First collisions at BaBar
The collisions are termed “asymmetric” because the electrons are accelerated to 9 GeV – three times the energy of the positrons. As the two beams collide, they generate B mesons that...
e/5 particles discovered
In 1980 Klaus von Klitzing discovered that the so-called Hall conductance across a material varied in steps, not continuously, as the magnetic field was changed. In other words the Hall effect was qua...
Neutrinos may decay
According to the Standard Model of particle physics, the three types of neutrinos – electron, muon and tau neutrinos – have zero mass. But the number of atmospheric neutrinos – muon ...
CERN and Fermilab argue over “new” discovery
Last Monday Fermilab issued a press release titled “Fermilab physicists find new matter-antimatter asymmetry”. On Thursday CERN replied with a statement which read: “The CERN physics...
New director for Fermilab
Witherell received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1973 and became an assistant professor at Princeton University in 1975. He moved to Santa Barbara in 1981 and in 1990 won the American Ph...
DESY director, Bjorn Wiik, dies
Wiik was born in Norway in 1937. He moved to Germany in 1956 and after spending several years in the United States, joined the Hamburg laboratory in 1972. At DESY he was a member of the TASSO collabor...
Laser accelerators receive a boost
Physicists hope to develop new ways of accelerating particles because of the high cost and large size of traditional accelerators. Electrons in standard accelerators gain energy by surfing large elect...
Henry Kendall dies
Friedman, Kendall and Taylor scattered beams of high-energy electrons from liquid hydrogen and deuterium targets. They found that electrons were more likely to be scattered at large angles than was pr...
New leaders for SLAC and ESO
Dorfan was born in South Africa and received his first degree from the University of Cape Town, and his doctorate from the University of California at Irvine in 1976. He has spent most of his career a...
Physics loses out in UK budget
All of the other research councils will get increases of at least 3%, with the Medical Research Council receiving a rise of 6.8%. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) will ge...
