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.
Like many Americans, my taste for the sciences was soured at a young age. I recall lugging around heavy, impersonal textbooks full of confusing diagrams and bizarre word problems.
The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector is one of the two general purpose particle detectors being constructed at CERNs Large Hadron Collider (LHC) outside Geneva, Switzerland.
Guest houses are common among particle physics labs, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center is no exception. But in many ways, the Stanford Guest House, situated on the grounds of SLAC, is different.
As physicists and engineers devise ways to make the International Linear Collider perform better at a lower cost, the design evolves, sometimes with tweaks but at other times with major reconfigurations.
The sun is shining; the Earth is warm instead of icy. Life is good, thanks to the weak force. One of the four known forces that shape the universe, the weak force sustains our lives, driving the nuclear reactions that power the sun and heat the Earth’s core. It’s also tremendously useful.
In October 2006, the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) provided a new roadmap for a broad and very exciting science agenda in particle physics research. The roadmap’s destinations are among the most intriguing questions in science.
The Fiscal Year 2008 budget request has just been released by the President of the United States. At the roughest cut of the figures, the FY08 high-energy physics program within the Department of Energy gets a 12% increase over the enacted FY06 budget level.
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
Thank you for symmetry’s beautifully designed covers. I am excited to receive each month’s new issue, since I rip off the cover and some of the articles inside and use them for wrapping paper and craft projects.
Lovers and insomniacs have enjoyed the night sky for millennia. With the surprising observation that stars are less than five percent of the universe, it is natural that there would be a proliferation of books for the layman about the other 95 percent.
Security officers raise and lower 20 flags in front of Fermilab's Wilson Hall every day. Each flag represents a country that researchers come from to work at the lab. "The problem is that there are twenty flag poles," says Fermilab's Roy Rubinstein.
Like many particle physicists, JoAnne Hewett can trace the course of her career through her scientific publications. But for a more colorful retrospective of her work, the SLAC theorist simply decorates her Christmas tree.
Fermilab might not have the world's longest fingernails or the world's oldest man, but, according to Guinness World Records 2007, the lab does have the most powerful beam of neutrinos.
