Recently in international facilities Category

Physics Today: A team working on the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus at CERN has succeeded in trapping and holding atoms of antihydrogen for more than 15 minutes—roughly 10 000 times longer than before, writes Mark Buchanan for New Scientist. Because antimatter is annihilated when it comes in contact with matter, the researchers used a magnetic trap to isolate the antihydrogen. According to Eugenie Samuel Reich, who wrote for Nature about the ALPHA team's work last year, an antihydrogen atom comprises a negatively charged antiproton and a positively charged positron, the antimatter counterpart of the electron. Because antihydrogen is made entirely of antiparticles, it is believed to be stable, unlike atoms made of both particles and antiparticles. The researchers are counting on that longevity to compare the energy levels in antihydrogen with those of hydrogen to see whether antimatter particles experience the same electromagnetic forces as matter particles, a key premise of the standard model.

UPI: CERN's director of communications James Gillies has told the BBC that the leaked report of a possible Higgs detection originated from a small group within the large ATLAS collaboration. The report is genuine but premature in that it has yet to be endorsed by the ATLAS collaboration or subjected to rigorous testing and peer review. Publicized last Thursday, the leaked information set off an explosion of speculation, comment, and recriminations on physics blogs.

Nature: The next-generation XENON100 dark-matter search experiment at Gran Sasso underground laboratory in Italy did not see any dark-matter particles during a recent 100-day run, but the data collected may shed new light on fundamental physics, writes Eugenie Samuel Reich for Nature. In a paper published online yesterday, the XENON100 researchers report that they detected three events during last year's experiment. Although they did not see evidence of dark-matter particles, their results, if confirmed, contradict earlier findings from other experiments, place new limits on how strongly dark matter interacts with ordinary matter, and may help refine the particle-physics theory known as supersymmetry. However, several researchers have expressed skepticism regarding the XENON100 group’s findings. Juan Collar, a University of Chicago cosmologist who works on CoGeNT, said that a lot rests on the calibration of the XENON100 detector, which he will be looking to study in detail. "Previous attempts by the XENON collaboration to calibrate the response of their detector contained traceable mistakes in methodology," he said.

Nature: Southern Sudan is going to become Africa's newest state this July. As a result, staff and students of the University of Juba, the University of Bahr el Ghazal, and the Upper Nile University's college of medicine and school of nursing must all move from Khartoum, in the north, to Juba, Wau, and Malakal, respectively. The moves could leave the institutions without staff, facilities, or infrastructure and could undermine scientific research in Southern Sudan. The University of Juba will initially move back to its old campus, which was used as a base by government forces during the Sudanese civil war and is now in disrepair. Upper Nile University may be forced to close its college of medicine because Malakal has no laboratories and the hospital there doesn't have the facilities needed to teach medical students. All three universities have extended their summer holidays by three months to accommodate the moves.

Nature: When it's up and running at its site in Jordan, the SESAME synchrotron will provide scientists in the Middle East with access to a bright, coherent x-ray source for crystallography and other kinds of experiments. But, as Nature's Geoff Brumfiel reports, three of the project's members—Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia—are embroiled in anti-government protests that could jeopardize the funding needed to complete the project. Brumfiel quotes Chris Llewellyn Smith, the president of SESAME's council: "It's obviously a bit worrying, but I think we'll come through it."

Science: The team behind Japan's IKAROS solar sail mission confirmed Wednesday that it completed all the performance tests set for it during its planned 6-month life, writes Dennis Normile for Science. So the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has extended the mission to March 2012. Launched 21 May 2010, IKAROS used centrifugal force to unfurl its sail and relied on the pressure of photons streaming from the Sun for acceleration. While sailing, the craft's suite of scientific instruments caught gamma-ray bursts, collected data on space dust, and participated in very long baseline interferometry observations of celestial objects.

Nature: After years of struggle on behalf of ocean science, Wang Pinxian—a marine geologist at Tongji University in Shanghai—is taking a key role in China's plans to expand marine research. With China facing an increasing need for energy and minerals, it is now taking an interest in the deep sea. In its next five-year budget, which will be announced in March, the country will boost funding for oceanography, particularly in exploration, research, and deep-sea technologies. As a result, Wang was awarded a US$22 million grant from China's National Natural Science Foundation to lead studies into the geology and biology of the South China Sea.

