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dimensionsofparticlephysicsvolume 05A joint Fermilab/SLAC publicationissue 01jan/feb 08

volume 05 | issue 01 | jan/feb 08symmetryA joint Fermilab/SLAC publication02Editorial: symmetry’s Web expansionStarting from this issue we will publish six printissues each year instead of 10 and add a muchlarger range of online content. Our hope is thatthis will give readers new ways to respond andbecome active members of the symmetrycommunity.03Commentary: Krystle WilliamsWhat will the physics community look like10 years from now? What should it look like?These are questions the Society of PhysicsStudents are encouraging you to ask yourself.04Signal to BackgroundSLAC’s rise from an ancient ocean floor; TVgoes underground at Fermilab; a shirt as old asSt. Francis; path-breaking bicycle; Czechstackle Japanese opera; mysterious wine sign;engineering with toys.Office of ScienceU.S. Department of EnergyC1On the coverFor decades, studies of how the eye sees—howthe information gathered by light-sensitive cells inthe retina is transmitted to the brain for analysis—were restricted to recordings from single neurons.The recording equipment was bulky, and the oneat-a-timeapproach made it hard to identify raretypes of neurons with highly specialized jobs, suchas detecting motion. Now, with technology borrowedfrom particle physics, scientists can recordsignals from hundreds of neurons at a time.Illustration: Sandbox Studio

from the editorsymmetry’s Web expansionPhoto: Reidar Hahn, FermilabWith 30 issues behind us, this issue of symmetry launches the next phaseof the magazine’s development. Our readers now use the magazine indifferent ways, and we are reaching a much larger audience. While youare outspoken in wanting to keep the print magazine, many of you arenow more comfortable reading online.Starting from this issue, we will publish six print issues each year insteadof 10 and add a much larger range of online content. We have completelyredesigned our Web site to accommodate this expansion. Our hope is thatthis will give readers new ways to respond and become active membersof the symmetry community.We still plan to cover the same kinds of topics in the magazine, butwill be adding online resources we think readers will find useful, includingbackgrounders and fact sheets on many topics.Online, we will be posting new content on a regular basis, a few times perweek at least. A symmetry blog will have the latest stories and discussionson topics ranging from research and news to policy and analysis. Ofcourse, there will still be plenty of the fun stories that are a hallmark ofthe magazine.Bubbling away in the background, we already have a symmetryFacebook group and YouTube channel and expect to see them becomemore active in coming months. We will be soliciting science videos andphotographs for contests, and looking for other materials from the verycreative minds of our readers that deserve a wider audience. As always, ifyou would like to see us address a particular topic or have ideas you thinkwill appeal to fellow readers, please let us know.This next phase of symmetry is very exciting for our team, and we hopeyou will all join in.David Harris, Editor-in-chiefSymmetryPO Box 500MS 206Batavia Illinois 60510USA630 840 3351 telephone630 840 8780 faxwww.symmetrymagazine.orgmail@symmetrymagazine.org(c) 2008 symmetry All rightsreservedsymmetry (ISSN 1931-8367)is published six times peryear by Fermi NationalAccelerator Laboratory andStanford Linear AcceleratorCenter, funded by theUS Department of EnergyOffice of Science.symmetryEditor-in-ChiefDavid Harris650 926 8580Deputy EditorGlennda ChuiManaging EditorKurt RiesselmannSenior EditorTona KunzStaff WritersElizabeth ClementsHeather Rock WoodsKelen TuttleRhianna WisniewskiCopy EditorMelinda LeeInternsHaley BridgerLizzie BuchenAmber DancePublisherJudy Jackson, FNALContributing EditorsRoberta Antolini, LNGSPeter Barratt, STFCRomeo Bassoli, INFNStefano Bianco, LNFKandice Carter, JLabSuraiya Farukhi, ANLJames Gillies, CERNSilvia Giromini, LNFYouhei Morita, KEKMarcello Pavan, TRIUMFPerrine Royole-Degieux, IN2P3Yuri Ryabov, IHEP ProtvinoYves Sacquin, CEA-SaclayKendra Snyder, BNLBoris Starchenko, JINRMaury Tigner, LEPPUte Wilhelmsen, DESYTongzhou Xu, IHEP BeijingLynn Yarris, LBNLGabby Zegers, NIKHEFPrint Design and ProductionSandbox StudioChicago, IllinoisArt Director/DesignerMichael BraniganIllustratorAaron GrantWeb Design and ProductionXeno MediaHinsdale, IllinoisWeb ArchitectKevin MundayWeb DesignKaren AcklinAlex TarasiewiczWeb ProgrammerMike AcklinPhotographic ServicesFermilab Visual MediaServicessymmetry | volume 05 | issue 01 | jan/feb 082

signal to backgroundSLAC’s rise from an ancient ocean floor; TV goes underground at Fermilab;a shirt as old as St. Francis; path-breaking bicycle; Czechs tackle Japanese opera;mysterious wine sign; engineering with toys.Photo: Lizzie BuchenSLAC's rocky pastForty members of the Societyfor Sedimentary Geology drovedown Loop Road, passedthrough the Sector 30 gate,and arrived on the north side ofthe klystron gallery. Stretchingbefore them, the earthen wallsof the accelerator trench cutan enticing swath through thefoothills, holding the secretsto a story that began more than55 million years ago.Led by geologists SusanWitebsky of the StanfordLinear Accelerator Center andKen Ehman of Chevron, thegroup of students, academicresearchers, and professionalgeologists explored the highlightsof the lab’s tectonicallyturbulent past.SLAC’s campus rests ona two-mile-thick bed of marinesedimentary rock, a rigidreminder of the waters that coveredthe land until just recently.The tectonic plate that bearsSLAC was once the deep oceanfloor, which gradually rose untilit broke through the water’s surfacea mere one million to twomillion years ago. Each period ofthis dynamic history left its markin the earth, depositing mineralsand fossilized creatures.At the start of its Octobertour, the group heard the tale ofPaleoparadoxia, a hippo-likebeast whose fossils were discovered,excavated, and reconstructedby Adele Panofsky,the diligent and passionate wifeof SLAC’s founder. At the westend of the two-mile-long linearaccelerator, they examined alarge mass of land which had,some millions of years ago,been drastically invertedthrough faulting and folding.A few hundred meters to thesouth, they studied 165-millionyear-oldrocks encrusted withfossilized algae barely 40 millionyears of age. This findingrevealed a tremendous deformationof the Earth’s surface,which saw rocks 15 kilometersbelow ground abruptly thrustto the shallow ocean floor.Certain curiosities, however,remain open questions, suchas a glaring 20-million-year gapin deposits, and maverick blocksof sandstone in the otherwiseuniformmudstone matrix atSector 11.Although Witebsky has beenat SLAC for more than 10 years,the rocks continue to excite andintrigue her. “Our primary jobis environmental restoration andevaluating the ground waterquality,” she says of the SLACresident geologists. “But everytime there’s an excavation, likefor the Linac Coherent LightSource, we get to come alongand see what’s revealed. That’sthe real treat.”Lizzie Buchensymmetry | volume 05 | issue 01 | jan/feb 084

Notes from theunderworldThey had braved Parisian catacombs,gloomy dungeons, andshipwrecks. Yet as the elevatordropped 360 feet into a cavernoushall at Fermi NationalAccelerator Laboratory, uncertaintyflickered across thefaces of the globe-trotting televisioncrew.Cities of the Underworld hostDon Wildman and his crew hadcome with the intention of peelingback the layers of the lab asif peeling an onion. Beginninghundreds of feet below groundand working their way to the topof Wilson Hall, the group documentedthe Tevatron collider, thedeep tunnels of the NuMI andMINOS neutrino experiments,and the science that goes onthere. The September 2007 filmingtook two days.“It turned out great,” says ChrisBray, a producer for AuthenticEntertainment. “We were worriedabout the explanation of suchabstract and complicated science,but when we showed peoplean early version, we foundthat they loved neutrinos.”Although the Fermilab segmentis brief, he adds, “This really isthe star of the Chicago show.”Each episode of the hitHistory Channel series focuseson the tunnels, tombs, and subterraneanhideouts beneath thefoundations of today’s moderncities. The show has exploredthe dungeons of Scottish castles,the underground infrastructureof Rome, and the cavesbeneath Budapest.While most episodes giveviewers glimpses of pastachievements, Fermilab’s tunnelsoffered a look at scienceworking to shape the future.“It appeals to a wide audience.People are fascinated by lookingat all different aspects ofwhat goes on in the world,” saysMike Andrews, safety coordinatorfor NuMI/MINOS.The initial airing of the episodewas scheduled formid-March; see the series’Web page for listings.Rhianna WisniewskiTunic from CortonaDating a saintTwo towns in Italy lay claim torelics from St. Francis of Assisi—pieces of clothing and anembroidered cushion from hisdeathbed.But one of those relics cannotbe authentic because itwas manufactured decadesafter the saint’s death in 1226,according to physicists whotested them in May.Contrary to popular fiction,particle accelerators can’t takepeople back in time. But theycan provide time stamps forclothing, books, and otherancient items that containcarbon.Scientists at Italy’s Laboratoryof Nuclear Techniques forCultural Heritage in Florenceexamined three relics tied to St.Francis, an aristocrat who tooka vow of poverty, founded theFranciscan Order, and becamethe Roman Catholic patron saintof animals.Examinations conducted atthe lab found that a tunic andembroidered cushion housed inthe Church of St. Francis inCortona dated from the timewhen the saint was alive.5Tunic from FlorenceHowever, another tunic from theBasilica of Santa Croce inFlorence was made decadeslater.The method the researchersused, known as acceleratormass spectrometry, requiresmuch smaller samples thanother forms of radiocarbon dating.This allowed the scientiststo take five to seven samples ofwoolen fabric from the tunics,each smaller than one squarecentimeter; the more samplestested, the more accurate theresults would be.The swatches were treatedto extract small pellets ofgraphite, a form of carbon.These pellets were exposed tocesium ions in an accelerator,releasing carbon isotopes thatare counted by a detector. Bymeasuring the ratio of carbon14 to carbon 12—a delicateundertaking, since there is onlyone carbon 14 for roughly a trillioncarbon 12s—the researchersdetermined the age of thefabric and discounted Florence’sclaim to holding this particularpiece of history.Tona Kunzsymmetry | volume 05 | issue 01 | jan/feb 08

