CERN could grant Latin-American groups access to facilities and other services, and give them priority for recuperating surplus equipment;

* CERN will continue to investigate additional funding from the European Union, UNESCO and CERN member states with the aim of increasing the exchange of scientists and to enlarge the duration and number of positions for Latin-American scientists, engineers and trainees at CERN;

* CERN can help by investigating possibilities of scientific, technical, industrial and public education co-operation with Latin America;

* opportunities and conditions under which some Latin-American countries could become CERN observer states would be investigated.

A joint CERN Latin-American steering committee would be set up with the goal of preparing a plan of action. The draft plan will be submitted, for approval, to the authorities of CERN, CLAF and the Latin-American funding agencies. It will also be submitted by CERN’s director general to those CERN European member states willing to co-operate, as well as to the European Union and UNESCO. Spain and Portugal have expressed an intention of submitting the plan to the next Ibero-American meeting of presidents and prime ministers which is planned for 2002.

A student’s viewpoint

As one of the students at the first school of high-energy physics organized jointly by CERN and CLAF, here are my personal impressions of the school, which I believe represent the feelings of the other students.

The school’s structure was basically the same as the traditional European school of high-energy physics: two weeks of excellent courses, discussion sessions and free time for amusement, in physics or other leisure activities.

The European school is designed mainly to teach theoretical physics to experimental physicists. The CERN-CLAF School was wisely adapted to the Latin-American reality – young theorists were also accepted and lectures on experimental physics were added. In addition, students from the US and Europe participated.

The lectures motivated our curiosity and provided material for discussion during the free time and the sessions.

The poster session was a very good occasion to show our work and to learn what others are doing. We had about three hours of stimulating exchange of information and many of us came back during
the free time to continue the discussions.

The mixture of young theorists and experimentalists was also very fruitful. The students had different physics backgrounds, so the discussions were enriched by different viewpoints.

The students from Europe and the US, with their different culture and experience in high-energy physics, were well integrated. Their participation was also important to encourage discussion in English.

For all of these reasons, the CERN-CLAF school of high-energy physics seems to be mandatory. It will certainly become instrumental in introducing the Latin-American community to the experimental particle physics world.

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Every two years since 1987 the ICFA Instrumentation Panel, as an activity of the International Committee for Future Accelerators, has organized an international school of instrumentation. The main aim of the school is to promote interest in nuclear instrumentation among graduate students and young researchers from developing countries. ICFA2001, which was held from 25 March to 8 April, was hosted by the National Accelerator Centre in Faure, near Cape Town, South Africa. It was the first such school to be held on the African continent.

ICFA2001 was devoted to the physics and technologies of instrumentation in elementary particle physics, with a slant towards devices and applications that generate and process image-like information from radiation detectors on a quantum-by-quantum basis. The basic research and spin-offs from the application of such instrumentation to high-energy physics, medicine, microbiology and nuclear sciences, as well as research and development for non-destructive testing in industry, attest to the importance of this vital and continuously growing field.

Instrumentation is usually developed in university laboratories with relatively low investment costs, but access to the latest technology is possible by means of co-operative ventures with other institutes, and in particular with large international research centres and industry. Access to instrumentation technology is a key tenet for the ICFA Instrumentation Panel. At ICFA2001, the organizers, speakers and instructors joined with Kobus Lawrie, Naomi Haasbroek and the rest of the National Accelerator Centre staff in an effort not only to provide access to instrumentation technology and stimulate development in experimental particle physics instrumentation, but also to reinforce the “Science for Africa” motto of South Africa’s National Accelerator Centre.

As far as content and structure were concerned, the main feature of this school – unique to high-energy physics – was its direct, hands-on approach. Students attended morning lectures, after which there were afternoon laboratory sessions lasting four to six hours. Lecture topics this year were wide-ranging, including introductory courses on the physics of particle detection, gaseous detectors, particle identification, calorimetry, silicon detectors, signal processing and data acquisition, as well as several review talks devoted to new technologies, applications in medical physics, molecular biology, astrophysics and data acquisition.

The laboratory classes were state-of-the-art instrumentation sessions, led by researchers in the fields in question from universities and research labs all over the world. In some cases they had simply packed up their current research project and shipped it to South Africa, so that students could get a true taste of what is currently of interest.

Students worked in small groups to carry out selected experimental techniques, using multiwire proportional chambers; drift chambers; silicon detectors; microstrip gas chambers; analogue and digital circuits; and data acquisition. They also worked with specific applications in medical imaging, cosmic rays and protein crystallography.

Satisfied students

A measure of its success is that the anonymous student evaluations that were collected at the end of the school overwhelmingly reflected the enthusiasm and satisfaction of the students. As was the case in previous schools, the students placed a strong emphasis on the importance of the laboratory sessions. The labs provided many students with their first hands-on experience of nuclear instrumentation, and offered those students who were well versed in issues of instrumentation a varied and challenging “playground”.

The school also provided a stimulating human experience for its students, some of whom had never attended a scientific meeting abroad, and for whom it was their first excursion outside their home country.

Those involved in running the school also found it rewarding, owing to the energy and enthusiasm that was generated by all who took part. One student even asked if she could skip lunch in order to return to the lab to finish a measurement from the day before. In another instance, Michel Spiro was bombarded with more than 20 questions during his evening public lecture on astrophysics and cosmology. A number of lecturers and instructors are continuing the discussions that they began with students at the school, with a view to potential scientific collaboration.

