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signal to background A saint goes underground at DESY; foreigner physicists get family treatment during Japanese quake; astronomy takes particle physics on a field trip; ALICE squeezes in; who needs James Bond when you have neutrinos?; letters; correction Photos courtesy of Ilka Flegel Saint protects European XFEL tunnel To the sound of a traditional German miners’ song, the two tunnel builders were lifted up to a shrine on the wall directly above the giant tunnel boring machine. They gently placed a wooden statue of St. Barbara into the shrine. Applause erupted from the 250 guests below —tunnel builders, scientists, politicians, and nearby residents. Hamburg’s and Schleswig-Holstein’s state ministers for science, Herlind Gundelach and Cordelia Andreßen, took scissors from a red cushion and cut the ribbons to inaugurate the project. The breaking of champagne bottles against the wall of the construction pit and the boring machine christened the newest construction phase of the European XFEL, a new X-ray free-electron laser in Hamburg, Germany. It was the second time the XFEL’s tunnel builders had called upon St. Barbara, patron of miners and others who work with explosives, to protect them from the dangers of their work. Miners in many countries pay homage to St. Barbara; Germany has a particularly strong tradition that plays an important role for miners and tunnel builders. Before two boring machines broke ground to carve the 5.8-kilometer tunnel system between the accelerator laboratory DESY and the town of Schenefeld, celebrations honored this decades-old custom. A June 2010 ceremony christened the first, 71-meter-long machine, whose cutter head measures 6.17 meters in diameter. Its smaller counterpart, with a 5.48-meter cutter head, was christened in December and powered up in early January 2011. Gundelach and Andreßen, 4 the state ministers for science, took on the role of patronesses for the tunnels excavated by the two machines. Workers regard patronesses as the earthly representatives of St. Barbara during the construction period, and name the tunnels after them. The patronesses agree to watch over the tunnel builders and oversee celebrations such as the festival of St. Barbara. St. Barbara willing, the European XFEL project expects to finish construction and begin research operation in 2015. It will provide extremely intense X-ray flashes to help map atomic details of viruses and cell composition and film chemical reactions, an ability that not too many decades ago would have been considered miraculous. Ilka Flegel symmetry | volume 8 | issue 2 | may 2011
KEK JPARC Disaster brings physics family closer A day after the devastating March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, with strong aftershocks still testing surviving buildings, Japanese residents and physicists were offering beds, food, and rides to stranded foreign physicists. This hospitality in the face of what has been called Japan’s worst disaster since World War II was a lifeline for the 30 mostly American and European foreigners at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex, J-PARC. “The Japanese are the people who helped the foreigners, not the other way around,” said Stony Brook University physicist Chang Kee Jung, international co-spokesman for the T2K experiment in Japan. While a 10-foot tsunami caused no damage to the laboratory, the magnitude-9 quake took out electricity, water, network phone lines, and part of the dormitory housing. Residents of Tokai, facing a water shortage and damaged buildings and roads, shared what meals they had with the physicists, and offered them shelter in a community center. Two days later, their Japanese colleagues from KEK, the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Tsukuba, were making their way on side roads to pick up the foreigners for evacuation to KEK at Tsukuba, and eventually to Narita Airport. The approximately 59-mile drive took seven hours because the quake had made main roads impassable. Japanese researchers at the KamLAND neutrino experiment at Kamioka made a similar journey to the hard-hit coastal town of Sendai to take food and water to colleagues at Tohoku University there, said Stuart Freedman, co-spokesman for KamLAND. Jung, an American physicist who has done research in Japan for 20 years, followed the progress of the aid and evacuation of the foreigners from New York, receiving updates via cell phones and eventually a single Kindle electronic-book reader, which draws less power, until the last battery ran out. Like other physicists across the globe, he wished the best for his Japanese colleagues and their families as their stories slowly emerged through tidbits on social media and newscasts. Jung said he wasn’t surprised at all by the selfless behavior of the Japanese, or by this demonstration that the global particle physics community is, indeed, a family. “They were just doing what comes naturally,” he said. To help Japan make a rapid recovery, US researchers continue looking for ways to combine efforts with colleagues in Japan who face personal hardships, repairs to their experiments, and power shortages, potentially for a long time to come. Tona Kunz Physics in a cornfield On a cool September evening in a cornfield south of Chicago, dozens of telescopes turned sky- ward for one of the largest star parties in the Midwest. At the center, Fermilab astrophysicist Dan Hooper was describing something no telescope can see. As keynote speaker for “Astrofest 2010: The Link between Particle Physics and Astronomy,” Hooper explained physicists’ pursuit of the invisible dark matter and dark energy that make up most of the universe. “If we want to understand the universe at the largest scales, we have to understand the laws of physics at the smallest scales,” Hooper said. “We can 5 tell by looking at galaxies that the part of the universe made of atoms is only a very small fraction of it. Dark matter and dark energy make up 95 percent of the universe, but we still don’t know what they are.” Astronomers and particle physicists have joined forces to explore the universe’s dark side. “In recent decades, these two seemingly different fields have become very interconnected,” Hooper says. The connection spurred the Chicago Astronomical Society to focus for the first time on particle physics during its yearly Astrofest star party. Founded in 1862, the society is the oldest amateur astronomy group in the US. Its members, from all walks of life, meet annually for two days and two nights of what organizer Jim Cuca calls “astronomy overload.” “At your typical star party, everybody just sits around and waits for it to get dark,” Cuca says. “Astrofest is unique in filling the day with speakers. Most of us don’t understand things like general relativity, so we need professionals at our meetings to clear up misconceptions.” Between talks and telescope-peering time, participants showed off their newest telescopes and cameras, shared tips of the trade and quizzed Hooper on his dark matter research. “There were a lot of great questions and interaction,” Hooper says. “People who do amateur astronomy are by nature inquisitive about how the universe works, and they take it very seriously.” Sara Reardon Photo illustration: Reidar Hahn, Fermilab symmetry | volume 8 | issue 2 | may 2011
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