signal to backgroundPhoto: Reidar Hahn, FermilabBiking the snow awayAfter seeing a documentaryon Ernest Shackleton’s 1914Antarctic expedition, in whichmen ate shoe leather to survivein bone-chilling temperatures,David Peterson felt kind ofsilly about letting snow stop hisbicycle ride to work.“There was no excuse,” hesays. “I’ve never had to eat mybicycle.”So he built a bicycle snowplow.On the snowiest days, a halfdozenbicycle commuters forma line behind Peterson and hisplow as he clears a path toFermi National AcceleratorLaboratory in Illinois, where heworks as an engineer in theantiproton source department.“They all ride behind meshouting words of encouragement,”he says. “Sometimes theytake turns on the plow if it’sreally deep or if I look particularlysad, pedaling.”After experimenting with severaldifferent styles of bladesand attachments, Peterson settledon two basic methods. Forsnow more than seven inchesdeep, he designed a “drift cutter”that can be pushed while walking.In shallower snow he pullsa 70-degree angled wedge plowbehind his bicycle; it clears aswath about 18 inches wide.When not in use, the plow pivotson a hitch and hangs overthe back tire, inches above theground.Peterson gets thank-youe-mails, and occasionallyrequests for new routes, fromwalkers, runners, and otherbicyclists. In the five yearssince he started plowing, hesays, others have started topitch in with shovels, snowblowers, and plows hooked upto all-terrain vehicles, althoughhe knows of only one otherbike plow like his. “It’s like somekind of underground insurgencyof snow clearing,” hesays happily.Asked if he would ever patenthis bike plow, Peterson saysno: “I look at it in the same veinas open access publishing. Ibenefit from things other peopleput up on the Web, so whyshould I charge them to look atmy plow?”See symmetrymag.org/plow/for more details.Tona KunzCzech kimonochallengeTokio Ohska had an opera todirect.As always, there were lighting,scenery, and music issuesto contend with. But findingcostumes to fit a cast ofEuropeans? That was a newchallenge.Ohska is a physicist. As thehead of research services atKEK, the Japanese particlephysics lab in Tsukuba, hetends to the needs of foreignscientists and has a knack formaking cultures click. Buthe’s also a former professionalsinger with a background inJapanese opera.So when a Czech theatercompany needed a stagedirector for the first Japaneseopera to be sung in Japaneseby a European cast, Ohskaseemed a natural choice.Jan Snitil, conductor of theSilesian Theater in Opava, haddecided to celebrate the theater’s200th anniversary with aperformance from his wife’shome country.“The problem was that thebody sizes of Czech singersare much larger than those ofthe Japanese,” Ohska said.He enlisted a friend to helpscour Japanese antique storesfor the largest kimonos theycould find to match the200-year-old setting of Yuzuru,roughly translated as “the craneat dusk.”“Fortunately, the singers andthe conductor are extremelytalented, nice people,” Ohskasays. “They worked with mewith a lot of patience and gaveme helpful suggestions.”On opening night in October2007, Ohska sat in the frontrow, almost holding his breath.As the performance ended hemade his way to the stage,expecting polite applause. “Butevery time I would go to walkoff, the curtain would rise again,”he says, for a total of 10 thunderingovations: “I was so relieved.”The opera sparked an encorein the form of an ongoing culturalexchange. Opava has sincehosted a Japanese cultureweek; and in 2009, the Czechopera Dalibor is scheduled forits first performance in Japan.Tona KunzPhoto courtesy of Tokio Ohskasymmetry | volume 05 | issue 01 | jan/feb 086

Chateau Neuf du PEPNo one is able to claim creditfor the ancient wooden signthat hangs on the porch of theold Positron Electron Projectbuildings at the StanfordLinear Accelerator Center.The sign, proclaiming thearea “Chateau Neuf du PEP,” isa play on the wine they usedto drink there. Châteauneuf duPape is a wine appellation insouthern France, named forPope John XXII’s 14th centurysummer “new home.”“Those were quite differentdays,” says Perry Wilson, asenior scientist on PEP at thetime. During the ’70s, when thesign went up, PEP collaboratorswould gather every Friday forrefreshments, music, and dancing.Wilson played the gutbucket,a homemade bass. Châteauneufdu Pape, a thick, powerful redwine, was a favorite libation.Perhaps all that wine addledtheir memories. Regarding thesign, Wilson points a finger atFrancophile John Rees. ButRees, who was director of PEP,denies responsibility. Phil Morton,who was part of PEP’s designteam, said, “It sounds likesomething I might have done.I’d like to take credit for it but,I just don’t know.”The wine no longer flows,but the well-weathered signremains, an anonymous monumentto the tastes and humorof the old PEP gang.Amber DanceCaterpillar crawls toa high-energy rescueRyan Schultz and Kris Andersonhad a problem: how to inspecta window in a pipe that carriesa powerful particle beam, 40feet below ground and 100 feetdown a narrow tunnel.Their solution: a 15-foot-longcontraption that combines adigital camera, a toy Caterpillarexcavator, and a scaled-upversion of the periscope childrenuse to peer over the backsof sofas. It cost just $200, notbad for a tool that is key tothe well-being of a multi-milliondollarexperiment at FermiNational Accelerator Laboratoryin Illinois.Directed via a 100-footremote control cord, the brightyellow excavator rolled into thetunnel, bathed the window inLED light and trained a spottingtelescope on it. Watchingthrough a periscope inserted intoan access shaft, inspectors onthe surface snapped pictures.The photos came out perfect,and a video of the inspectionkept Schultz’s 5-year-oldson entertained for days.“He wanted RIC to go with hisother toy cars,” Schultz says. Asfor RIC, or Remote IlluminationCaterpillar, “he’s like a person,”Schultz says. “He had his ownidentity. There’s nothing complicatedabout him. He just doeshis job.”The window is in a decaypipe linking Fermilab’s MainInjector with NuMI, an experimentthat shoots a beam of neutrinosthrough the ground to adetector in Minnesota. It must beperiodically inspected for corrosionand other wear and tear.But since the pipe isencased in concrete, wirelessdevices won’t work, and the lowlevel of radiation in the tunnelfogs photos taken down there.So Schultz and his supervisor,engineer Kris Anderson,drew on a deep well of experience:hours spent drivingremote-controlled cars withtheir kids.Meanwhile, senior technicianKeith Anderson knew fromhis days working on US Armytanks that he could devise aperiscope to look into the tunnel.“It is mostly modeled after thechildren’s milk-bottle periscope,a box with two mirrors on it,”he says.In the end, Schultz jokes, oneof the most difficult parts of theproject was getting reimbursed:“Think about it. I submitted areceipt that says Toys ‘R’ Us.”Tona KunzPhoto: Reidar Hahn, Fermilabsymmetry | volume 05 | issue 01 | jan/feb 087