The decision to hold the school in Africa was made in an attempt to make an impact on young African researchers and postgraduate students who were interested in nuclear instrumentation. Previous workshops had attracted, on average, only one or two African students.

ICFA2001 achieved this goal and was a resounding success. Of the 96 students in the school, 45 were African, and they represented 12 different countries. Not only was the students’ level of preparation high, but all brought with them a remarkable enthusiasm for the subject. Many had a clear understanding of the instrumentation needs faced by their home countries, which were, in general, related to applications such as nuclear medicine and ambient protection (as in the case of a student from Sierra Leone who was working on radioactive waste management). Yet it was clear that such pragmatism is balanced by a common sentiment that involvement in basic research might be a way to slow down the “brain drain” from their home countries.

Follow-up programme

To promote “Science for Africa” further, ICFA has launched a new programme this year that provides a follow-up to the school, by means of a number of summer student placements offered by CERN and DESY (and Fermilab is expected to participate next year). Suitable candidates were easily identified among the students of the school, and all studentships have been accepted.

It was also clear that South Africa might be able to act as a catalyst for science, and, in particular, nuclear physics, at a regional level, providing higher education to students from countries such as Kenya, Zambia and Mozambique. African students who distinguished themselves came not only from South Africa (primarily from the National Accelerator Centre) but also from Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania.

With “Science for Africa” as its motto, the National Accelerator Centre has made its objectives clear. Indeed, the centre’s leading role in African science was apparent throughout the school, as was the significant support given by local scientific authorities.

Small but active

The facilities at the National Accelerator Centre are good, despite the cashflow crisis in the past couple of years that has triggered a downsizing of its workforce. The centre has overcome that hurdle and has a stable workforce of about 200 staff. Its experimental physics group is small but active and includes several young postgraduates who are working on MScs and PhDs. Significant effort is being made to bridge the age gap and remedy racial disparity.

With these resources the centre carries out several programmes. Its radiation therapy programme includes impressive facilities for neutron and proton therapy with which hundreds of patients have been treated, while its production of isotopes for medical applications brings in additional income for the centre through their sale on both the national and the international markets. The centre also runs a nuclear physics programme, including the use of a spectrometer to study nuclear reactions, and a new state-of-the-art “gamma ball” (Afrodite), which has attracted foreign experimentalists from such laboratories as INFN-Milano, Italy; and another on material science, using a nuclear microprobe on a 6 MV Van de Graaff accelerator.

Activities are based on a large separated sector cyclotron that accelerates protons to energies of 200 MeV, and heavier particles to much higher energies. Two smaller cyclotrons are also used to provide intense beams of light ions, polarized light ions or heavy ions for injection into the large cyclotron. The beam time from the cyclotron is shared equally among the three main programmes, with some beam allocated specifically to the experimental physics community at weekends, when users come in from several South African universities and from abroad.

ICFA2001 was the eighth edition of the school. Previous editions took place at ICTP Trieste, Italy, in 1987, 1989 and 1991; in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1990; in Bombay, India, in 1993; in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 1995; in Léon, Guanajuato, Mexico, in 1997; and in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1999.

The ICFA2001 instrumentation school was jointly supported by the National Research Foundation, DACST, ESCAM and NESCA of South Africa, and by CERN, DESY, INFN, ICTP, IN2P3, RAL, DOE and NSF.

The post First African school for instrumentation appeared first on CERN Courier.

CERN’s major contributions to culture range wider than the discovery of the neutral current of the weak interaction, or the carriers of the weak nuclear force. CERN has shown how international collaboration in science works. Different national attitudes complement and reinforce each other, but this needs to be experienced first.

The vitality of the more than 7000 researchers using CERN’s facilities creates a continuous exchange of ideas and people from all over the world. In addition to the advances in frontier science, the technology needed to carry out this research is often years ahead of what industry can provide.

Every year more than 600 new students, scientists and engineers participate in the various schemes over periods ranging from three months to three years. They all benefit from their experience of working in an international collaboration at the forefront of science and/or technology. Returning to their home institutes, they provide a seedbed for new developments.

A significant fraction (about 10%) of CERN’s personnel budget is spent on various fellow, associate and student programmes. As well as promoting the exchange of knowledge between scientists and engineers from all over the world, these programmes are vital elements in the high-level research and technology training of scientists from CERN’s 20 European member states and, to a lesser extent, from other nations too.

The programmes are popular and there are many applications from eager candidates. Their success is largely due to the strict criteria applied in the selection procedures.

The fellowship programme aims to provide advanced training to young CERN member state university-level postgraduates (mostly with doctorates) in a research or technical domain.

Catering for a different need is the associates programme, which offers opportunities for established scientists and engineers from both member states and elsewhere to spend some time – typically a year – at CERN, on leave from their research, teaching, managerial or administrative duties. During their stay at CERN, associates are on detachment from their home institute.

Students and trainees

Fulfilling another requirement are the various student programmes (summer students, technical students and doctoral students) for undergraduates and postgraduates in CERN member states. Doctoral and technical student programmes are currently restricted to candidates from applied sciences and engineering, but there is a move to extend this.

In the popular summer student programme, with a tradition going back to CERN’s early years, some 150 students selected each year from many times that number of applications participate in CERN’s research programme under the supervision of CERN scientists, and they also attend a series of specially arranged lectures. Many leading scientists have benefited from this scheme early in their careers.