Daily Mail: On the edge of the Yorkshire moors in the UK, in a lab more than a half mile below ground, astroparticle physicists work at the Boulby potash mine, which houses the Deep Underground Science Facility. Two pieces of experimental apparatus—a dark matter detector and a dark matter telescope—which cost less than £1 million to run are being used to search for the elusive matter. James Delingpole, writing for the Daily Mail, provides an in-depth account of the facility.

Science: A plan to cover a budget shortfall for the ITER fusion reactor project in France appears to have fallen apart just two weeks before the end-of-year budget deadline, writes Daniel Clery for Science. The plan was for the European Union to use €1.4 billion ($1.9 billion) in unused 2010 budget funds to fill a gap in 2012–13 caused by the project's ballooning costs. ITER is a global project supported by seven partners: the EU, China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the US. Now the European Commission, the EU’s executive agency, must go back to the drawing board.

Sunday Express: Staff from ATLAS, the biggest particle-physics experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, have recorded an album for Christmas. Chris Thomas, an ATLAS technician who masterminded and produced the Resonance double CD, found a wealth of musical talent among the 3000 ATLAS physicists, technicians, and support staff in Switzerland. One track on Resonance is the "Atlas Boogie," a bluesy introduction to the search for the Higgs boson, or “god particle." Most of Resonance’s 36 tracks are not inspired by science, however, but are a mixture of cover songs and original compositions and range over rock, folk, classical, and Latin.

Fox News: For the first time, scientists in Japan have converted information into pure energy. In their experiment, they caused a molecule to climb up a very small “spiral staircase” made of potential energy and created using electric fields. The molecule, which had some thermal energy, moved in random directions. When it went up the staircase, the scientists let it continue; when it went down, they blocked its motion by inserting a virtual wall using an electric field. As the particle moved up the staircase, it gained energy—without the group having to add any; to guide the climb, they simply used the information about which direction the particle happened to be moving at any given time. Their results were published in the 14 November issue of Nature Physics.

New Scientist: The Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland produced a flurry of “mini big bangs” on 7 November. Instead of the usual proton–proton collisions, the LHC started smashing lead ions, which produced dense fireballs with temperatures of about 10 trillion kelvin. At those temperatures, the atoms’ nuclei melt and become a quark–gluon plasma. The resultant plasma fireballs will allow physicists using the ALICE detector at CERN to study the universe as it was about a millionth of a second after the Big Bang.

Nature: France and the UK have agreed to build a joint nuclear testing facility in France, using technology developed in the UK. Known as EPURE, the facility will image dummy bombs as they explode in order to determine whether warheads remain reliable as they age. The research is essential to the maintenance of the two countries’ nuclear weapons because both have a moratorium on testing. Although the decision to share the sensitive facility has baffled some, Bruno Tertrais, at the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris, said that the motivation is "extremely simple: to save money."

Photonics.com: American artist Josef Kristofoletti has created a three-story-tall mural of the ATLAS particle detector at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The mural, which is one-third the size of the actual detector, is located aboveground at the ATLAS experiment site, while ATLAS itself is in a cavern 100 meters below. The artist was inspired to produce the large work when he visited the detector; he was invited there by ATLAS collaboration members who had seen his smaller painting of it. “We were thrilled to learn that ATLAS and particle physics had found their way into popular art,” said Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory physicist Michael Barnett, an ATLAS outreach coordinator. Because CERN and the LHC have attracted considerable interest from the artistic community over the years, the laboratory is developing an artist-in-residence program.

Science: A planned €500 million particle collider to be built outside Rome is moving forward as Italy increases its investment and other groups jump on board. The SuperB project, which will be built from parts of a decommissioned US accelerator, would generate large quantities of B mesons to study charge conjugation–parity (CP) violation—the asymmetry between matter and antimatter. The project faces competition from the Japanese, however, who are working to build the Super KEKB, which would pursue much the same research.

New Scientist: Despite having created some innovative technology, CERN has not attempted to patent its inventions until now. Responsible for the touchscreen and the World Wide Web, CERN is only now working with the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization to try to profit from its engineers’ innovations. In the past, CERN’s 20 European member states had avoided patents in order to avoid double-billing members to use the inventions in their own countries.