It can take weeks to get into the groove ofanalyzing data from an unfamiliar detector.With a new starter kit, physicists at theCompact Muon Solenoid can cut that timeto hours.Postdoctoral researchers likeBrown University’s SeldaEsen can use the CMS StarterKit to get a jump-start ontheir analyses.Photos of Selda Esen:Reidar Hahn, FermilabPhoto-illustrations: Sandbox Studio8

symmetry | volume 05 | issue 01 | jan/feb 08By Elizabeth Clements9

In Fermilab’s Remote OperationsCenter from left: Liz Sexton-Kennedy, Sal Rappoccio and EricVaandering represent a fewmembers of the CMS Starter KitTeam. Photo: Reider Hahn, FermilabWhen Sal Rappoccio, a postdoctoral researcherfrom Johns Hopkins University, joined the CompactMuon Solenoid experiment in mid-2007, he didwhat any newcomer would do. He tried to starthis analysis.It did not go well.“Each group had its own computing tools,” saysRappoccio. “It was daunting for someone unfamiliarwith the software. It took a few weeks justto get something working.”Such rough beginnings are not unique to theCompact Muon Solenoid, or CMS, one of twogiant experiments at the Large Hadron Colliderin Geneva, Switzerland.Graduate students learn physics in the classroom.When they join an experiment and try tostart analyzing data, however, they find themselvesin a world of chaos. The early stages of anyexperiment can be especially overwhelming.“Nothing works when a new experiment starts,and you need help,” says Boaz Klima, a physicistat Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory inIllinois and member of the US CMS collaboration.The solution used to be simple: Go downthe hall, offer to buy a colleague a cup of coffee,and ask for help. That approach worked wellfor Rappoccio when he was a Harvard Universitygraduate student on the CDF experiment atFermilab.Buying coffee for an experimenter on CMS,however, is not so simple. Coffee is still a valuablecommodity, but CMS involves more than 2500people from all over the world. In fact, many CMScollaborators will work from their home institutionsand not actually live at CERN, the Europeanparticle physics center where the Large HadronCollider is scheduled to start up this year.Recognizing that a basic and consistentinstruction manual might be useful, Fermilab’sLHC Physics Center worked with other CMScollaborators to develop a set of user-friendlycomputing tools, or “starter kit.”Essentially a tool box for physicists, the CMSstarter kit provides researchers with a set ofsimple examples that lets them get started ontheir analyses right away. “The learning curveis so steep in a large experiment like CMS,” saysDan Green, co-coordinator of the LHC PhysicsCenter. “We felt we had to do better, becausespeed is essential at a discovery machine.” Theidea is to allow a user to create a graphic representation,or plot, of a particle collision in a matterof hours, rather than weeks.“The main goal is to reduce frustration,” saysRappoccio. “The starter kit makes things simpleso that newcomers can get reasonable resultsright away. It’s for someone who is familiar withphysics but not familiar with CMS.”10

When the LHC starts up, data will pour in fromup to 40 million particle collisions that occureach second in the CMS detector. A trigger system,which acts as a sort of spam filter, selectsonly the most interesting collisions, roughly 100per second, for further study. Even so, what’sleft is an overwhelming amount of data. Giantcomputer farms store this data, and physicistslater reassemble it into a form the human braincan grasp and analyze. Piecing the collisionstogether requires complex software with thousandsof lines of code. To discover anything new, physicistsmust be able to speak a common language—a computing language.That is where the starter kit comes in.“If you don’t have a simple way of getting peopleon the road, you lose them,” says Klima, who coleadsthe LPC Physics Forum, a weekly seminarfor young CMS scientists.Although the starter kit started as a USendeavor, it didn’t take long for all of CMS toembrace the idea and make it an official project.In fact, a Physics Analysis Tools group alreadyexisted for CMS, and the starter kit project fitright into its charge. The collaboration appointeda starter kit team, including Steven Lowettefrom the University of California, Santa Barbara;Elizabeth Sexton-Kennedy and Eric Vaanderingfrom Fermilab; and Petar Maksimovic andRappoccio from Johns Hopkins. Other CMS collaboratorshelped, too. “A lot of tools alreadyexisted,” Rappoccio says. “It was just a questionof putting things together in a user-friendly way.”The starter kit consists of a number of “buildingblocks” that recognize specific particles—forinstance, muons or electrons—coming out ofcollisions. Like templates for a Web page, theyallow the user to plug in information and generateimmediate results. Later, researchers cancustomize the computer code to suit their needs.Each building block comes with the collaboration’sguarantee that it will work.After testing the new tools on a few fellowphysicists, the team launched Starter Kit 1.0 at aCMS tutorial workshop for graduate studentsand postdocs in January. For now, physicists areusing the kit to analyze simulated data.The early reviews are positive.Malina Kirn, a graduate student at the Universityof Maryland, says she likes the kit because it’sa great way to start an analysis and “not worryabout mistakes.”Kevin Flood, a postdoc at the University ofWisconsin-Madison, describes the starter kitas satisfaction guaranteed: “It gives you a realsense of accomplishment.”The starter kit builds on a tradition of preparingpeople to dive into an experiment. At Fermilab,for example, the CDF and DZero collaborationsheld tutorials for newcomers. Klima recallsrecording DZero tutorials on videotape in the early1990s; some institutions even bought copies ofthe tapes for their users.ATLAS, the other gigantic detector at the LargeHadron Collider, also has a set of analysis toolsto get members started. Based on a handbookfrom the BaBar experiment at the StanfordLinear Accelerator Center, the ATLAS workbookintroduces experimenters to the detector’s softwareand describes basic analysis steps. Lastyear, ATLAS started another workbook dedicatedsolely to physics analysis.CMS also has a workbook, modeled on toolsthat ATLAS developed. Since both ATLAS andCMS have many members who used to work onBaBar, it’s natural for them to have similar softwaretools.Although the CMS team based parts of itsstarter kit on the workbook, they say it’s fundamentallydifferent because it was designed with theuser in mind. And while they originally developedthe kit for newcomers, it’s intended to becomea repository of CMS-certified code that’s usefulto anyone. A newcomer starts with the buildingblocks; a more experienced experimenter canuse the starter kit to test more complicated scenarios.“If you have an idea, you don’t want itto be months later before you find out if it works,’’Rappoccio says.Now that the starter kit is launched, the teamserves as the starter kit help desk. In additionto providing user support, they are adding moresophisticated physics tools for expert users. Infact, Kirn, who helped test-drive the kit, is alreadyworking on a more advanced set of tools.With the ever-evolving starter kit providing acommon language, physicists will be able tojump into the analysis of their mountains of dataright away, leading to quicker scientific resultsand, ultimately, a faster pace of discovery.symmetry | volume 05 | issue 01 | jan/feb 0811

Illustrations: Sandbox Studio12

As a particle physicist,Alan Litke routinelymeasures tiny signalswith equally tiny electronics.Now he’s applyingthose methods toindividual nerve cells,revolutionizing thestudy of how we see.By Lizzie Buchensymmetry | volume 05 | issue 01 | jan/feb 0813