The trainee programme is new. Numerous member states have shown a very strong interest in using CERN as a training ground in a wide area of hi-tech activities. In the past five years there has been a rapid development of special programmes that are based on bilateral co-operation agreements.

Member states Austria, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden provide additional funds for the student programmes, while Israel, a CERN observer state, contributes to the associate programme. For another observer state, Japan, since 1996 part of the interest in the nation’s financial contribution to the construction of the new LHC accelerator has been used to help to fund a few fellows and short-term associates.

Member states Spain and Portugal provide grants that cover the insurance and living costs of the young people specializing in engineering and technology. An additional CERN contribution offsets the relatively high cost of living in the Geneva area.

At a regional level, about 25 young engineers and technicians spend some time at CERN within the framework of a special French Rhone_Alps Region programme. A few graduates and postgraduates from the Italian Piedmont are funded by the regional Association for the Development of Science and Technology. It is hoped that these special programmes will be integrated into the wider schemes and expanded.

Together, the various student and short-term visitor schemes transfer specialized knowledge and expertise, and make CERN’s mission and work in particle physics and further afield known to a wider public.

The post CERN experience benefits students and specialists appeared first on CERN Courier.

An 18 minute video entitled The ATLAS Experiment has been declared overall winner of the 2000 MIF-Sciences Scientific Film Box Office contest.

The award-winning film explains how more than 1800 physicists from 35 countries are working on the ATLAS detector for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. It gives a glimpse behind the scenes of building a technological edifice that measures 45 m long and 22 m high, and is made up of millions of components with a precision of one-hundredth of a millimetre.

Will all of the physicists who teamed up to construct this apparatus eventually be able to answer such fundamental questions as: Where does mass come from? Why does the universe have so little antimatter? Is there an underlying theory?

Members of the ATLAS experiment’s Education/Outreach Committee developed the concept of a film for both the general public and students that would describe the physics motivations, the process by which 1800 people from all over the world go about building such a complex detector, and the accelerator that would both deliver and collide beams of protons.

Committee members prepared a detailed outline for the film and hired a professional director from the Netherlands. At various stages the participating members and ATLAS management evaluated progress and provided input. Funding came from nine countries: the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US.

The film, which combines live footage and animation, was designed to be translated into many languages, so there are two sound tracks – one with ambient sounds and the other for the narration (provided by each country). The various language versions will be linked from the ATLAS site in the near future and eventually collected onto a DVD. The film is currently available as a videotape, as a CD-ROM and on the Web.

The post ATLAS becomes a film star appeared first on CERN Courier.

On-line publication is made possible through the complete automation of editorial work by means of a software robot, thereby reducing costs and speeding up the procedure. The Journal of High Energy Physics is available via eight nodes that are updated in real time using innovative software. Special multimedia facilities have been added to enhance the Web possibilities.

An electronic journal

With the extensive use of the World Wide Web by the international community of physicists, the Journal of High Energy Physics (JHEP) aims to exploit the new media and take advantage of their innovative qualities – rapid communication, broad diffusion and low cost.

The journal’s initial focus was on theoretical high-energy physics and has now been extended to encompass experimental high-energy physics as well. However, the same model (and the same software robot) will be used to create similar journals in the same field, such as a review journal, as well as in other fields.

As far as research and development are concerned, a new project, begun in February 2000, is now devoted to the development of new-generation software that will be applied to new journals and services. It is directed by Loriano Bonora and Marco Fabbrichesi, JHEP’s creator, and it is financed by the European Union.

The journal has grown enormously, now publishing 12 000 pages a year and still growing. As a consequence of the complexity of operating JHEP and other publications, it is now time to give JHEP a more professional structure. To do so, Hector Rubinstein joins Loriano Bonora and Daniele Amati in the JHEP directorate, thus adding his wide professional experience in academic publishing and emphasizing the international character of the enterprise already witnessed in the editorial and advisory boards.

Moreover, it seems necessary to spread the costs to all users. A typical week sees the journal consulted by 10 000 users from all over the world. At present the costs are paid by the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste and the INFN, and sponsorship is being requested from major research centres. CERN has already accepted the financial and moral commitment.

In parallel with the directorate, JHEP’s distinguished advisory board lays down the scientific policy of the journal. An editorial board of leading scientists in a large number of fields acts as mediator between authors and referees. Selected by an electronic robot, they either referee or assign referees. Unless unforeseen problems develop, they are the final arbiters. If problems arise, they consult the higher boards via the Executive Office.

The running of the journal is assigned to the executive office at SISSA, which is in charge of supervising the functioning of the journal in collaboration with the editorial board. The executive office monitors the journal daily and intervenes in the event of any problems that may arise. Local system support is provided at each one of the journal nodes.

The software robot

The JHEP software performs all of the steps in the editorial procedure: submission of papers; assignment to appropriate editors; review by referees; management of the contacts between editors, referees and the executive office; revision, proofreading and publication of papers; and administration of the journal.

Accepted papers are made available on the JHEP Web sites to all interested readers. Editors, referees and authors have their personal Web pages, where they run the editorial procedure or check the status of the papers. The software comprises three major families of scripts. All interfaces with the robot are via e-mail or accessible from a browser (optimized for Netscape Navigator 3.0 or later).

The first family of scripts allows the interaction between JHEP and the scientific community and deals with the publication of papers. The submission procedure is also part of this family of programs. The second script family runs the interface among editors, between editors and referees, and between editors and authors. The third family is in charge of the administration of the journal.

