EU Particle Physics & Astronomy commit to the Research Data Revolution making the EOSC a reality
First quarter 2019 sees the exciting launch of one out of the five successfully retained INFRA-EOSC-04-2018 Cluster projects, which the European Commission supports with €16 million to boost the implementation of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).
The Origin of Water’s Anomalous Properties Captured by X-ray Experiments
Water is the most important liquid for our existence on Earth and it plays an essential role in physics, chemistry, biology and geoscience. What makes water unique is not only its importance but also the anomalous behavior of many of its macroscopic properties. For example, density, specific heat, viscosity and compressibility of water behave in ways opposite to other liquids that we know. If we look at a glass of ice water, everything is, in a sense, upside down.
Exploring the energy frontier in particle physics
The desire to understand the elementary constituents of matter and their interactions has been one of the most important drivers of physics research. In the past 50 years, major progress in the field of particle physics has been made by accelerating particles to the highest energies available (the energy frontier) and by colliding them to produce and study new particles and interactions. Recent examples are the 1992 discovery of the top quark, by the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) and D0 experiments, in the Tevatron collider at Fermilab; and the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, by the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) and A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS (ATLAS) experiments, in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. These important discoveries, as well as many others, are the experimental foundations of the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics.
Editorial – Scanning Khufu’s Pyramid with atmospheric muons
In a publication in Nature in December 2017 [1], teams of the ScanPyramids project [2] announced the discovery of a hitherto unknown big void in Khufu’s Pyramid in Egypt, also known as the Great Pyramid of Giza or the Pyramid of Cheops [3]. The void was found by scanning the internal structure of the pyramid using the abundant flux of atmospheric muons
Editorial – From Particles to the Cosmos at EPS HEP 2017 in Venice
Close to a thousand physicists from all over the world gathered in July 2017 at the European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics (EPS-HEP) in Venice, Italy. The HEPP division of the EPS played the role of the International Organising Committee and the conference was organised by Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) and the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Padova.
2017 EPS High Energy and Particle Physics Division prizes
The 2017 EPS High Energy and Particle Physics Division prizes have been announced. The six winners will be presented during the EPS HEP2017 conference, in Venice, from 5-12 July. The prize ceremony is scheduled on 10 July.
The International Particle Physics Outreach Group (IPPOG)
The International Particle Physics Outreach Group (IPPOG) is a network of scientists, science educators and communication specialists working across the globe in informal science education and outreach for particle physics. Particle physics is the science of matter, energy, space and time. IPPOG brings new discoveries in this exciting field to young people and conveys to the public that the beauty of nature is indeed becoming understandable from the interactions of its most fundamental parts – the elementary particles.
GraSPA 2016
Registration for the 2016 Summer School of Particle and Astroparticle Physics [GraSPA 2016] in Annecy-le-Vieux, France is now open.
The goal of the school is to introduce Particle Physics and Astroparticle Physics to 3rd and 4th year physics students while at the same time touching upon the latest results and challenges in these fields.
Recommendations for evaluation of experimental particle physicists
The European Committee for Future Accelerators [ECFA] and the High Energy and Particle Physics Division of the European Physical Society [EPS-HEPP] have jointly prepared a document to help professional committees to assess the achievements of individual particle physicists from large experimental collaborations. The document is motivated by the need to explain to scientists from outside the community of experimental high-energy physics the way these collaborations, of few hundred to few thousand members, are organized in order to design, build and carry out the scientific program of large-scale experiments.
SCOAP3: more than 2000 Open Access articles online
Two thousand Open Access articles have been published with SCOAP3 funding since January 2014 in 10 journals from 11 publishers and learned societies. These articles are released under a CC-BY license, and available on the SCOAP3 repository in several formats. Scientists from over 80 countries have freely published in SCOAP3 journals so far.The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics [SCOAP3] is operated at CERN in Switzerland and managed by an international consortium of thousands of libraries in 35 countries that redirects funds previously used for subscriptions to instead support Open Access. All articles are published under…
An unconventional 4-quark particle
On 9 April 2014, researchers at the LHCb experiment published a paper validating the existence of an exotic particle, which appears to be a tetraquark. The LHCb spokesperson Pierluigi Campana said: “We are very happy to have confirmed this particle, which is in fact a very strange object.”
Precisely 50 years ago, George Zweig and Murray Gell-Mann independently introduced the Quark Model, which is a fundamental cornerstone in particle physics. The model is a perfect tool to understand how matter interacts…