Seeing is easy. We open our eyes, and there theworld is—in starlight or sunlight, still or in motion,as far as the Pleiades or as close as the tips of ournoses. The experience of vision is so commonand effortless that we rarely pause to considerwhat an astounding feat it is: Every time our eyesopen, they encode our surroundings as a patternof electrical signals, which the brain translates intoour moving, colorful, three-dimensional perceptionof the world.This everyday miracle has attracted thedevotion and expertise of an unlikely individual—Alan Litke, an experimental particle physicistbased at the University of California, Santa Cruz.When not in Geneva, Switzerland, where he isworking on the ATLAS particle detector for theLarge Hadron Collider, Litke is working with neuroscientistsand engineers, adapting the technologyof high-energy physics to study the visual system.The central challenge is to understand thelanguage the eye uses to send information to thebrain. Light reflected from our surroundingsenters our eyes through the transparent windowof the cornea and is focused by the lens, formingan image on the retina. The retina of each eyecontains about 125 million light-sensitive rodsand cones, which translate light into electrical andchemical signals. These signals travel to thevisual centers of the brain through a million retinalganglion cells, or RGCs.The retina thus encodes the activity of 125million cells in the signals of one million outputcells, which deliver the brain a highly compressedneural code from which our entire visual experienceis derived. Litke wants to understand howthis neural network processes information fromour surroundings and portrays it to the brain.Coming from a particle physics backgroundpresented many challenges for Litke. Not onlywould he need to adapt particle detector technologyfor the messier, wet world of living tissue,but he would also need to win over skepticalbiologists and funding agencies. He was proposinga whole new way of doing research in neuroscience,one that promised a vast leap forward inwhat could be measured and analyzed.Litke’s interest in neuroscience began with hisdaughter’s wobbly first steps. At the time, hewas developing the first silicon microstrip detectorsystems for the Stanford Linear AcceleratorCenter’s MARK II experiment. These systemsconsist of many very narrow detecting strips,fabricated on a thin silicon wafer, which recordthe passage of subatomic particles; when readout with specially-designed integrated circuits,they can deliver their vast amount of data overjust one line, instead of a nest of wiring. The goalof the project was to detect the charged particlesproduced in Z boson decays with unprecedentedspatial resolution, but the real objectof his fascination was the technology itself. “Itwas marvelous,” he recalls. “I really loved thattechnology.”As he watched his daughter teeter along, hemarveled at how her developing brain adaptedto the novel, bipedal world. “I had started readinga little about artificial intelligence, and I thought,‘This can’t be how the brain works!’ I couldn’timagine my beautiful daughter learning to walkif her brain was a set of if/then statements,purely logical. It’s much more magnificent andbeautiful than that.” He adds, “I didn’t know muchabout the brain, but I knew that if you wanted tounderstand it, you need to get in there and reallysee the circuitry. I kept thinking about thisincredible technology we were working with, andI wanted to come up with a way to use it forthe brain.”Litke appealed to his group at SLAC, tryingto lure them into his neurobiology vision, but therewere no immediate takers.Meanwhile, Markus Meister, a postdoc inDennis Baylor’s neurobiology lab at StanfordUniversity, was leading groundbreaking experimentson the retina.An appealing slice of tissueThe retina appeals to scientists studying neuralcircuitry for a number of reasons: All the inputneurons—the rods and cones—are known, as area number of its output neurons, the retinal ganglioncells. The input signals can be easily controlledjust by shining light on the retina. And theoutput signals can be easily monitored, in principle,by recording the electrical activity of the RGCswith electrodes. Further, what scientists learn fromstudying the retina can be applied to understandingthe function of any neural circuit—a central goalof neuroscience.For decades, studies of neural function in theretina and brain were restricted to recordingsfrom single neurons. It was presumed that thesemeasurements could be pieced together todecipher the functions of complex circuits, butMeister wasn’t convinced; he believed it wouldbe necessary to record from many neuronssimultaneously.Meister had already started working with a61-electrode array, originally developed by JerryPine, formerly a particle physicist at SLAC. Buthe needed more help. As luck would have it,Meister’s neighbor was a postdoc in Litke’s laband arranged an introduction.“It seemed to me like a wonderful project,” Litkerecalls. “To a physicist, the retina is like a particledetector. It’s an advanced pixel detector thatdetects light, and converts it to an electrical signal.I knew the only way to figure it out was torecord from live retinal tissue.” As Meister developedthe methods for monitoring the simultaneouselectrical activity of many neurons, Litke volunteeredto contribute in any way he could. He14

The retina (in cross section here) absorbs light in the rod andcone cells at the top and converts them to electrical signalsthrough a series of cell layers. The slice of retina sits directly onthe electrode array, which is mounted on a glass base.Image courtesy of Alan LitkeA computer-generated pattern of light is focused on the retina.The electrode array below senses the retina's response soscientists can understand the conversion of light to electricalsignals.Image courtesy of Alan LitkeRods andConesHorizontalCellsBipolarCellsAmacrineCellsGanglionCellsPlatinumBlackSiliconNitrideIndiumTin OxideGlassOptic NerveComputer-generatedpatternPhysiologicalSalineSolutionGlass SubstrateMicroscopeLensElectrode ArrayChamberLive RetinalTissuestarted to help with the electrode array fabrication,and published a paper with Meister in 1991.The technique involves placing a slice of retinaltissue on top of the array in a chamber filledwith a special solution that can keep the tissuealive for several hours. Images are then focusedon the retina’s photoreceptors while the electrodesmonitor the responses of the retinal neurons.At the time, an array with 61 electrodes was revolutionaryand, today, is still considered stateof the art. But Litke had higher aspirations.“In physics, when you design a new instrument,like a new accelerator, you want to go up by afactor of 10 in energy, in resolution, whatever itis,” he says. “So, not really knowing what thescale was for interesting neurobiology, I thought,‘We get tens of neurons now; let’s go up to thehundreds.’ A factor of 10 seemed like an interestingstep, and it seemed more appropriate forthe level of information the retina was feedingto the brain.”But Litke’s vision wasn’t embraced by hiscollaborators. “They were still learning to graduatefrom one to 10, so more would be a big leap,and I couldn’t convince them it was worth doing,”he says. “Without the support of the biologists,we couldn’t get funding.”Litke then moved to Geneva to devote himselfto high-energy physics, visiting California onlyoccasionally to lobby for the next-generation retinalmeasurement device. He had all but givenup when he received a call from Bob Eisenstein,head of the physics division of the NationalScience Foundation. “I assumed he called to talkabout physics,” Litke says, “but it turned out hewanted to talk about neurobiology.”Cultures collideEisenstein had been trying to push biologicalphysics within the NSF and had heard aboutLitke’s work with Meister. As Litke recalls, “He hada call for proposals but didn’t receive anythinginteresting, so he wanted to hear more about mywork. I took the proposal very seriously, and fasterthan any proposal I’ve ever submitted, it wasapproved.”Finally, Litke had the financial resources andencouragement to pursue neuroscience onceagain. He returned to his original goal of developingarrays of electrodes that would record fromhundreds of neurons simultaneously. “To biologists,using this many electrodes to record fromlive animals was inconceivable—they didn’t seehow it was technically possible,” Litke says. “Butto me, we were doing this daily at CERN!”Litke assembled a team from the high-energyphysics community. His first ally was WladyslawDabrowski, a physicist and integrated circuitdesigner from the AGH University of Science andTechnology in Krakow who had been working onread-out chips for ATLAS. To begin, the team madeprototype 61-electrode array systems that weresymmetry | volume 05 | issue 01 | jan/feb 0815

smaller, denser, and more advanced than the onesMeister had been working with. The goal was toeventually develop an array with 512 electrodes.But when Litke asked about more fundingfrom the National Institutes of Health, he wasstrongly discouraged. “Basically, the programmanager said I wasn’t really doing anything, justbuilding equipment,” Litke says. “They wanted ahypothesis. They didn’t want instrumentation.”Litke was shocked. In the world of physics,technology development is recognized as vitalfor new discoveries. But the life sciences are morehesitant about exploring something completelyunknown, and thus a well-founded hypothesis isrequired. “I couldn’t believe it. This technologywould take neurophysiology to another realm!”Litke says. “It would answer questions that cannotbe addressed by current technology. It’s an incrediblestory to me as a physicist.”At the time, Litke was working full-time on theALEPH experiment at CERN, while spendingnights and weekends working on his neurosciencearrays. He continued making trips to Stanford totalk with Baylor and his postdocs, who were workingwith Meister’s 61-electrode array.Although most of the postdocs were unwillingto advance past 61 electrodes—the technology’spossibilities had certainly not been exhausted—one, E.J. Chichilnisky, was captivated. Eventually,Baylor also became convinced, and wrote aninfluential letter of support to the NSF, generatingfurther funds for Litke’s project.“Most people weren’t interested because theydidn’t see the point,” Chichilnisky says. “We didn’thave enough information from our 61-electrodearrays to know whether it was worthwhile to goto another level. It was risky.” Yet Chichilnisky wasexcited about the project, and confident of itssignificance: “The truth of the matter is I don’t knowwhy. It was a gut feeling.”A groundbreaking leapWhen Chichilnisky took a faculty position at theSalk Institute in La Jolla, California, in 1998, hebegan collaborating with Litke, using the prototype61-electrode version of a new, more advancedarray to help evaluate the function of live retinaltissue.“These chips were completely different thanthe original 61-electrode arrays that Meister wasusing,” Litke says. “We completely redesignedeverything. We needed it to be high-density, withmany interconnected channels. Everything wasinspired by silicon microstrips.” The geometrywas different, but the concepts were all directfrom the Mark II Silicon Strip Vertex Detector.The first 512-electrode array went into usein 2003.Litke says, “When biologists saw this, theywere flabbergasted. When they think of 512 electrodes,they think of 512 cables coming out, abig amplifier, a room filled with electronics. Whenthey saw this tiny array—hundreds of electrodes,all squeezed into 1.7 square millimeters on a smallprinted circuit board, and one little cable—theywere really excited.”Chichilnisky says the unique technology hasrevolutionized his work, allowing his lab to examine,with unprecedented power and resolution,how patterns of RGC activity interpret the visualworld for the brain. While focusing on specificaspects of visual perception, such as motion andcolor, he is also developing models that wouldallow one to predict and reproduce RGC activityfrom the visual stimulus alone, an accomplishmentthat could contribute to the developmentof prosthetic devices for the visually impaired.For Chichilnisky, the ability to monitor theactivity of hundreds of RGCs simultaneously wasinitially the biggest draw. But in 2007 a newreason emerged, leading to the group’s biggestdiscovery yet.Among the one million RGCs “there are somethinglike 20 different types of ganglion cells,”Chichilnisky explains, “each of which is distinct andconveys different types of information. But lessthan half have really been studied, because they’reso rare you can’t detect them with traditional techniques.”The various types of cells form parallelvisual pathways that communicate contours,movement in specific directions, and colors asseparate images for the brain to piece together.To gain a comprehensive understanding of theinformation the brain receives, it is vital to understandwhat each of the 20 types does.A 61-electrode array doesn’t have enough coverageto do that. However, with a 512-electrodearray, the researchers could distinguish each typeof cell and its function, Chichilnisky says: “You geta completely new level of clarity about all thevisual signals.”This clarity led to a groundbreaking finding thatestablished the value of Litke’s device as a toolin neurobiology. In a paper published in October2007 with Dumitru Petrusca—a physics studentwho had developed software for ATLAS—as thelead author, Litke, Chichilnisky, and their teamreported the discovery of a new class of RGCsin the primate retina, thought to help primatesdetect motion. They named it the “upsilon” cell.“They’ve been searching for it in primates forover 40 years,” Litke says. “It’s such a small fractionof all the ganglion cells, so it was impossibleto confidently detect with single- or even61-electrode techniques. But when we recordedwith this array, we’d get five to 10 upsilon cells,so we knew it wasn’t an artifact.”Pushing the limitsWhen Litke and Petrusca started to write thepaper, they encountered another major differencebetween physics and neuroscience. “I was hoping16

