Abraham Pais dies
His best-known work was a biography of Einstein, Subtle is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein, which was published in 1982 and won the 1983 American Book Award. Pais went on to publ...
Tau neutrino identified at last
The DONUT team fired an intense beam of neutrinos, which they expected to contain tau neutrinos, at a target consisting of iron plates with layers of emulsion sandwiched between them. One in a million...
Sir Mark Oliphant dies
Oliphant was born in Adelaide in 1901 and attended the local university before going to Cambridge University in 1927, where he worked on nuclear physics experiments with Ernest Rutherford. In 1937 he ...
RHIC makes its debut
One of RHIC’s main goals is to produce a quark-gluon plasma – the state of matter that is thought to have existed just millionths of a second after the big bang. Quarks are normally confin...
PPARC starts to identify its priorities
The particle physics panel identified three projects related to the Large Hadron Collider – a 14 TeV proton-proton collider that is due to start in 2005 at CERN – as top priority. These we...
Hendrik Casimir and John Ward
Hendrik Brugt Gerhard Casimir was born in the Hague in the Netherlands in 1909 and received his PhD from the University of Leiden in 1931. After working with Bohr in Copenhagen and Pauli in Zurich, he...
Boost for particle physics in Canada
“This renewal of funding will permit TRIUMF to become a world leader in particle physics research,” said Arthur Carty, President of National Research Council. “It will also retain an...
CERN claims quark-gluon first
In the CERN experiments a 33 TeV lead ion beam was crashed into targets made of lead and gold inside the seven different experimental detectors. The collisions created energy densities twenty times th...
CERN-Gran Sasso neutrino experiment is approved
Italy is paying over half of the cost of the SwFr 71million experiment, with voluntary contributions from Belgium, France, Germany and Spain covering the rest. The experiment will start taking data in...
Physicists look to neutrino factory
When charged particles move in a circle they lose energy through synchrotron radiation. However, muons lose much less energy that electrons or positrons because they are 200 times heavier. This reduce...
