Thomson scattering goes relativistic
Donald Umstadter and co-workers used a neodymium-glass laser to illuminate helium gas in a vacuum chamber. The team were able to focus 4 trillion watts of power on the gas. The electric field of the l...
All change at the top for US particle physics
Richter, 67, will remain on the faculty at Stanford University and will be the next president of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. Richter’s main achievements at SLAC have bee...
Time’s arrow seen in particle decays
The CPLEAR collaboration studied the decays of neutral kaons produced in proton- antiproton collisions. The collisions produce both neutral kaons – which contain a down quark and an anti-strange...
Higgs search loses a fortnight
With a collision energy of 189 GeV, LEP is currently the world’s highest energy electron-positron collider. It was originally due to be shut down at the end of this year, but physicists working ...
Tevatron upgrade complete
The Main Injector has a circumference of 3.2 km and contains 432 magnets, each of which weighs over 18 tonnes. The Tevatron itself has a circumference of 6.3km and collides protons and antiprotons at ...
Field theorists win Dirac prize
The citation highlights Adler’s derivation of a sum rule for pion-nucleon scattering that marked a breakthrough in our understanding of the currents and broken symmetries of the strong interacti...
PEP-II shapes up
PEP-II consists of two independent storage rings in the tunnel that housed the original PEP collider. The high-energy ring, which stores a 9 GeV electron beam, is an upgrade of the existing PEP collid...
Neutrino mass discovered
Neutrinos were first detected in 1956 by Fred Reines of the University of California at Irvine and the late George Cowan. They showed that a nucleus undergoing beta decay emits a neutrino with the ele...
Hackers attack Stanford accelerator
The hacker or hackers managed to gain password access to SLAC by intercepting the username and password of a registered user accessing data inside SLAC’s firewall. The random behaviour of the ha...
Japan increases contribution to LHC
The LHC will be a 14 TeV proton-proton collider. High-energy physicists will use to LHC to search for the Higgs particle (or particles), which are thought to explain the origins of mass. It will also ...