In the center of this chip, an array of 512electrodes no bigger than the headof a pin records signals from neurons thattransmit information from the retina.Photo courtesy of Alan LitkeI could just write about our methods and presentthe data,” Litke says. That’s how it works in physics—thereare so many new devices and techniquesthat researchers typically just reference themost recent and most relevant. But in neuroscience,the publishing culture requires referencesgoing back nearly a century at times. He alsohad to get used to sensitivities involving theorder in which authors are listed on a paper. Theaverage neuroscience paper typically has fewerthan six authors, Litke says, and the order matterswhen people are trying to get jobs. In high-energyphysics, on the other hand, collaborations ofseveral hundred simply use alphabetical order.Authorship of papers is not the only differencebetween particle physics and neuroscience culture.Litke’s experience with the highly collaborativenature of particle physics has influenced hisneuroscience labs. “He changed the atmospherehere,” says Jeff Gauthier, a graduate student inChichilnisky’s lab. “In most neuroscience labs,everyone is working on their own project andis very independent from one another. But theexperiments with Alan’s array will only reallywork if everyone in the lab helps each other out.We have our own projects, but in order to maximizethe use of the technology and the animaltissue, we all work on each others’ projects, too.”Encouraged by progress in Chichilnisky’s lab,Litke decided to expand his neuroscience workat the University of California, Santa Cruz, wherehe was still working full-time on ATLAS. But itcontinued to be a struggle: “We didn’t have a lab,we didn’t have animals to work with, and evengetting a postdoc to work on the project wasa challenge, because the work was so risky. Youcome from a field where you know a lot, andenter one in which you know virtually nothing.”Litke was eventually able to convince highenergyphysicist Alexander Sher to join his neurosciencecrusade as a postdoc. “We talkedabout whether it would be better to continue inhigh-energy physics and work with ATLAS,”Sher says. “But with neuroscience, I’d be part ofa small team, doing groundbreaking work. I reallygot into the biology.”The reach of Litke’s technology now goesbeyond the retina. He has ongoing or proposedprojects to study the brain activity of naturallybehaving barn owls and rats to try to understandthe connections between their behaviors and theirneural activities. Nevertheless, he is still frustratedby funding issues. “With neuroscience proposals,you have to start out by saying how your researchis going to help autism or Alzheimer’s disease andsuch,” Litke says. “I can't just talk about how wonderfulthe technology is, and all the potential itholds. Everything has to be low-risk. I learned fromthe biologists that you only propose to do thingsyou’ve essentially already done.”Litke doesn’t think he’ll be able to spread himselfbetween physics and neuroscience muchlonger. “It’s getting to the point where I’m going tohave to decide on one field, and the truth is I don’tknow which it will be,” he says.Still, he is reveling in the possibilities before him:Stick with the ATLAS collaboration to help opena new era of particle physics, or move full-time toneuroscience and try to answer the questionsraised by watching his daughter start to comprehendthe world. Either way, he’ll be pushingthe limits of detector technology to measureand probe, in search of the answers to the mostfundamental questions of science.symmetry | volume 05 | issue 01 | jan/feb 0817

PhysicistsRock!Wherever physics goes, music follows,from the lyrical strains of flute andviolin to Blue Wine, Les Horribles Cernettesand Drug Sniffing Dogs. by Tona KunzStanding on a stage near the border of France and Switzerland, thesongwriter and keyboard player for Les Horribles Cernettes looksup at the sky and grimaces. So much for the annual free HardronicMusic Festival, he thinks. Thousands of physicists, engineers, technicians,and their families sit in a grassy field, far from any shelter, at CERN, theEuropean particle physics center. The crowd got in free; they won’t hesitateto leave, Silvano de Gennaro thinks. He sighs, and his fingers touchthe first note of the song “Big Bang” just as buckets of rain start to fall.People start moving—but not to go home. Concertgoers pick up plasticchairs to shield their heads. Others alternate clapping to the beat and wipingrain out of their eyes.Then water shorts out the lighting system. A bevy of upcoming specialeffects—heart-shaped balloons, bubbles, disco lights, smoke—vanish intothe darkness. Disappointed, de Gennaro gets ready to pack up.A beam of light streaks across the stage, focuses on a musician andstops, followed by another, and another. People are pointing flashlightsretrieved from their cars.“They were singing along. They called us back three times,” recalls deGennaro, who heads the laboratory’s multi-media production department.“They were all drenched, and they stayed anyway.”Their set finished, de Gennaro and his wife, Michele, change from the1950s-style attire of the Les Horribles Cernettes, who sing doo-wop songswith physics themes, into the black and leather of a heavy-metal band.Backed by a grinding guitar and pounding drum beat, a seductive Michelecloses out the festival, whose 10-band lineup had the audience swaying tojazz, lindy-hopping to the Cernettes and, at the end, flailing wildly.“They jumped on the stage with us and sang along,” de Gennaro says.“They head-banged.”With two decades of history behind it, the Hardronic Festival maybe the biggest and best-known event in the high-energy physics musicscene, but it’s no anomaly.Wherever physics is done, music rears its head—from a 20-year-oldrevolving-door rock band in Illinois to the sound of bamboo flutes in Japan,a jazz band in Germany, and a college physics instructor from Californiawho spreads a message of science activism through a provocative nightclubact.The CanettesFrom left to right: Jim Stone,Connie Potter, Wojt Krajewski,Wolfgang von Rüden, SimonBaird, David Boys, Marc Dambrine,and (top right) Steve Goldfarb.Photo: Claudia Marcelloni18

CERN’s Les Horribles CernettesThe Cernettes are known not just for their physics-flavoreddoo-wop, but also for posting the first photo on the Web.They also claim the first home page for a musical group.From left: Anne MacNabb, Michele de Gennaro, and VickyCorlass. Photo courtesy of Les Horribles Cernettessymmetry | volume 05 | issue 01 | jan/feb 0819

Beautiful connections“I kept telling people it’s not that different liking science or music,” saysTokio Ohska, a former professional classical singer and semi-professionalopera singer who is now a physicist at Japan’s KEK laboratory. “In scienceyou appreciate the beauty of the structure of nature. In music it is the same.You appreciate the beauty of the structure.”Music, he says, “kind of trains your mind so you can be creative. If youlike physics and nothing but physics, I don’t know if you can be creative.”Music and physics go back a long way. The Greeks used musical constructionsto explain the orbits of planets. Albert Einstein played the violin.Werner Heisenberg played piano. Richard Feynman played bongos. Eventoday, college courses and popular science books such as Brian Greene’sThe Elegant Universe use musical analogies to explain string theory.“It is amazing how much music has inspired physics,” said GeorgeGibson, a physics professor at the University of Connecticut who teachesa course on the physics of music. “It’s kind of a one-way connection.Physicists are interested in music, but musicians aren’t necessarily interestedin physics”—although he says his course has persuaded some students toswitch to physics majors.Both music and science require self-discipline and the ability to worktoward a distant goal, often by yourself. Like the math underlying physics,music consists of symbols making up a non-verbal language that usespatterns to forge meaning.“We find order with a few gaps intriguing,” Gibson says. “A gap in theStandard Model makes you want to find out what it is. Gaps in music drawyou in because the pattern is not resolved until the song plays out. I assumean interest in music or physics is just playing on the same process in the brain.”Others take a less cerebral view of the connection, suggesting it is abyproduct of the long work hours and frequent travel that careers in physicsoften entail. People seek out music as a way to relax or to connect withresearchers from other countries.“It’s really magic,” de Gennaro says. “You all work together, and then yousee your colleagues jumping around on the stage.”Dogs rock the prairieFermi National Accelerator Laboratory sits in the midst of an Illinois prairiethat has been restored to its pre-settlement, early 1800s condition. Theusers’ center and bar feel almost as old. Hand-me-down couches abandonedby graduate students push up against faded, wood-paneled walls. Whenthe center fills with students and collaborators from the Collider Detectorexperiment at Fermilab, or CDF, it has the cozy feel of a family reunion ata small-town lodge. The feeling is heightened by the fact that the collaborationhas its own rock band, Drug Sniffing Dogs.“It is definitely fun to do something with your colleagues in a non-workcontext,” says saxophone player Andy Hocker. “It is kind of a natural way tokeep the camaraderie going.”The band’s name was the result of a stalemate: after failing to findsomething everyone liked, members agreed that the name would be basedon the next television image they saw. It was a show about police dogs.The group plays for collaboration meetings, members’ weddings, andblock parties, and occasionally at the users’ center for the whole lab.Dancing always ensues.“A lot of people bring their children, so there are usually a half-dozen2- to 5-year-olds swinging their arms in front of us,” says Ben Kilminster, leadsinger for the Dogs.“We feed off the energy in the crowd.”In a world where jobs depend on yearly grants and researchers flyaround the globe to work in international collaborations, holding a band ofphysicists together takes work. Band members rotate in and out. FounderSteve Hahn, the only constant, finds new members and offers his home forpractices.20