Nature: The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor could be getting a new director. ITER’s seven partners—Europe, Japan, the US, South Korea, China, Russia, and India—are reportedly troubled by a likely three-year delay in meeting the original 2016 completion date and by a likely doubling of the project’s cost to €10 billion (US$12.6 billion). According to Nature:

Osamu Motojima, a distinguished Japanese physicist, is being floated as the project's new chief. The appointment, if made, may trigger further changes for the project. "I wouldn't be surprised if there's a huge shake-up in ITER management under him," said one fusion scientist familiar with the project.

Science: Venus, Earth's twin by size and composition, is a hostile planet full of heat, a carbon dioxide–laden atmosphere, and thick sulfuric clouds.

Most puzzlingly, venusian winds move at up to 60 times the speed of the planet's rotation; Earth's fastest winds clock in at just 10% to 20% of the rotation speed.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is out to solve this problem with its Akatsuki mission, slated for launch on 18 May. Akatsuki will train four cameras at ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths on the planet to track clouds at different altitudes. The craft also has a high-speed camera that aims to capture venusian lightning, presumed to occur but never directly observed.

symmetry: Business in the particle accelerator world is booming, as is business at Advanced Energy Systems, where Tony Favale is president. His company is doing research and design work for the next generation of accelerators, which will be employed in electron lasers for the Navy, radiation detectors for the Department of Homeland Security, and more efficient particle colliders at US national laboratories.

But of the seven positions he was advertising in November, three were still unfilled in mid-March because Favale can't find enough qualified accelerator scientists.

Physics Today: The European Southern Observatory has announced that the Cerro Armazones site in Chile will be the baseline site for the planned $1.3 billion optical/infrared 42-meter European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), and not the island of Las Palmas as hoped by ESO member state Spain.

Nature News: Around four tonnes of ancient Roman lead was yesterday transferred from a museum on the Italian island of Sardinia to the country's national particle physics laboratory at Gran Sasso on the mainland. Once destined to become water pipes, coins or ammunition for Roman soldiers' slingshots, the metal will instead form part of a cutting-edge experiment to nail down the mass of neutrinos.

Various: In the two decades since its launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has transformed the way we see and understand our universe.

Now, to mark the observatory's 20th anniversary, scientists at NASA have selected the most dramatic and scientifically important images it has taken.

Related links
Up close and phenomenal—the Hubble telescope at 20 The Observer
Images mark 20 years of Hubble telescope Daily Telegraph

Nature News: Overlooking Los Angeles, six small domes nestle amid the pine trees atop Mount Wilson. Individually, the 1-meter telescopes inside those buildings have no chance of competing with the biggest ground and space telescopes. But collectively, the Mount Wilson telescopes are producing some of the sharpest images ever made.

Nature News: Europe's busiest big science facilities, such as powerful neutron sources and synchrotrons, are centers of international collaboration—but there is precious little coordination to ensure that they are adequately funded, or that underused or moribund facilities are wound down.

To tackle this problem, says Carlo Rizzuto, chair of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures, charged with drawing up Europe's priority list of such facilities, he is calling for a new independent body to help manage their cash flow across the continent.

Physics Today: CERN's Large Hadron Collider has finally started colliding two 3.5-TeV circulating beams of protons together to produce 7-TeV collisions and the official start of the LHC research program.

The collisions above (image credit: CERN) occurred at 13:06 Central European Summer Time, according to a live broadcast from CERN, with a couple hundred thousand collisions taken in the first hour.

"It's a great day to be a particle physicist," said CERN director general Rolf Heuer. "A lot of people have waited a long time for this moment, but their patience and dedication is starting to pay dividends."

Nature News: "I am here to watch you." So began anthropologist Arpita Roy when introducing herself in 2007 to a roomful of particle physicists. At the time, those scientists were racing to finish work on the world's biggest machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe's high-energy physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.

The LHC carries the hopes of generations of physicists, who have designed it to reach energies never before achieved in a collider and—possibly—to produce a zoo of particles new to science. But the LHC is also a huge human experiment, bringing together an unprecedented number of scientists. So in recent years, sociologists, anthropologists, historians and philosophers have been visiting CERN to see just how these densely packed physicists collide, ricochet and sometimes explode.

washingtonpost.com: At colleges and universities across the country, many graduate students who have babies work until their due dates and return soon after giving birth.

If they don't, they risk getting kicked off projects, falling out of favor with powerful faculty members and losing their student status, which is often required for visas, health insurance plans and student loan grace periods.

