CERN MEDICIS: radioisotopes for health
On 4 September, a ground-breaking ceremony at CERN marked the start of construction of CERN MEDICIS, a research facility that will make radioisotopes for medical applications. The new facility will use the primary proton beam at ISOLDE – CERN’s online isotope separator – to produce the isotopes, which initially will be destined for hospitals and research centres in Switzerland. The aim is then to extend the service to a larger network of laboratories in Europe and beyond.
ISOLDE has provided beams of isotopes for experiments at CERN for more than 40 years. Since the 1990s, it has used a 1.4 GeV proton beam from the Proton-Synchrotron Booster, which interacts with a primary target. This beam loses only 10% of its intensity and energy on hitting the target and the particles that pass through can still be used. For CERN MEDICIS, a second target will be placed behind the first to produce the desired radioisotopes. An automated conveyor will then carry this second target to the CERN MEDICIS infrastructure, where the radioisotopes will be extracted.
So far, the Geneva University Hospitals, the Centre hospitalier universitaire vaudois (the University Hospital of Lausanne) and the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research of the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) will use CERN’s isotopes. But there is room for expansion.
The project is financed by CERN and counts on financial and in-kind donations from private foundations and from KU Leuven in Belgium. The civil engineering for the facility should be completed by the end of 2013. Installation of the infrastructure and equipment –including a radiochemical laboratory – is planned for completion in 2015.
Carlo Rubbia appointed senator for life
Four new senators for life were appointed by the Italian president, Giorgio Napolitano, on 30 August. They included Carlo Rubbia, CERN’s director-general from 1989 to 1993, together with the music director and conductor Claudio Abbado, the neuroscientist Elena Cattaneo and the architect Renzo Piano.
Before becoming director-general, Rubbia was head of the UA1 collaboration and in 1984 was awarded the Nobel prize in physics together with Simon van der Meer for discovery of the W and Z particles. During his term of office as director-general, the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) collider was inaugurated and the four LEP experiments produced their first results. He was also a strong advocate of the case for the next collider in the LEP tunnel – the LHC – first as chair of a long-range planning committee and later as director-general. In 1993, the last year of his mandate, the World Wide Web protocol and code were declared "free of charge" for all time.
In Italy, the senators for life have the same power as elected senators, including the right to vote. As the term suggests, their mandate lasts for their lifetime. The four new senators for life are worldwide renowned personalities in the fields of music, art and science.
André Lagarrigue prize honours work of Haïssinski
Jacques Haïssinski, professor emeritus of physics at the Université Paris-Sud, has been awarded the 2012 André Lagarrigue Prize. He received the prize on 12 September, during a lively ceremony in which his friends and colleagues acknowledged his scientific achievements, the diversity of his interests – from electron–positron colliders to cosmology – and the depth of his physics understanding.
The award, established in 2006 under the aegis of the French Physical Society, pays tribute to André Lagarrigue, director of the Laboratoire de l’Accélérateur Linéaire (LAL) Orsay from 1969 to 1975, who played a major role in the discovery, 40 years ago, of weak neutral currents with the Gargamelle bubble chamber at CERN, so establishing the validity of the electroweak theory. Co-funded by the CEA, CERN, Ecole Polytechnique, IN2P3-CNRS, LAL and Université Paris-Sud, the prize is awarded every two years.
Having begun his career at LAL when the laboratory had just been created, Haïssinski’s work has focused mainly on the physics of electron–positron colliders and on the particle physics accessible through electron–positron, electron–photon and photon–photon collisions. The subject of his doctoral thesis at the Université Paris-Sud was the operation of AdA – the small collider in which electron–positron collisions were observed in Orsay for the first time, 50 years ago. Combining experimental and theoretical approaches, Haïssinski became a pioneer in the field. Most recently, he has engaged in the design of the ThomX project, a compact source of X rays produced by Compton scattering of an intense laser beam off stored electrons.
Like Lagarrigue, Haïssinski is an outstanding teacher advocating the dissemination of knowledge to the general public. Respected for his integrity and his thorough and rigorous mind, he has participated in many international committees and held major positions. He was notably deputy scientific director of IN2P3-CNRS (1987–1992), led the Dapnia-CEA (1992–1996) and chaired the LEP Committee at CERN (1990–1993).
Royal Society honours the communication work of Frank Close
Frank Close of Oxford University has been awarded the 2013 Michael Faraday Prize by the Royal Society for excellence in communicating science to UK audiences. The society described Close as "the popular authoritative voice of particle physics for three decades", praising him for championing physics in the days when "hard science" fought for media attention.
Close has popularized physics through radio, newspaper and magazine articles, several books, and lectures he has given throughout the world. Particle physicists will know his classic introduction to the subject, The Cosmic Onion, and his recent work The Infinity Puzzzle, which tells the story of the quest to find the Higgs boson (CERN Courier Januray/February 2012 p51). At CERN he was co-founder and the first chair of the European Particle Physics Outreach Group.
The Scuola Normale Superiore: still strong after 200 years
Two centuries ago, on 1 November 1813, the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa enrolled its first students. Founded two years earlier by Napoleonic decree on 18 October 1810, it was intended as a "carbon copy" of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. With Napoleon’s abdication in 1814, this first institution lasted for only one academic year but it came to life again during the 1840s and went on to become a highly regarded seat of learning. Nobel laureates Enrico Fermi and Carlo Rubbia are probably the best known among the physics students of the 20th century. Others well known in the field of particle physics include Gilberto Bernardini, Gian Carlo Wick, Luigi Radicati, Emilio Picasso, Luigi Di Lella, Italo Mannelli, Giorgio Bellettini, Riccardo Barbieri and Michelangelo Mangano. The Scuola Normale Superiore is at the right of this sketch of the Piazza Dei Cavalieri in Pisa. On the left, is a building where Count Ugolino della Gherardesca was imprisoned with his family and, according to Dante, finally ate the corpses of his children.