To ensure that enough players are available for each gig, the band hasto build in redundancy. The Drug Sniffing Dogs roster includes five leadguitarists, two bass guitarists, two saxophonists, and a couple of horn playerswho can play several instruments.In its 20 years of existence, the band has experimented with musicalstyles to see what would get people on their feet. Feel-good, ageless rockclassics work best. Cover tunes with physics lyrics drew interest, but notas much dancing, so they’ve been dropped from the repertoire.At one lab Halloween concert, a saxophonist jerked his head at his bandmates when he saw most of the crowd on its feet rocking to the song“Knock on Wood.”“So we started running around in the crowd,” Hocker says. “Someonegrabbed one of the horn players and that just sort of spontaneously morphedinto a conga line.”Building a music sceneEach laboratory has a unique musical culture, a blend of local styles, on-siteamenities, and staff tastes.At KEK, for instance, Ohska tried to get a band together, but people weretoo busy. So he created a concert series that brings in outside musicians,Fermilab’s Drug Sniffing DogsOne of many incarnations of a bandthat has been evolving for 20 years.From left: (front) Louise Oakes, trombone,euphonium; Jared Yamaoka, drums;Ben Kilminster, vocals; Steve Hahn, guitar,keyboards; (back) Antonio Boveia, guitar;Andy Hocker, saxophone; Ulrich Husemann,saxophone; and Aron Soha, bass.Photos: Fred Ullrich, Fermilabsymmetry | volume 05 | issue 01 | jan/feb 0821

DESY’s Blue WineBelow: Manfred Rüter, trumpet. Bottom: YorckHoller, front, records the session; at back (fromleft) are Felix Beckmann, trombone; PeterGasiorek, drums; Jan Kuhlmann, bass; BerndReime, guitar; Hans-Bernhard Peters, saxophone.Top right: Christian Mrotzek, saxophone.Photos courtesy of DESYas well as an annual art festival that mostly features solo or duet performancesby lab personnel. There, the music takes on a soft and lyrical quality as crowdsgather to hear co-workers on bamboo flutes and violins.CERN has more success building bands. The lab has a practice roomand a music club with 120 members. But it took nearly 30 years to grow sucha substantial musical base. For the first Hardronic Festival in 1989, deGennaro could barely scrounge up a dozen musicians to forge last-minuteacts to fill the stage. Today the festival has more would-be participantsthan it can accommodate, and the lab hosts smaller concerts every two orthree months.“The Hardronic Festival was really the spark that started the fire,” deGennaro says. “There was a massive number of people who came aroundand joined the music club after that.”By providing mixing boards, microphones, and other equipment fora small fee, the music club has encouraged the creation of bands like theCanettes, whose name is both a play on Cernettes and a nod to thehalf-liter beer orders popular in Geneva.“I said, ‘OK. Let’s try this out,’ and it was fun,” says Steve Goldfarb, whoalong with fellow ATLAS experiment member Connie Potter is a leadsinger for the blues band. Three more CERN employees and four localresidents complete the roster.Although vacation schedules make it hard for the blues band to playthe Hardronic Festival, it appears regularly at local clubs, drawing a fan baseof several hundred Americans and Britons. Some members wear blacksuits, sunglasses, and hats reminiscent of the American movie classic TheBlues Brothers.During a recent gig at the 7 Arts pub, harmonicas and saxophonesmoaned as Goldfarb jumped around and fell to his knees, crooning tothe standing-room-only crowd. “Some real blues, man!” yelled a Floridaman, Paul Vega, from the audience. “Finally, some blues in Geneva.”Blue jazzAt Germany’s Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron Laboratory, or DESY,the music scene grew more slowly. The lab now has a choir, a classicalband, and an orchestra. Individual staffers practice banjos, pianos andtrumpets for solo shows. Rock bands are rare, but a jazz band with a soulfulside has found a niche.Blue Wine took its name from the bottles consumed during practice toloosen lips and fingers, and—depending on which band member you ask—the German term for “drunk” or a term for blues-inflected scales and notes.The 10-member band plays occasional gigs before a crowd of about 150in a nearby small town. It also performs three or four times a year at the lab’srestaurant, for holiday parties and at employee birthday parties.Core band members come from the technical, computer, administrative,and research sections of the lab. One non-lab musician rounds out thegroup, which ranges in age from 32 to 67, and visiting researchers sit in.“The band is very open,” says trumpet player Manfred Rüter.22

As at other labs, weekly practices must compete with work and familycommitments. “Sometimes we have more bottles of red wine than musicians,”says saxophone player Christian Mrotzek. That’s OK, he says, becausethe night is as much about socializing and relaxing as making music.Rüter, who initiated the group, took to music much later than his bandmates did. As a young man he was captivated by the free-spirited, highenergyvibe of jazz clubs and wanted to take up the trumpet. He just neverfound the time until a DESY colleague walked into his office talking aboutmusic. Rüter was 50 at the time. He shared his desire to play, the colleaguesaid he had extra trumpets at home, and for the next nine yearsRüter practiced and played off and on with friends before launching BlueWine with fellow lab employees. The band has been together five years.Mrotzek, meanwhile, had been playing saxophone. He didn’t want tobother anyone, so he practiced his instrument in a guest room below thelab’s cantina. That’s where guitar player Bernd Reime found him. AsMrotzek recalls it, Reime asked, “What are you doing here? There is a bandnearby. You have to come play.”Later, Reime saw Felix Beckmann walking through the lab with a trombonecase. The men started bumping into each other and into other musiclovers and talking about songs. Blue Wine was solidifying.Drummer Peter Gasiorek had retired, but came back at age 67 to join theband because it gave him a connection to the lab and his old colleagues.Judging from audience reactions at DESY and other labs, they seem toenjoy those connections, too.Physics ChanteuseLynda Williams, whose day job isteaching physics and astronomy, addsa cabaret feel and political bent toher music as the Physics Chanteuse.Photo courtesy of Lynda WilliamsPhysics cabaretSome bands use music to enrich their lives; others use it as a way to shownon-scientists their world.The Cernettes sing about physics concepts in songs like “Every Protonof You” or “Big Bang.” They also sang “Surfing on the Web” in 1992, at atime when the World Wide Web, created at CERN to allow physicists to sharedata, was a mystery to most people. The first photo on the Web wasof the Cernettes, who also claim to have created the first homepage fora musical act.Lynda Williams also sings about physics, but with a political message.As the Physics Chanteuse, she croons about the 1980s political downfallof the Superconducting Super Collider, which was abandoned midwaythrough construction in Texas. In “Hi Tech Girl,” set to the tune of Madonna’s“Material Girl,” her backdrop is a photo montage of 300 women scientists.Women have not always found her act endearing, though. She dressesin evening gowns or slinky cocktail dresses with go-go boots, turning heract into a cabaret. Some say the sex appeal in the show demeans the science,but Williams, who teaches physics and astronomy at Santa RosaJunior College and formerly at San Francisco State University, says it doesjust the opposite.“I can prove science is super-sexy,” she says. “I don’t mean pornographic;I mean titillating. It’s cool. It’s slick. String theory and high-energy particlephysics are as cutting edge as there is. People are really, really interestedin smart, sassy, sexy science and that is what I do.”The American Institute of Physics commissioned her to write a songfor Valentine’s Day. The result was “Love Boson,” about an unmeasurableparticle that mediates the force of love. Physicists cheer the show, shesays, but it’s the engineers, political junkies, and science fans who really gowild. And winning over those groups helps scientists make the case forcutting-edge research projects to the general public.She says she hopes her songs encourage people to spread the messagethat understanding science is power.“If I am going to talk about global warming or carbon dating, before I canmake a political comment people have to understand the science,” Williamssays. “They are always surprised. They say, ‘I had no idea this is what scienceis about.’”23symmetry | volume 05 | issue 01 | jan/feb 08

