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02/01/07

Engineering big upgrades

How do you renovate a delicate, irreplaceable detector? Very carefully. During the last four months of 2006, the BaBar collaboration at SLAC successfully replaced a prematurely aging muon identification system.

02/01/07

Walking in the dark?

I have been attending hundreds of talks by particle physicists who look for a very specific experimental signature that is predicted by a very specific theory extending the Standard Model.

02/01/07

Dark matter rap

I first heard of dark matter at a Moriond Conference in 1987.

12/01/06

“Dirty bubble chamber”

Luis Alvarez, a physicist at what today is the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, attended a 1953 meeting of the American Physical Society and heard a young University of Michigan physicist named Donald Glaser describe a particle detector he’d developed and called a “bubble chambe

12/01/06

A project worth its salt

The Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) isn't scheduled to open until 2008, but the Tokai campus facility is already the site of discovery—just not of the physics variety.

12/01/06

The human side of virtual collaboration

Advances in virtual control technology have shown scientists just how important humans are after all. Although scientists can now essentially operate a particle collider from anywhere in the world, having members of a team work well remotely is just as significant a challenge.

12/01/06

LCLS ground breaking

Call it subtle irony: The ground breaking for SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) took place among earth movers that had already been busily transforming the rolling California landscape for weeks.

12/01/06

Postdocs

Postdocs are temporary research positions for scientists who have completed their PhDs.