The 2002 Pontecorvo and Bogoliubov prizes
Samoil Bilenky of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), Dubna, has been awarded the Institute's prestigious Bruno Pontecorvo Prize for 2002, for his theoretical research in the field of neutrino oscillations. Bilenky is seen here with his award (right), together with the director of JINR, Vladimir Kadyshevsky (centre), and Nicolai Russakovich, the jury chairman for the prize and director of the JINR Dzhelepov Laboratory of Nuclear Problems.
The Nikolai Nikolaevich Bogoliubov Prize for 2001-2002 has been awarded to Albert Tavkhelidze (the Institute of High Energy Physics, Tbilisi, Georgia and the Institute of Nuclear Research, RAS, Moscow) and Yoichiro Nambu (Chicago University), for their fundamental contribution to the theory of quarks with colour. They were the first to suggest a hypothesis for a new quantum number - the colour charge. In 1965, while studying composite hadron models, Tavkhelidze, together with Bogoliubov and B Struminsky, and independently Nambu and Moo-Young Han, suggested a new quantum number for quarks, later called "colour". A particular feature of the dynamical approach they used is that quarks with colour are regarded as physical fundamental particles - fermions that stay in hadrons in a quasi-free state.
The dynamical quark model of hadrons became the foundation of the relativistic generalization of the SU(6) symmetry of elementary particles, and led to the relativistically co-variant equations for particle bound systems in quantum field theory. The concept of colour quarks became the keystone in the theory of quantum chromodynamics.
Earlier this year Bryan Pattison was at Buckingham Palace, London, to receive an OBE for services to British interests in Switzerland, awarded in the 2003 New Year's Honours List. Pattison moved to Switzerland in 1966 when he joined CERN as a physicist working on the interactions of neutrinos in heavy-liquid bubble chambers. More recently he has become well known at CERN as head of the Users' Office and president of the CERN Cricket Club. He is seen here with his medal - which was presented by Prince Charles - along with his son Andrew and daughter Maxine.
Guillaume Unal, from LAL Orsay, has been awarded the 2003 Joliot-Curie Prize of the SFP (French Physical Society), which is given to a particle physicist or nuclear physicist in alternate years. After his thesis on the UA2 experiment on the W mass measurement in 1991, Unal went to CDF at FNAL where he was one of the most active participants in the discovery of the top quark. In 1995 he joined NA48 at CERN, where he was heavily involved in the measurement of direct CP violation in KL decays.
At the occasion of the 13th Meeting of the BMBF JINR Association Committee, Horst Rollnik, emeritus professor for theoretical physics at the Physics Institute at Bonn University, received an honorary doctorate of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), in recognition of his long-lasting engagement in the Heisenberg-Landau Programme. This programme was set up to support scientific exchange in various fields of theoretical physics by financing schools, workshops and mutual working visits, and it was originated by Rollnik in 1991 in close collaboration with Vladimir Kadyshevsky, who is the current director of JINR.
Klaus Winter, who is well known for his contributions to neutrino physics at CERN, together with Masatoshi Koshiba from the University of Tokyo, in Stockholm on the occasion of the award of the 2002 Nobel Prize to Koshiba for his pioneering work in detecting cosmic neutrinos (CERN Courier November 2002 p6).
The ATLAS silicon test laboratory in Building 161 was one of the stops on the itinerary of Gary Nairn MP, chair of the Standing Committee on Science and Innovation, Australia, when he visited CERN on 17 April. In the test lab he saw work on silicon detectors for ATLAS, to which Australian universities are contributing. Nairn also toured the ATLAS assembly area and the cavern where the experiment is due to be installed.
The ALICE experiment, with its future emphasis on heavy-ion collisions in the LHC, was a key part of the visit to CERN of Walter Henning, director of the German heavy-ion research centre, GSI (Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung mbH), Darmstadt, on 14 April. Here Henning (second right) listens intently together with, from left to right, Jurgen Schukraft (ALICE spokesperson), Hans Gutbrod and Norbert Anger (both from GSI), while Lars Leistam (ALICE deputy technical coordinator) describes the challenges in the construction of ALICE.
In the ATLAS assembly area, in front of one of the two vacuum vessels for the ATLAS end-cap toroid magnets, Horst Wenniger of CERN describes the construction of the ATLAS detector to Manfred Popp, chairman of the executive board of the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe GmbH, when he visited CERN on 2-3 April. Popp not only toured the ATLAS assembly area, but also visited the CMS construction site, the LHC magnet test area, and met with representatives of the LHC Computing Grid and European DataGrid projects.