gallery: satoru yoshiokaAn extraordinaryeye for the everydayText by Glennda ChuiPhotography by Satoru YoshiokaThe two facets of Satoru Yoshioka’s work couldnot be more distinct.His black-and-white Polaroid photographshave been exhibited in the United States, Japan,and Europe. They range from distorted, enigmaticimages of people to wall-sized projectionsof Nagasaki’s Fountain of Peace and the warstrafedstreets of Sarajevo, both part of an 2001art project at The Museum of Art in Kochi,Japan, his home town. “I wanted to expressa sense of never-ending time with never-endinghuman tragedies in this work,” he wrote on hisWeb site.Meanwhile, Yoshioka has been traveling theworld taking pictures of high-energy physicslabs—inside and out, in daylight and in the spookyglow of artificial lighting at night. People rarelyappear in these photos, which instead focus onequipment, everyday work areas, streets, landscapes,and buildings.“I want to use photography to do art. That’s theway I started, actually,” says Yoshioka, an ebullientman who will sometimes spend hours gettinga photo just right. “That’s still the focus, but it’schanging a little bit.”With his physics photos, he says, he hopes tomake “a kind of record of the ordinary personlooking at such a special place.” Most visitorsfocus on the big detectors and other spectacularsights, he adds, “but they don’t imagine just a24

street or a building. So I wake up in early morningand walk around taking pictures and put themon the Web site.”Yoshioka studied photography at PalomarCollege in San Diego and was one of a selectgroup of photographers chosen for the EuropeanPhotography ’90 exhibition, which opened in Berlinthe day after the Wall fell (see bottom photo onprevious page.) His love of particle physics goesback to 2005, when a friend who worked atStanford Linear Accelerator Center in Californiaarranged for him to see the lab.Since then, he has prowled CERN, theEuropean particle physics center in Geneva,Switzerland; KEK and J-PARC in Japan;and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory inIllinois, one of many stops on a honeymoon tourof the United States that included New YorkCity and Niagara Falls.“I went to CERN and these machines are sohuge,” Yoshioka says. “It’s just amazing, it’s beyondmy imagination, and it’s beautiful.”Like his black-and-white Polaroids, his digitalimages of physics labs are often manipulated.By changing the contrast or intensifying colors,he creates his own interpretation of a scene.Yoshioka seeks out obscure places anddetails—things that are hard to find on an officiallab tour, which in any case would not give himnearly enough time to get the shots he wanted.Top left and right: Fermilab, August 2007“Their accelerator was running so I couldn’ttake pictures of it, so we went lookingfor something special. We were driving aroundlooking at Wilson Hall and the patternswere very interesting.”But with his outgoing nature, he often findssomeone who will take him around and give himall the time he needs.At J-PARC, for example, “the people were really,really friendly, and they were so eager to showme—‘Come this way!’” he says. His unofficialguides, including accelerator physicist MasakazuYoshioka, showed him deep inside the lab, allowinghim to photograph empty rooms that would soonfill up with equipment: “That was really fortunate, toget a really deep insight into the facility.”In August, Yoshioka was invited to show hiswork at the UCLA-KEK-Sokendai InternationalSymposium and Workshop, which focused onstrategies for studying contemporary science inJapan and in the United States. His photos arefeatured on a 2008 KEK calendar designed byhis wife, Ayako—it is for limited distribution, notavailable to the public—and hundreds are displayedon his Web site, www.sypi.com.symmetry | volume 05 | issue 01 | jan/feb 0825

gallery: satoru yoshiokaTop: CERN, February 2007“I made a friend, and he said, ‘Takeall the pictures you want!’ Thisis near Building 180, where they’remaking the parts for ATLAS.”Bottom: KEK, August 2007“In the nighttime KEK is muchmore dramatic. I went so manyplaces—the machine shop,storage areas, everywhere.”26

Top: SLAC“This is the ordinary life ofSLAC, behind the klystrondepartment where there isa workshop.”Bottom: J-PARC, August 2007“At J-PARC everything is justbeautiful. This is a brand-newtunnel, a place where equipmenthad not been installed yet,totally empty space.”symmetry | volume 05 | issue 01 | jan/feb 0827

day in the life: monica dunfordPlenary session of the ATLAS Trigger & Physics Week at CERN Main Auditorium. Photo: CERNMeetings: You gottahave ’em, love ’emReally? Really, guys? Did we really have more thanfive thousand meetings last year?Some friends and I were discussing the volumeof meetings within ATLAS, one of the two bigdetector experiments at the Large Hadron Colliderin Geneva, and I thought I might support thisdiscussion with some statistics.According to the 13-year summary of ATLASmeetings registered on our main schedulingWeb site, we had 5063 meetings in 2007, nearlytwice as many as the year before.But even that number understates the case.What the chart actually shows is the numberof “events,” and a single event can range froma one-hour meeting to a week-long conference.Trigger and Physics Week, for instance, whichinvolved five full days of meetings, is listed as oneevent, which makes this figure all the moredepressing. Say there are approximately 250working days at CERN, the European particlephysics lab where the LHC will soon start operations;this would work out to approximately18 meetings per day. It baffles me that we havethat much to talk about!Since I just couldn’t resist, I looked at thenumber of 2007 events for CMS, the other bigdetector at the Large Hadron Collider. AlthoughATLAS and CMS each involve roughly the samenumber of scientists—about 2000 people fromaround the world—there were 2938 CMS eventsto ATLAS’s 5063.Hmm.I think there are two possible explanations here.Maybe CMS uses a different scheduling andconferencing Web site. Or perhaps CMS is moreverbally efficient; they say in one word what ATLASsays in two.It would be interesting to see the monthly statistics,but the Web site doesn’t generate those.That’s probably for the greater good of the experiment.People can really get into plotting all thevarious statistics; and knowing ATLAS, we wouldprobably have to schedule a meeting to discussthe results.If you were to ask me—and I feel I representthe population well on this—“Do you spend toomuch time in meetings?” I would say, “Yes.” But ifthe next question was, “Which meetings do youthink ATLAS could afford to get rid of?” I wouldsay, “None.”Take Trigger and Physics Week. In the talksI attended, the information presented was usefuland relevant, meaning that for the most part itwas information I needed to continue my ownwork. I cannot point to a single talk that was notworth hearing. Certainly there was some overlap,but I didn’t feel I was being told the same thingtwice. So maybe 5063 meetings per year is thereality of doing physics in an experiment with2000 people.Here’s my meeting schedule for the week ofJanuary 15, 2008, which did not include any big,multi-day events. All but one of these meetingsis weekly. My meeting load is pretty typical, I think.People have different focuses, but the volumeis similar.Monica Dunford is an Enrico Fermi Fellow from the Universityof Chicago who works on the Large Hadron Collider’sATLAS experiment. She lives in a quaint little house in theFrench countryside. When not attending meetings, sheenjoys rowing, backpacking, running marathons, and bloggingabout her work at http://uslhc.us/blogs/.28