"Workplace balance is an issue in any workplace, but it can play a huge role in academics," said Lisa Maatz of the American Association of University Women. "They judge your research, but they also judge your collegiality."

Did you have any difficulty juggling the demands of academia and of home? Considering commenting or provide advice below.

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Physics Today: At just after 5:20 this morning central European time, two 3.5-TeV proton beams successfully circulated in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This is the highest energy yet achieved in a particle accelerator. The first attempt to collide beams at 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam) is expected in the near future.

"Getting the beams to 3.5 TeV is testimony to the soundness of the LHC's overall design, and the improvements we've made since the breakdown in September 2008," says CERN's director for accelerators and technology, Steve Myers. "And it's a great credit to the patience and dedication of the LHC team."

The current LHC run began on 20 November 2009, with the first circulating beam at 0.45 TeV. Shortly afterward on 23 November, two circulating beams went around the collider, followed by a new energy record of 1.18 TeV on 29 November.

By the time the LHC switched off for general maintenance and the holiday period on 16 December, another record had been set with collisions recorded at 2.36 TeV.

More than a million particle collisions were already recorded in 2009 from the four major experiments, ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb. The first physics papers from the experiments were soon to follow with papers from ATLAS appearing this week.

Higher energy collisions beyond 2.36 TeV require higher electrical currents in the LHC magnet circuits, which placed exacting demands on the new machine protection systems—built after the initial accident at CERN—which have now been readied for the task.

The fact that the LHC has been running so smoothly since operations restarted has led the CERN council to change the colliders' operating schedule, says CERN's director general Rolf Heuer.

"Traditionally, CERN has operated its accelerators on an annual cycle, running for seven to eight months with a four to five month shutdown each year," says Heuer. "With the LHC, things are different. Being a cryogenic machine operating at very low temperature, the LHC takes about a month to bring up to room temperature and another month to cool down. A four-month shutdown as part of an annual cycle no longer makes sense for such a machine."

Instead, says Heuer, the LHC will run with longer periods of operation—18&ndahs;24 months with a short stop at the end of 2010—accompanied by longer shutdown periods when needed.

"This will bring enough data across all the potential discovery areas to firmly establish the LHC as the world's foremost facility for high-energy particle physics," says Heuer. "Only when the repairs and consolidation are complete after the LHC's next shutdown will we be fully able to consign 19 September 2008 to the history books."

Paul Guinnessy

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Did design flaws doom the LHC?
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First collisions occur in the LHC

New plans for fixing and using the LHC

LHC repair plan points to weaknesses in original design

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Physics Today: New thermal images of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot have provided the first detailed interior weather map of the giant storm system.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/ESO and NASA/ESA/GSF

The observations reveal that the reddest color of the Great Red Spot corresponds to a warm core within the otherwise cold storm system, and images show dark lanes at the edge of the storm where gases are descending into the deeper regions of the planet. These types of data, detailed in Icarus, give scientists a sense of the circulation patterns within the solar system's best-known storm system.

"This is our first detailed look inside the biggest storm of the solar system," said coauthor Glenn Orton, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We once thought the Great Red Spot was a plain old oval without much structure, but these new results show that it is, in fact, extremely complicated."

Sky gazers have been observing the Great Red Spot in one form or another for hundreds of years, with continuous observations of its current shape dating back to the 19th century. The spot, which is a cold region averaging about 110 Kelvin is so wide about three Earths could fit inside its boundaries.

The thermal images were obtained by 3 giant 8-meter telescopes—the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, the US-led Gemini Observatory telescope in Chile, and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan's Subaru telescope in Hawaii—have provided an unprecedented level of resolution and extended the coverage provided by NASA's Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s.

Together with observations of the deep cloud structure by the 3-meter NASA Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii, the level of thermal detail observed from these giant observatories is comparable to visible-light images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope for the first time.

One of the most intriguing findings shows the most intense orange-red central part of the spot is about 3 to 4 Kelvin warmer than the environment around it, said Oxford University fellow, Leigh Fletcher, the lead author of the paper.

This temperature differential might not seem like a lot, but it is enough to allow the storm circulation, usually counter-clockwise, to shift to a weak clockwise circulation in the very middle of the storm. Not only that, but on other parts of Jupiter, the temperature change is enough to alter wind velocities and affect cloud patterns in the belts and zones.

