Commission appoints Mauro Ferrari as next President of the European Research Council
The European Commission has appointed Professor Mauro Ferrari as the next President of the European Research Council (ERC), responsible for funding investigator-driven frontier scientific research in Europe.
The waltz of the LHC magnets has begun
Major endeavours have got underway in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) over the past few weeks, with the extraction of magnets from the accelerator tunnel. The LHC has a total of 1232 dipoles, magnets which bend the particles’ trajectories, and 474 quadrupoles, which squeeze the bunches. All these magnets are superconducting, i.e. they operate at a temperature of -271°C, are 15 metres long and weigh up to 28 tonnes. So moving them around is no trivial matter.
A fully coherent soft X-ray free-electron laser
An international team of researchers implements a new method for generating intense and nearly fully coherent soft-X-ray pulses at a free-electron laser with high potential for use in novel spectroscopic techniques. An international research group led by the FERMI free-electron laser (FEL) physics team from the Elettra laboratory in Trieste demonstrated the first lasing of [...]
42nd “School of Young Physicists” in Skopje and “The Light Fantastic show” in Ohrid
The Society of Physicists of Macedonia, together with its Skopje Young Minds section, has organised two major outreach events in this 2018/2019 academic year. One was the 42nd “School of Young Physicists” in Skopje with more than 500 registered participants, and the other “The Light Fantastic show” in Ohrid, which completely filled a 600-seat theater, one of the largest events in the Society’s long history.
CERN unveils its Science Gateway project
CERN is launching a new scientific education and outreach centre. The building will be designed by world-renowned architects, Renzo Piano Building Workshop and funded through external donations, with the leading contribution coming from FCA Foundation
Baikal-GVD project 2019
Two new clusters of optical modules of the Baikal deep underwater neutrino telescope, Baikal-GVD, were put into operation. The effective volume of the facility, which already includes five clusters, increased to 0.25 km3.
ASTRI-Horn is first Cherenkov telescope in dual-mirror configuration to detect the Crab Nebula at TeV energies
Exactly 30 years after the first historical observation of Crab nebula at TeV energies, which opened the era of TeV astronomy with the Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Technique (IACT), another advancement in IACT technology has been achieved. The ASTRI-Horn Cherenkov Telescope, based on the innovative Schwarzschild-Couder dual-mirror configuration and equipped with an innovative camera, has detected the Crab Nebula at TeV energies for the first time, proving the viability of this technology.
Interview – Donna Strickland, 2018 Nobel Prize of Physics
Donna Strickland was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for her invention of the chirped pulse amplification (CPA) technique with Gérard Mourou in 1985. This technique amounts to stretching a short pulse at low energy through diffraction gratings, then amplifying it to high energy before finally compressing it in order to get a short, high energy pulse. This technology opened the route to petawatt lasers used in high-field science, ultrafast imaging and spectroscopy techniques, eye surgery, and many industrial applications such as micromachining, to mention a few.
Orbital Crossing with Spin Flip Found in Noncentrosymmetric Metals
Abstract
In noncentrosymmetric metals, the antisymmetric spin orbit interaction resolves spin degeneracy of electronic bands and therefore a Fermi surface splits into two pieces. In the metals belonging to a certain point group, however, the spin degeneracy recovers at the special symmetry points. Here, we found the orbital crossing phenomenon in which a carrier transfers from one split Fermi surface to the other one at a degenerate point. We further estimated the probability of crossing the orbital and revealed that the estimation allows us to judge the occurrence of spin flip at the degenerate point.
Featured in EPN
Europhysics News Vol. 50-2 can be downloaded at the magazine’s website. View it also as a flipbook. Flipbook of EPN – issue 50/2 Ultrafast lasers: from femtoseconds to attoseconds p. 11 Giulio Cerullo and Mauro NisoliPublished online: 29 March 2019DOI: https://doi.org/10.1051/epn/2019201 Manipulating matter with light p. 15Giuseppe Pesce, Giulia Rusciano and Antonio SassoPublished online: 29 March 2019DOI: https://doi.org/10.1051/epn/2019202 A nobel cause: public [...]
EPS Historic Site in Budapest to Honour the Eötvös Experiment
The former physics building of the Loránd Eötvös University ‒ the physics department was moved from the centre of the city to a new campus about 20 years ago, the former building being occupied now by institutes of the Faculty of Humanities ‒ has been recognised as an EPS Historic Site.
SESAME becomes the world’s first large accelerator complex to be fully powered by renewable energy
On 26 February 2019, a ceremony was held to mark the official inauguration of the solar power plant of SESAME (Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East).
