A joint Fermilab/SLAC publication
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04/01/05

Barry Barish: building a global design effort

On March 18, before 400-plus people at the Linear Collider Workshop in Palo Alto, Jonathan Dorfan, chair of the International Committee for Future Accelerators, offered me the job as director of the Global Design Effort for the International Linear Collider.

04/01/05

Feedback

Symmetry has now been published for six months. It has been a whirlwind beginning for this new type of collaborative venture for SLAC and Fermilab. We hope our initial issues are indicative of a long future serving our diverse readership. And we have discovered it is indeed diverse.

Simplified illustration of the LHC
04/01/05

Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider is currently being installed in a 27-kilometer ring buried deep below the countryside on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland. When its operation begins in 2007, the LHC will be the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.

04/01/05

Control room

Each of the world's particle accelerators has its own custom control room, a nerve center where every detail of accelerator operation is monitored.

04/01/05

Fermilab open house

From babies in strollers to their grandparents, about 2000 people of all ages enjoyed science at the Fermilab Family Open House on Sunday, February 13.

04/01/05

The new high-energy frontier

In less than three years, scientists will start up the world's largest scientific instrument: The Large Hadron Collider. US scientists have built key components for the machine and its experiments, paving the way for their participation in a decade of discoveries.

Logbook of March 2005 CDF DZero
03/01/05

Top quark

Theorists predicted the existence of a sixth quark in the 1970s, and no one imagined that finding the particle would take another two decades.

03/01/05

Teaching art with physics

I teach physics to college art students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. You have published three issues of symmetry, and each time I've found something in it to point out to my students.

03/01/05

Muons, gluons, futons

When my wife is intrigued by the cover of a particle physics magazine, as she was with the February issue of symmetry, you know your editors and designers are doing a good job.

03/01/05

The doorkeepers of building 280

Unless you're looking for them, you might not notice the two stone gargoyles standing watch over building 280 at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. In fact, for the first month they were in place, not many people did notice them.

03/01/05

The growth of e-printing

Before the days of the World Wide Web, scientists would mail their colleagues preprints, hard copies of papers submitted to scientific journals. In 1991, particle physicists began posting these papers on the Web, calling them e-prints.

03/01/05

Good-natured community relations

Working at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, you never know what projects may come your way. So when Helen Quinn, head of education outreach at SLAC, asked me to plant trees with a class of fourth graders, I said sure, it's not rocket science.

03/01/05

A badge of honor and buffalo

Fermilab's new Girl Scout badge has troop #312 excited about "atoms and buffalo." Unlike a field trip where kids visit Fermilab to learn about physics in an "educational environment," the Girl Scouts' Fermilab outing lets kids come with their friends and a scout lead

03/01/05

Nobel Laureates and Twentieth-Century Physics

Do you know why Louis Victor de Broglie won a Nobel Prize in 1929? Or why a Nobel Prize wasn't given out in 1934? What about Nils Gustaf Dalen's invention of an automatic sun valve beating out Max Planck and Albert Einstein for the Nobel Prize in 1912?

03/01/05

The smoking mouse

Because particle physicists cannot directly see the objects they study, they rely on deduction and decay products to detect nature's tiny, ephemeral particles.