In addition to these scripts, there is a program called Harold that is dedicated to updating in real time the journal’s network of nodes throughout the world (see below). The robot carries out many of the menial tasks that make the running of a scientific journal expensive and slow. This program has been implemented in successive steps and is now fully working. Further upgrades will follow as new possibilities are explored and realized.

Multimedia facilities have been added to enhance the possibilities offered by the Web: powerful search engines replace the table of contents and indexes used by paper journals; and papers, published in three different formats (PDF, PS, DVI), are in hypertext, with links within the articles themselves and to the papers quoted in the references.

To ensure reliability and fast connections, JHEP exists as a network of nodes throughout the world.

All nodes are equivalent. The program Harold has been developed to keep them synchronized. All events taking place at any of the nodes are notified to the other nodes within a matter of minutes. On notification, the nodes execute the corresponding action and are updated accordingly. All transactions are encrypted in order to protect the data.

The post HEP electronic publishing takes off appeared first on CERN Courier.

The Olympic Games are held up as the most international of all events. It is accepted that the athletes “compete for their nation” and make up “national teams”. These are (unofficially) ranked according to how many medals they win, and the “most successful nations” show up. This success is taken as a benchmark of the effectiveness of training, the mood of a nation, and so on. One is tempted to compare this to the situation in science. Here the credo is: science is international. But is this really true?

There is of course a compelling reason why science has to be international. The goal of science is to find a complete and provable description of our world. This implies that the description has to be independent of the views of individuals. It must not depend on the national, ethnic, cultural or family background of a scientist or consider any other subjective aspect – science has to be, among other things, international. Only in this way can it develop a universal idea of the world.

Nevertheless, national feelings are real for a large majority, as the Olympic Games show. Does this mean that scientists have reached a higher state of collaboration and culture?

The answer is a clear yes. Excellent proof of this is CERN. Anyone who has worked there will confirm that one loses one’s nationality. In his book The Joy of Insight (Basic Books 1991), Victor Weisskopf, who served as CERN’s director-general from 1961 until 1965, wrote: “I insisted that anyone who entered CERN be regarded as a European and no longer a citizen of some nation.”

Very little attention is paid to physicists’ nationality – only the quality of their scientific work counts. This is unavoidable because the ever-increasing complexity and size of physics projects surpasses individual abilities. The collaboration, imposed initially by the requirements of the project, becomes a habit and finally a conviction. This mechanism works equally well in all parts of the world.

However, we also know that this conviction is challenged. Nations try to gauge the performance of science as they do with other activities – sport, art, the economy, and so on.

This leads to a dilemma. On the one hand, Nobel prizes are counted, evaluations by national agencies carried out, publications counted and their impact assessed. Are national science administrators swimming against the tide of international science?

Here a particular role is played by scientific journals. The visibility and quality of national journals have been and are still taken as a measure of national scientific excellence. Such ambitions lead, however, to deplorable situations, such as favouring the work of one nation to the detriment of others.

The only solution to this problem is that publishing culture has to follow that of science itself and abandon nationalism. Several competing international journals should be maintained in the interest of science. However, since national feelings are so strong and not all scientists can work at CERN, it may be necessary to install an international “ombudsboard” to referee what goes on and pass judgement as necessary.

A frequently formulated hope is that national cultures too could embrace scientific internationalism. This feeling has developed as contacts between scientists improve due to cheaper travel and improved communications.

Knowing other people helps to overcome the feelings of insecurity and personal insufficiency for which ardent nationalism naturally compensates. The need for exchange is the key – it is no accident that the World Wide Web was invented at CERN and not by Microsoft.

The post The internationalism of science as an ideal appeared first on CERN Courier.

CERN always has plenty of visitors, but never more so than in the summer, when the itinerant population is boosted by several hundred students from CERN member states and further afield. CERN’s Summer Student Programme offers undergraduate students in physics, computing and engineering a unique opportunity to join in the day-to-day work of research teams participating in experiments at CERN.

Beyond the outstanding first-class scientific value of their stay, the students find working in a multidisciplinary and multicultural environment an extremely enriching experience – an opportunity to make valuable and long lasting contacts with other students and scientists from all over Europe.

In addition to the work with the experimental teams, summer students attend a series of lectures specially prepared for them. Scientists from around the world share their knowledge about a range of topics in the fields of theoretical and experimental particle physics and related technologies.

Victor Weisskopf, field theory pioneer and CERN director-general in 1961-1965, had a particular interest in education. During his mandate as director-general, he gave a series of introductory lectures on particle physics (maintaining that “the best way to get a basic understanding of anything is to teach it”). For many years after he left CERN, Weisskopf returned every summer to address an eager audience. These lectures also developed into a book, Concepts of Particle Physics (two volumes), written with Kurt Gottfried.

Many generations of CERN summer student alumni vividly recall a relaxed Weisskopf recounting anecdotes about the early days of quantum mechanics. Among them is Melissa Franklin of Harvard (CERN summer student 1977), who lectured this year on “Classic experiments”. Sadly, Weisskopf seldom returns to CERN, but the tradition lives on.

The post Summer students benefit from CERN visit appeared first on CERN Courier.

Every two years, Europe, Japan, Russia and the US collaborate to organize a Joint Accelerator School, giving accelerator physicists and engineers from each region an opportunity to meet experts from most of the world’s accelerator laboratories. This year it was Russia’s turn to host the school. It chose an unusual setting – on board a river boat sailing from St Petersburg to Dubna and Moscow along the system of inland waterways that link the mouth of the Neva with the Volga.