Monday, January 15, 20089:00–10:00 a.m. We call this the Tile morning meeting. Everyone at CERN who is working on calibrationand commissioning of the tile calorimeter, or TileCal, gathers in the coffee area to discussactivities for the next two days. TileCal is an ATLAS sub-detector that measures the energies of particlejets coming from the collision point. This is a very nuts-and-bolts meeting—where the detector willhave power for the day, who is doing what tests and when, things of this nature.5:30–6:30 p.m. The University of Chicago group meeting. Every week we have a phone meetingbetween the seven Chicago people located at CERN and about 15 back home in Chicago. Peoplegive informal presentations about their work. It helps the group stay connected and gives us constructivesuggestions in a relaxed environment.Tuesday, January 1610:00–11:00 a.m. Counting room management meeting. The “counting room” is a series of undergroundrooms near TileCal that contain most of the electronics and services for the sub-detector,such as the low-voltage power lines. This meeting discusses system-wide problems that mightaffect the sub-detectors, from power cuts to disruptions in the computer networks. Usually one personfrom each sub-detector attends this meeting and passes the information on to their group.5:00–6:00 p.m. Fast Tracker weekly meeting. The Fast Tracker is a hardware upgrade being proposedfor the ATLAS trigger system, which sifts through the enormous amount of data comingout of particle collisions and decides which events are interesting enough to examine further. Thegoal of the upgrade is to quickly search for particle tracks in the innermost ATLAS sub-detectors.The tracks can be used to select events that produce b quarks, for example, which are of great physicsinterest. This group is doing research and development for the proposal; in our weekly meetingwe discuss any results and the progress we have made.Wednesday, January 179:00–10:00 a.m. Another Tile morning meeting, going over plans for Wednesday and Thursday.10:00–11:00 a.m. Phase 2 commissioning meeting: This is an ATLAS-wide meeting to discuss theintegration of each sub-detector into ATLAS as a whole. During commissioning—the process of gettingready to take meaningful data—each sub-detector is basically autonomous. But as we movecloser to the day when the Large Hadron Collider starts running, we have to get all the sub-systemsoperating together. We work toward this by running multiple sub-systems at a time. In this meetingwe discuss the planning and coordination of these combined runs, and tally up the things still to bedone before the commissioning phase is over.1:00–2:30 p.m. CERN supersymmetry meeting. We discuss how we are going to search for supersymmetry—atheoretical phenomenon in which each known particle would have a heavier partner—withATLAS. We spend a lot of time talking about how we can realistically measure the background “noise”of particles coming out of collisions and how to measure uncertainties, so we could recognize anyevidence of supersymmetry that might pop up.Thursday, January 189:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Level-one calorimeter trigger meeting. We discuss the commissioningof the level-one calorimeter trigger, another system for sifting data to find interesting collisions.It is a monthly meeting, so it is longer. The level-one calorimeter trigger receives signals from TileCal,so I work with the level-one people on jointly commissioning and calibrating the combined TileCal/level-one system. This meeting is good for me; I can connect with some of my level-one colleagues,whom I might not interact with on a daily basis, and see their recent work.4:00–6:00 p.m. TileCal weekly commissioning meeting: We talk about calibration results, how thecommissioning is going and the things we still need to do before the beam turns on. About 50people spend a large fraction of their time commissioning TileCal. Among other things, this meetingallows me to see what others are doing.symmetry | volume 05 | issue 01 | jan/feb 08Friday, January 199:00–10:00 a.m. Yet another Tile morning meeting, going over plans for Friday and the weekend.29

essay: jennifer ouellettePhoto courtesy of Jennifer OuelletteThe BigBangTheoryOne of my favoritescenes in The BigBang Theoryinvolves the twomain characters,Leonard andSheldon, trying tomove a large, flatbox up two flights ofstairs. Faced with no equipment and little upperbodystrength, Leonard declares, “We are physicists!The intellectual descendents of Archimedes!”He proceeds to work the problem, tilting the boxagainst the stairs, explaining (for the benefit of thestudio audience) the mathematics of how thatreduces the force required to lift the box.I think of that scene whenever I hear a memberof the physics community griping about the showand how it reinforces negative stereotypes of scientists.The premise is quite simple: Two nerdyphysicists befriend the pretty blonde waitresswho moves in next door, and wackiness ensuesfrom the cultural clash. It’s the show about physicsthat physicists love to hate: “How dare networktelevision call us nerds for fun and profit!” Butchances are the person griping hasn’t even seenthe show. And that’s too bad, because The BigBang Theory is actually a very smart, savvy series.More importantly, the science is right on target–arare accomplishment for a TV sitcom. Muchof that is due to the efforts of UCLA physicistDavid Saltzberg, who serves as the show’s technicalconsultant, painstakingly fleshing out thephysics jargon in the dialogue and making surethe equations on the white boards lurking in theset’s background are accurate.When was the last time you were watching TVand the characters brought up the formula fordetermining the force required to push an objectup a slope…and then used it to solve a practicalproblem? There are more obscure in-jokes, too:When Leonard spends the night with a brilliantfemale physicist, she “fixes” Sheldon’s equationin-progressby changing the sign, promptingSheldon to gripe that now he’d have to share hisNobel Prize with her. Only PhD physicists familiarwith QCD theory are likely to get that joke, yetthere it is, on network television.So it’s not the science that physicists are likelyto find problematic. It’s the way the main charactersare portrayed. Sheldon is a genius physicistwith a serious case of Asperger’s syndromewho needs cue cards to alert him to sarcasm incasual conversation, and arranges his breakfastcereals numerically according to fiber content.His other regularly appearing friends are no better.Leonard emerges as the sweet-natured counterfoilto his geeky compatriots, and much of theshow’s premise rests on whether he has a chancewith the waitress Penny. Will she recognizeLeonard’s true romantic worth?It’s understandable that watching a shy, awkwardphysicist drooling over the stereotypical“dumb blonde” might annoy some folks in thephysics community. Why can’t television portrayscientists “accurately” instead of falling backon unfair stereotypes? That’s the familiar refrain,but women could make the same complaintabout Penny–who isn’t nearly as stupid in laterepisodes as she is initially made out to be. Thecharacters are evolving as the show develops,moving beyond the initial caricatures. The humoris evolving, too. It’s more in the vein of goodnaturedteasing than outright ridicule, and it stemsfrom a genuine fondness for geek culture. Afterall, Penny genuinely likes the geeky physicistsnext door.Perhaps the humor raises some hacklesbecause–like all good comedy–it contains anelement of truth. We have all encountered physicistswho fail to pick up on common socialcues; who make inappropriate comments toattractive women; and who engage in animated,technical arguments on the difference betweencentrifugal and centripetal force, to the bemusementof any non-scientists who happen to bepresent. In another scene, the guys argue atlength about the scientific inaccuracies containedin the first Superman movie. There areentire Web sites devoted to bad movie physics,and scientists are notorious for griping at lengthabout minor technical inaccuracies in film andtelevision.Comedy is a funhouse mirror: It’s an exaggeratedreflection, to be sure, but it is still a reflection.If we don’t like what the funhouse mirror showsus, maybe we need to change the reality. Only thenwill we see a change in the reflection. Or maybewe could just relax a little and learn to chucklegood-naturedly at our own human foibles. Thephysicists in The Big Bang Theory are likeable,even endearing. How can that be bad for physics?Ultimately, the primary objective of any TVshow is to entertain, not to teach. But humor isinfectious. People can still come away with atiny bit of physics insight, and a better appreciationfor its relevance to our lives.Jennifer Ouellette is the author of The Physics of the Buffyverseand Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annalsof Physics. She also blogs about science and culture at CocktailParty Physics: http://twistedphysics.typepad.com.symmetry | volume 05 | issue 01 | jan/feb 0830

logbook: W bosonLetter courtesy of the CERN ArchiveMargaret Thatcher, thenIn August 1982, prime minister of theUnited Kingdom, paid a private visit to the European laboratoryCERN. On her arrival she told Director GeneralHerwig Schopper that she wanted to be treated as a fellowscientist. Schopper gave Thatcher, who had studiedchemistry, a tour of the laboratory and told her about theongoing search for the carriers of the weak nuclear force.The particles, dubbed W and Z bosons, enable radioactivedecays and make the sun shine.At CERN, scientists operating two large undergrounddetector assemblies, UA1 and UA2, were in hot pursuitof these bosons. They were collecting signals of particlesemerging from proton-antiproton collisions produced atthe laboratory. Schopper promised the prime minister thathe would inform her when the scientists had found theelusive bosons. Four months later, Schopper sent herthis letter, sharing with her “in strict confidence” the newsabout the imminent discovery of the weak bosons. Heexplained that scientists had found the decay of a positivelycharged W boson into a positron and a neutrino(W + → e + +ν).On January 25, 1983, CERN held a press conferenceto announce the discovery of the W boson. UA1 andUA2 had recorded a total of nine events consistent witha W signature. The particle was more than 15 timesheavier than any other fundamental particle previouslyobserved. About four months later, CERN announcedthe discovery of the Z boson.Kurt Riesselmann

explain it in 60 secondsThe W bosonis one of five particles that transmit the fundamental forces of nature.It is responsible for two of the most surprising discoveries of the20th century—that nature has a “handedness” and that the physics of antimatter is subtly differentfrom the physics of the matter-based world we see around us.The W boson comes in positively and negatively charged varieties. They collaborate with anotherparticle, the electrically neutral Z boson, to cause the force known as the weak interaction, whichis responsible for some forms of nuclear decay, among other phenomena.The W is very massive, which means its effects are very short range and very weak at everydayenergies. Hence, the effects of these particles are subtle—but important! For example, the W canchange the very nature of an interacting particle, turning an electron into a neutrino or a down quarkinto an up quark. This is important in the fusion reactions that power the sun, which involve protonsturning into neutrons. Finally, the W provides the only established mechanism for allowing matter andantimatter to evolve in different ways.When W bosons are created in particle accelerators, they live for only about 10 –25 seconds, butthey provide important tests of the Standard Model of particle physics.Patricia Burchat, Stanford UniversitySymmetryA joint Fermilab/SLAC publicationPO Box 500MS 206Batavia Illinois 60510symmetryUSAOffice of ScienceU.S. Department of Energy