A joint Fermilab/SLAC publication
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09/01/07

The end of the HERA era

Laughter punctuates the excited conversations, a mix of German and English. Drinks are passed around and children dart among the legs of the hundred or so scientists gathered together for one last time. The sky’s blue is deepening: only 90 minutes until sunset.

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

BaBar's window on the weak force

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.

09/01/06

Lee Sawyer: Katrina aftermath challenges research institutions

The history of Louisiana is closely intertwined with tragedies. My father, who turns 90 this fall, vividly remembers the Great Flood of 1927. "You could take a boat from Monroe, Louisiana, to Jackson, Mississippi," he says, a trip of over 120 miles.

08/01/06

A long commute to summer school

This August, one hundred and fifty postdocs and advanced graduate students from around the world will gather on the Illinois prairie to enhance their understanding of particle colliders at the CERN-Fermilab Hadron Collider Physics Summer School.

07/01/06

Verlyn Klinkenborg: Renewing America's commitment to high-energy physics

In October 2003, I gave an evening talk at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. The subject was nature on the familiar scale, the kind embodied in the restored prairie on the Fermilab campus–some 1200 acres of compass plant and rattlesnake master and other species.

Illustration of a man writing on a chalkboard
07/01/06

Elementary particle physics

Physics has demonstrated that the everyday phenomena we experience are governed by universal principles applying at time and distance scales far beyond normal human experience.

05/01/06

KEK's ambitious future

Japan's high-energy physics laboratory KEK is undergoing a transition as it expands its science program with upgraded and new facilities.

05/01/06

Pierre Darriulat: Modern physics built from scratch

Modern physics built from scratch. It is difficult to summarize my experience in Vietnam in a few lines as the boundary conditions differ so radically from those that apply in the scientific environment of Western countries.

05/01/06

Asian committee for future accelerators

Few parts of the world would relish a revisiting of conditions from nearly 200 years ago. For Asia, approximating the past could be the key to the future.

02/01/06

Challenges

Particle physics has been confronted with serious challenges in recent years, especially for the operation of colliders. Yet 2006 promises to be a great year for research in particle physics as well as photon science, and many exciting projects are underway.

02/01/06

Brighter future

Collider luminosity is the key to particle physics discoveries. Fermilab and labs around the world have spared no effort in increasing their collider luminosities.

An illustration of a factory
01/01/06

B factories

B factories mass-produce B mesons, particles that contain a bottom quark.

01/01/06

Unitary triangle

The weak force is responsible for the decay of matter: unstable particles made of heavy quarks and antiquarks decay into particles made of their lighter cousins.