The title of the school was JAS2000: High Quality Beams, and an international team of more than 20 lecturers addressed the many effects that limit the intensity, luminosity and brilliance of proton and electron beams in both linear and circular machines. Parallel afternoon sessions on insertion and crossing region design, space charge and beam quality control for linear colliders allowed students to concentrate on a specialist topic of their choice. The school attracted more than 70 students, including 20 from outside Russia.

The boat proved to be an ideal environment for uninterrupted study. Nevertheless, participants still had a chance to visit two great Russian cities on a voyage that also passed through two large lakes – Ladoga and Onega. Historic sites en route included the monastery on Valaam Island, the famous church at Kizhi constructed entirely out of timber and the delightful town of Yaroslavl.

For CERN’s Accelerator School (CAS) this was one of three events in a crowded millennium year calendar. In March, CAS and GSI Darmstadt organized a specialist course on radiofrequency engineering at the Lufthansa Training Center, Seeheim, near Darmstadt, and in October there will be a course entitled Introduction to Accelerator Physics, held in Loutraki, near Athens. This has been organized with the help of the Institute of Accelerating Systems and Applications in Athens and the University of Athens. The Loutraki school is designed to be of particular interest to those participating in the SESAME initiative, which will provide a synchrotron light source for eastern Mediterranean countries. Parallel courses will deal with synchrotron light sources, linacs, and muon and neutrino factories.

In addition, the CAS course, Particle Accelerators for Medicine and Industry, will be held at Pruhonice, near Prague, on 9-17 May 2001.

Details of these courses will be posted on the Web site at “https://cas.web.cern.ch”.

The post Accelerator schools set sail appeared first on CERN Courier.

“I have filled 10 quarto 120-page record books and three filing cabinet drawers with such notes. These have been willed to the Rutherford Collection at the Alexander Turnbull Library, the historic arm of the National Library of New Zealand. The master manuscript refers to these notes. The biography also draws extensively on the local newspapers of the day, Rutherford family correspondence and the official and unofficial records of the relevant organizations.

“In such a major research, sometimes every paragraph, sentence or even phrase requires a reference or further comment. This is too detailed for most users. In this book only the main points will be referenced due to space considerations.

“A master copy, which includes material edited out of the printed version, will be hand annotated with full references and comments on the sources of every statement. Two years after publication date, thus allowing for the incorporation of any new information which may come to light as a result of the book, I will donate a copy of this master manuscript to public repositories in each country with a Rutherford association. This will make the details more freely accessible to interested people.

“There will be one condition imposed, that for 10 years after the deposition date any person can copy no more than 10 pages per day. After that period copying will be as per the usual custom for the particular archive. During that 10 year period I will invite people seriously interested in Rutherford to purchase their own copy from AAS Publications, PO Box 31-035, Christchurch, New Zealand. Purchasers will be encouraged to donate their copy to any other appropriate public repository.”

Repositories of Master Copies:
Alexander Turnbull Library of the National Library of New Zealand Nelson Provincial Museum Cambridge University Library (Manuscripts) National Library of Scotland Center for the History of Science, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm Musée Curie (France) McGill University Library (Archives) P L Kapitza Institute for Physical Problems (Moscow) American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library National Library of Australia

The post Painstaking research appeared first on CERN Courier.

The year is 2005, CERN’s LHC collider is running, and discoveries are on the horizon. Pete Bruecken and Jeff Dilks, high school teachers from Iowa, are telling students about their experiences of building detectors and carrying out beam tests at CERN. The students are even more interested when they learn that they will be analysing some new data from the LHC experiments that their teachers had a part in building.

As part of the QuarkNet programme, hundreds of teachers with similar experiences will have their students doing the first analyses of LHC datasets. These will be small datasets, filtered to be useful to students. This is an exciting opportunity because no-one else has analysed these data yet. There is always the possibility that the students will be part of an important discovery; the odds may be small but the potential is enormous. Furthermore, they will be communicating with students in other classrooms around the world, comparing notes about their findings and viewing the action at CERN, live via the Web. They will also be learning basic physics. Ultimately QuarkNet will reach 720 teachers and over 100 000 students.

Teachers Bruecken and Dilks were among 24 teachers who joined QuarkNet in 1999. After a week at Fermilab in June, learning about particle physics, they participated in seven weeks of research, which was funded by QuarkNet. Together with Professor John Hauptman at Iowa State University, Bruecken and Dilts constructed an incredibly fast detector, which, essentially, could collect energy and spatial information at the speed of light and then empty the calorimeter of signal in a nanosecond. Hauptman said, “The amazing thing about this module is that it was largely built on zero funds… and QuarkNet was essential for its success.”

The local newspaper reported, “Just imagine it: high school students watching cutting-edge particle physics experiments, analysing data and collaborating with scientists. How’s that for science homework?” QuarkNet plans to fly a number of students to CERN for the first physics runs so that they can report back on the events.

Introductory physics is present in much of high-energy physics. For students, concepts such as conservation of momentum and energy are ubiquitous. Particle physicists use these concepts as they study the fundamentals of nature. Why not let students explore classical physics through the lens of particle physics? Wouldn’t this bring much more interest to their studies?

