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...
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 ...
