EPS elections to be held during council at CERN

The next European Physical Society [EPS] council meeting will be held at CERN, Geneva, on 30-31 March this year. The council will see the gathering of around 100 delegates, representing member societies, individual members, associate institutions, divisions and groups.

Elections will take place for both executive committee members and for the EPS president-elect. A large list of executive committee candidates has been formed, covering various European areas and physics fields…

European research pilots cloud computing resource

Leading IT providers have teamed up with three of Europe’s largest research centres this month to launch a new cloud computing system. CERN, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and the European Space Agency will be the first to enjoy the processing power of the platform – which has been named “Helix Nebula – the Science Cloud” – for such activities as the search for the Higgs Boson, the study of geological disasters and unravelling the secrets of DNA.

This pan-European collaboration – which will offer flexible and robust computing services for research and innovation…

EPS launches new Technology and Innovation Group

The European Physical Society [EPS] is launching a new Technology and Innovation Group [TIG], in accordance with the EPS Strategy Plan 2010+. This initiative, fostered by the EPS Executive Committee last year, confirms the longstanding role of the EPS in establishing links between industry, research institutes, society and universities within Europe.

The Technology and Innovation Group is hoping to build a close collaboration with the newly created Technology Transfer Offices [TTO] Circle, by means of CERN, which is both a founding EPS member as well as a major player in the TTO…

Serbia to be CERN Associate Member

The CERN Council unanimously voted to admit the Republic of Serbia as an Associate Member State of CERN, during their 161st council meeting, on 16 December last year. The final step in this process will involve the signature of the related agreement, and ratification by the Serbian Parliament. Following a five year maximum period of Associate Membership, the council will decide on the admission of Serbia to full membership.

“It’s a pleasure to welcome Serbia back into the family,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer…

Editorial

Dear Readers,

The year 2011 comes to an end with fireworks from CERN.

On 13 December a special seminar was held in CERN’s main auditorium, where the spokespersons of the two major experimental collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider [LHC], Fabiola Gianotti (ATLAS) and Guido Tonelli (CMS), presented their results from the search for a new particle, a fundamental and desperately wanted ingredient of the Standard Model: the Brout-Englert-Higgs-Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble boson, currently called ‘the Higgs’…

CERN and Ars Electronica first digital art resident

The first Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN was awarded to Julius Von Bismarck, the noted German artist, at CERN, Geneva, on 6 December 2011. Winning 3 months as artist in residence at CERN and Ars Electronica, along with 10,000 Euros in prize money, Von Bismarck – a growing name in the artistic community – is known for taking inspiration for his from philosophic and scientific ideas.

The jury reportedly chose him for his ability to playfully combine the arts and the sciences, and “his proposal and work which manipulates and criticises our notions of reality in unpredictable ways, often with inventive use of video…”

Editorial

Dear Readers,

There has been plenty of breaking news in physics this month; from the Nobel Prize awarded to our American colleagues, Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess, for their discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe; to the intriguing results, obtained in Europe, on the velocity of muon-neutrinos.

The neutrino velocity has been measured with unprecedented precision in the OPERA experiment…

Israel a CERN Associate Member State

Israel has been made a CERN Associate Member State, following the signing of an admission document by the Director General of CERN, Rolf Heuer, and the Israeli Ambassador to Geneva, Aharon Leshno-Yaar, on 16 September.

Following ratification of the document by the Knesset – the legislative branch of the Israeli government – Israel will assume Associate Member status with CERN for a minimum of two years. At the end of this period, the CERN council will decide on the admission of Israel into full Membership…

Forum Physics and Society

The fifth EPS Forum Physics and Society – looking at Physicists in the marketplace – will be held at CERN, in Switzerland, between 28-29 March next year. The meeting will focus on the challenges experienced by physicists who pursue alternative careers in the marketplace, outside of teaching and university based research.

The first part of the meeting will revolve around the invited keynote contributions, defining the issues concerning physicists who enter the global marketplace. The forum will then split into groups to discuss the different aspects and to draft reports…

EPL publishes its first paper from the LHC

EPL has published its first article from the Large Hadron Collider, in the august issue this year. The paper, submitted by the TOTEM experiment, was entitled: ‘Proton-proton elastic scattering at the LHC energy of √s = 7 TeV’.

EPL looks forward to publishing other such results from the experiments at CERN in the future. The abstract from the paper follows…

European Strategy in Particle Physics

Since 2007, the High Energy Particle Physics Board of the European Physics Society (EPS) and the European Committee for Future Accelerators (ECFA) have been organising jointly a half-day plenary session during the biannual EPS conference on High Energy Physics. This year’s session, which took place in Grenoble in the afternoon of 23 September, marked the start of the process for updating the European strategy in particle physics.

The first European strategy for particle physics was adopted by a special session of the CERN Council in July 2006. The Strategy was defined by 17 statements that were approved by Council and were contained in the Strategy Statement…

2012 EPS Council meeting

The next EPS Council meeting will be held at CERN, on 30-31 March 2012. The event will be a return of sorts for the EPS – coming back to where the society was founded, 44 years earlier, by its first president, Gilberto Bernardini, the then Research Director of CERN.

The venue for the meeting will be the CERN Council Chamber, where the EPS Constitution was first signed, on the 26 September 1968, by eminent representatives from 20 different national societies, academies and groups; along with the initial sixty-two individual members…