QuarkNet seeks to create such a lens. The project’s main goal is to involve high school students and teachers in the ATLAS and CMS experiments as well as in Run 2 of the CDF and DØ experiments at Fermilab. A year ago, Keith Baker (Hampton University), Marge Bardeen (Fermilab), Michael Barnett (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) and Randy Ruchti (University of Notre Dame) organized the project. To carry out the programme, QuarkNet has hired four teachers/educators to run the summer activities, assist the centres in the development of their programmes and help monitor the success of the project. QuarkNet is supported by the US National Science Foundation, the US Department of Energy and the participating universities and laboratories. While QuarkNet began in the US, there have been expressions of strong interest from CERN and from other European countries.

Teachers aboard experiments

QuarkNet invites teachers to join groups of particle physics experimenters (their mentors) for an eight-week summer research assignment. This immersion in research gives the teachers time to become familiar with the experiments and provides them with an overview of particle physics. Physicists, from a university or laboratory, recruit the teachers from nearby schools. The institution’s needs and the teacher’s personal skills determine the research assignment. QuarkNet provides a stipend (a salary) for these teachers and, for those who leave home for extended periods of time, living expenses.

During the academic year, teachers invite their students into the project by integrating some aspect of their summer work into their physics curriculum. This does not mean that students must study the Standard Model. Students could study the conservation of momentum via analysis of data from a collider event. They could also discover the vital role of computers in modern science by examining thousands of events: a task that is impossible to do by hand. They may consider protons moving through the LHC as they investigate the force that magnetic fields exert upon moving, charged particles. Each of these, and other curriculum ideas, will be developed by the teachers and QuarkNet staff as the programme matures.

During the school year, after their summer research assignment, QuarkNet teachers invite 10 other teachers from their area into the project. These associate teachers participate in a three-week institute, which is planned and hosted by the QuarkNet teachers and their local physicist mentors. Here they explore particle physics research and the classroom application of classical physics topics to the world of particle physics.

QuarkNet centres

This group of 12 teachers and at least two physicist mentors comprise a QuarkNet centre. During the summer of 1999, QuarkNet established 12 centres at universities and laboratories from California to Massachusetts, and in many places in between.

Teachers participated in a one-week orientation workshop at Fermilab in preparation for the summer research assignments. During the week, the teachers attended talks on everything from accelerators to cosmology, and enjoyed tours of CDF and DØ along with explanations of upgrades for Tevatron Run II. They worked with hand held cosmic-ray detectors brought from Notre Dame, and engaged in computer activities using Fermilab Run I data, computer simulations and material from the Web. The workshop featured time for teachers to pose questions to principal investigators Randy Ruchti and Michael Barnett and to synthesize a deeper understanding of physical phenomena. In addition, teachers discussed the classroom implementation of their research work on one of the four major collider experiments.

During their summer research the teachers took on varied and challenging projects. Larry Wray and Rosemary Bradley of Langston University in Oklahoma, under mentor Tim McMahon, worked on a project related to the “powers of ten”. Ulrich Heintz at Boston University involved Rick Dower in using LabView to write interface and data-collection software for measuring the characteristics of a silicon tracker wafer to be used in DØ. He did this and then repeated his measurements in a neutron beam, generated by the low-energy (approximately 4 MeV) proton accelerator at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, to test the effect of radiation on the wafer.

The CMS project

Much of the work for QuarkNet 1999 involved the CMS project at CERN. Kevin McFarland, of the University of Rochester, had Susen Clark and Paul Pavone test the long-term stability of scintillating crystals (to be used as reference standards for CMS). These two teachers also built a “muon telescope” cosmic-ray detector for classroom demonstrations. The work of the Iowa centre in CMS was explained well by John Hauptman of Iowa State University: “Nural Akchurin in Iowa City and I, in Ames, have a lot of good work to do, and Jeff [Dilks] and Peter [Bruecken] were right in the middle of it. Peter analysed radiation damage data, designed and built mechanical mounts for a new calorimeter, and next week he will start taking data in the LEP injector beam at CERN. Jeff was responsible for designing and building a new calorimeter in Ames, testing it at CERN this summer, and analysing data from it.”

At Notre Dame, LeRoy Castle and Dale Wiand worked with Randy Ruchti to design Optical Decoder Units (ODUs) for CMS. Both teachers became involved in negotiation with other CMS production sites to find satisfactory solutions to questions on how to best place the ODUs in the detector structure.

How does this experience influence teaching and learning? Students in Ames, Iowa were performing an experiment in their physics class. They had divided up the parameter space of a dataset so that they could save class time, but still cover the necessary measurement parameters. Jeff Dilks had his students share their measurements by writing their data on the white board. A plot of the measurements showed absolutely nothing. Over the weekend Dilks considered his options. He resolved to use this opportunity to show his students that science does not always yield what is expected.

On the Monday he started class by informing the students that their work truly models what goes on in the “real world” of science. The results that they had shared on Friday were nonsense and indicated that new and more precise measurements were required. The class discussed what changes could be made, assigned parameters and performed their measurements once again. This time a quick plot of those measurements showed some interesting results. The lesson was learned; science is an involved process that has starts and stops, and it often yields results that beg more questions.

The post Caught in the QuarkNet appeared first on CERN Courier.

The summer heat presses down relentlessly on the plains of Pakistan, but the hills overlooking the capital city of Islamabad from the north perch above the worst of the steamy blanket, and in only an hour and a half’s drive the mercury drops from 40 to 25 °C. Historically, towns in the Murree Hills have been the traditional summer retreat for local administrations, but with improved communications they now throng with plains-dwellers eager to escape the oppressive heat below.

Since 1974 the Murree Hills have also been the scene of a notable annual physics event. In Pakistani physics, the influence of the late Abdus Salam, the first Pakistani to be awarded a Nobel Prize, is everywhere. Throughout the world, Salam is remembered for his physics contributions and for founding the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, which now bears his name. In 1974 he also suggested setting up a regular international forum in Pakistan, to attract scientists from all over the world, particularly from the developing countries. Salam knew that these scattered scientists can easily become isolated and often lack the contact so necessary to keep pace with, and contribute to, contemporary research.

The summer college was established at the leafy haven of Nathiagali (at 2600 m), the former site of the summer residence of the North West Frontier Province. More recently the College has moved to a modern tourist complex in Bhurban, overlooking the Jhelum Valley and facing the foothills of Kashmir.

The summer colleges have attracted a prestigious list of speakers, each year having special keynote topics. This year the 25th International Nathiagali Summer College on Physics and Contemporary Needs focused on three themes: high-energy physics and accelerator-driven fission in the first week; and laser cooling, quantum computing and nanotechnology during the second week. Students came from all over Pakistan and from neighbouring countries in Central Asia.

Pakistan’s increasing involvement in experimental particle physics was reflected in the lectures on high-energy physics. Presentations were given by Hafeez Hoorani of CERN on the subject of W Physics at LEP, Felicitas Pauss of ETH Zurich on Physics at the LHC, Daniel Treille of CERN on the Standard Model and Physics at LEP, Tejinder Virdee of CERN and London’s Imperial College on LHC Detectors, and Oswald Gröbner of CERN on the LHC machine.

In the lectures on accelerator-driven fusion, Jean-Pierre Revol of CERN described experiments by Carlo Rubbia’s group and spoke of future plans at CERN, while Günter Bauer and Sandro Pelloni of the Swiss PSI Institute covered accelerator-driven reactors and neutron reaction rates respectively. Giovanni Ambrosi of Geneva spoke on the AMS particle physics experiment in space, and CERN Courier editor Gordon Fraser surveyed some recent history in “Physics and the 20th century”.

Since Salam’s death in 1996, the college has featured a Salam Memorial Lecture, which this year was given by distinguished theorist Sergio Ferrara of CERN, speaking on “Superspace and supergravity ­ the quest for unification”.

At the official inauguration of the summer college, held at the National Library in Islamabad, a new collaboration agreement was signed between CERN and Pakistan’s recently established National Centre for Physics (CERN Courier March). Pakistan’s President, Muhammad Rafiq Tarar, said he hoped that the collaboration would flourish and that such international ventures would strengthen contacts between Pakistan and the rest of the world.

The post Pakistani physics appeared first on CERN Courier.

‘To see something new, you must make something new.’ This quotation from 18th-century German scientist and philosopher Lichtenberg was a favourite of the late Bjoern Wiik, chairman of the DESY Directorate, and chief promoter of DESY’s TESLA electron­positron linear collider and X-ray laser project.

While for particle physicists this credo seems natural, the general public and many politicians usually find it harder to digest, especially when facing the finance of basic research.

Conveying the purpose of basic research and introducing the public to the thrill and fascination of frontier science and discovery are the main goals of a new DESY exhibition, which is planned to take place in Hamburg from June to October 2000, as one of the Worldwide Projects of the EXPO 2000 World Exhibition.

The Light for the New Millennium will be delivered by the new type of Free Electron Laser (FEL) into which DESY’s TESLA Test Facility (TTF) will eventually be converted. What had started mainly as a testbed for TESLA’s superconducting acceleration principle will be extended as a 300 m FEL delivering laser light of wavelengths in the soft-X-ray range down to 6 nm. Radiation generation via the SASE (self-amplified spontaneous emission) principle is a completely novel technique allowing high-intensity laser pulses to be produced at these short wavelengths for the first time. SASE-FEL proof of principle is foreseen later this year.

The facility, which is due to go into test operation in 2002 and be available to users from all over the world a year later, will be under construction during the exhibition. Visitors will witness the machine being built and inspect it much more closely than would ever again be possible during operation.

However, accelerator and FEL components in the facility’s tunnel will be only one facet of the DESY-EXPO: a 1200 square-metre exhibition in the future experimental hall will show the technology and research opportunities of the new device, general DESY research ­in both synchrotron radiation and particle physics ­ and the laboratory’s plans for the future.

Laser insights

Multimedia and virtual reality shows as well as hands-on experiments will introduce the fascination of science and the emotion and thrill of discovery. Subjects will include “From light to microscopes to the X-ray laser”, “Laser technology in science and everyday life”, New insights opened up by the FEL in fields such as biology and materials sciences, and a presentation of DESY, its research programme and its planned TESLA project.

With 50 000 visitors expected, exhibition staff will be supported by DESY’s own undergraduate and graduate students, plus ­a new idea ­undergraduates from other German universities, who will be offered a research trainee period at DESY in return.

Exhibition languages will be German and English. Admission, which is free, will be from 1 June to 31 October 2000, from 10.00 a.m. to 7.00 p.m daily but until midnight on Thursdays. In the meantime, the Web site at “http://www.desy.de/expo2000/” is well worth a visit.

The post EXPO 2000 appeared first on CERN Courier.

As we worry about how we will mark the passage of the millennium and whether its technology will survive that incremental year, fundamental physics has already embarked on its assault on the 21st century. Caught up in the jostle, it is hard to perceive this acceleration. But look back 100 years and it is clear how the prospect of the 20th century provided incentive right across the cultural spectrum.

The work of poverty-stricken artists who were humiliated by the drudgery of unrecognized creativity now trades for fortunes. Fresh influences that were to fire the popular music of the 20th century blazed only in the confines of the ghetto.

Physics too was poised on a launchpad. The decade spanning the 19th and 20th centuries brought a chain reaction of discovery: X-rays, radioactivity, the electron, quantum theory, special relativity…Before the century was much older, a full theory of relativity and the interpretation of empirical quantum theory in terms of quantum mechanics had revolutionized our understanding of the universe.

Rather than having been assimilated into the collective consciousness, these two monuments of human intellect ­ quantum mechanics and relativity ­ still remain obstacles to the public understanding of science. In his introduction to the first edition of his masterpiece The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, Paul Dirac said: “The methods of progress of theoretical physics have undergone a vast change during the present century [he wrote in 1930!]. The classical tradition has been to consider the world to be an association of observable objects (particles, fluids, etc) moving about according to definite laws of force, so that one could form a mental picture in space and time of the whole scheme…It has become increasingly evident…that nature works on a different plan. Her fundamental laws do not govern the world as it appears in our mental picture in any very direct way, but instead they control a substratum of which we cannot form a mental picture without introducing irrelevancies.”

Dirac was trying to encourage students who were about to embark on a difficult but rewarding book, warning them that they should loosen the straps on their 19th-century imagery of springs and gear-wheels and prepare to accept an unfamiliar “impressionist” physics.

Some 70 years later, many generations of physicists have learned to handle relativity and quantum mechanics in their sleep, but these concepts remain a foreign language for the uninitiated.

“The new theories, ” wrote Dirac, “if one looks apart from their mathematical setting, are built up from physical concepts which cannot be explained in terms of things previously known…which cannot even be explained adequately in words at all. Like the fundamental concepts which everyone must learn on their arrival into the world, the newer concepts of physics can be mastered only by long familiarity with their properties and uses.”

For the 21st century, physicists are venturing into even deeper conceptual water, painting ambitious new pictures that even Dirac would have shunned. Abandoning the “classical” concept of point particles in favour of two dimensional strings in many-dimensional spaces, new developments suggest that some of the mysteries of quarks and gluons could be inferred from quantum theories of gravity cast in many more dimensions than once was ever thought necessary. The microworld could be a hologram of an otherwise invisible structure of a larger universe.

Superstrings

Recent CERN Courier articles on superstrings by Gabriele Veneziano and Yaron Oz have pointed out how we could have been blindfolded by living in a four-dimensional spacetime lesion embedded in a much larger, but ironically indiscernible, scheme. Our limited experience might not be that of most of the rest of the universe, and another Copernican revolution might be round the corner.

These ambitious theories are not yet ready for any textbooks, but something will surely emerge from all of this intellectual industry. Such a reappraisal of our understanding could go on to parallel Planck’s introduction of the quantum concept 100 years ago.

If these new theories do bear fruit, then the problems underlined by Dirac 70 years ago will have been amplified. The preface to the ultimate 21st-century textbook The Principles of Superstrings will have to encourage students even more than Dirac did, and the public, blinkered by living in three dimensions, let alone four, could be even more in the dark and seek easier intellectual comfort.

The 21st-century public could find physics not to its taste unless a major effort goes into making the subject palatable. For physics, a key problem is to accomplish this while retaining the confidence and credibility of the scientists. Paraphrasing what can ultimately only be expressed with mathematical precision can attract heavy dogmatic firepower. Researchers accustomed to peer review frequently get hold of the wrong end of the stick when confronted with a popular market.

A successful play now running in London has shown that physics, given the right treatment, can have popular appeal. However, science communication ultimately has to come from scientists. Where Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking whetted the public appetite for the incomprehensible, others have followed. With the prospect of fresh conceptual horizons, a new door is open.

The post The incomprehensible is always fresh appeared first on CERN Courier.

The School was organized by CERN in collaboration with LIP, Lisbon and the University of Madeira. 67 students (from 45 institutes, 22 countries and of 22 nationalities) attended, of which 14 were funded by the European Commission and by UNESCO.

After general lectures in the first week, the second week was oriented towards computing problems for particle physics and the LHC programme.

Practical exercises are an important part of the programme and require a complex computing infrastructure. Computing and peripheral equipment was provided by and via CERN. Equipment lent by various manufacturers was delivered to CERN where it was set up, tested, dismantled and shipped to Funchal, Madeira. Portuguese colleagues ensured the provision of the necessary network connection from Funchal via the University of Madeira, Lisbon and CERN and, together with students from Madeira, helped in the installation. Setting up this complex computing facility, even if only needed for a short time, needed close collaboration and was widely appreciated.

The 22nd CERN School of Computing will take place in Stare Jablonki, Poland, from 12-25 September, organized in collaboration with Warsaw University (IFD) and the Department “Internet For Schools” of the Foundation in Support of Local Democracy (IdS). The themes for 1999 are: advanced topics; LHC experiments data communication and data processing systems; software building; and Internet software technologies.

The School is open to postgraduate students and research workers with a few years’ experience in elementary particle physics, computing or related fields. The number of participants will be about 80, mostly from the CERN Member States or from laboratories closely associated with CERN, but a few may come from elsewhere.

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