"This is the first time we can say that there's an intimate link between environmental conditions—temperature, winds, pressure and composition—and the actual color of the Great Red Spot," Fletcher said. "Although we can speculate, we still don't know for sure which chemicals or processes are causing that deep red color, but we do know now that it is related to changes in the environmental conditions right in the heart of the storm."

Related link
Thermal structure and composition of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot from high-resolution thermal imaging

Nature News: With the launch of a powerful laser facility, called Orion, the UK's atomic weapons establishment (AWE), which is generally closed to academic research, is opening up.

Researchers will use Orion to explore two key parameters for materials used in nuclear weapons: their opacity and their equation of state.

The first describes how radiation travels through a material—in this case, the two stages that make up a weapon, particularly as how the opacity changes with age

The other parameter—the equation of state—describes how a material behaves at enormous pressures and temperatures. By generating data on these and other crucial parameters, Orion will give nuclear-weapons scientists the information they need to ensure that their models are correct.

If the US National Ignition Facility is a thermonuclear hammer, then Orion is a scalpel says Peter Roberts, head of the AWE's plasma-physics department to Nature's Geoff Brumfiel.

Physics Today: (Updated 3/2/10 to include Gemini Observatory). Chile has ideal weather conditions for observing the night sky in the Southern Hemisphere, with high altitude and low humidity, which has led to some major international astronomical facilities being based there.

The European Southern Observatory, has three main sites in Chile at La Silla, Paranal, and Chajnantor, for instruments such as the Very Large Telescope (VLT), the partly built Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), and the newly completed Vista telescope.

Through a message on the ESO website, the staff expressed their deepest condolences to the families of the victims and sympathy and support for all those affected by the earthquake.

No casualties among ESO staff occurred but power cuts and network interruptions were impacting communications from the telescopes to the outside world. The largest outrage happened at the La Silla Paranal Observatory, the southern-most telescope among the facilities, which lost power for 10 minutes.

Astronomers who were scheduled to visit ESO were asked to put their trips on hold until further notice, and were encouraged to remotely control the telescopes over the internet.

"Despite being the 7th strongest earthquake ever recorded worldwide, the ESO observatory sites did not suffer any damage," said Lars Lindberg Christensen, at the ESO headquarters in Garching, Germany, "partly as [the telescopes] are engineered to withstand seismic activity and partly due to their distances from the epicentre."

The National Optical Astronomy Observatory's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile also survived intact with nearly all the staff and visitors confirmed safe.

"The effects were strong,' says a message on the NOAO website, "but no significant damage was registered. Both telescopes and observatory infrastructure are intact with no detected damage. Indeed, observations on the telescopes continued immediately after the earthquake. Minor rock slides on the access road were cleared Saturday morning. Electricity, external telephone, and internet connectivity were lost initially, but internal communications remained stable, allowing operations to continue."

It was a similar situation at the Gemini Observatory, "The earthquake disrupted observations on early Saturday morning for less than 30 minutes," said a press release. "Subsequent operations have been essentially normal with the exception of Internet connectivity."

Paul Guinnessy

Nature News: Running more than a year behind schedule and at half its intended energy, the world's most powerful particle accelerator is slated to begin its first full scientific run this week. Along with relief, the occasion is bringing some soul-searching. One senior scientist who helped to build the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, is claiming that the cause of the delay—a major accident in 2008—could have been avoided.

"Any technical fault is a human fault," says Lucio Rossi, a physicist who oversaw the production of the accelerator's superconducting magnets. In a paper published this week, he concludes that the catastrophic failure of a splice between two magnets was not a freak accident but the result of poor design and lack of quality assurance and diagnostics. The project, he says, will be coping with the consequences for many months to come.

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KEK: The Japanese-led multinational T2K collaboration announced today that they had made the first detection of a neutrino which had travelled 295 km from their neutrino beamline at the Japanese Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) facility in Tokai village to the Super- Kamiokande underground neutrino detector near the west coast of Japan.

"Switching on one of the world's first neutrino superbeams is a great achievement," said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. "Even in a time of financial difficulty around the globe, it's important not to lose sight of the fact that basic science is and always will be a crucial element of progress. It is therefore heartening to see such an important new basic science initiative getting underway now."

"It is a big step forward," said T2K spokesperson Takashi Kobayashi. "We've been working hard for more than 10 years to make this happen."
 

J-PARC now produces the world's most powerful neutrino beams to study neutrino oscillations.
 

"Neutrinos are the elusive ghosts of particle physics," Kobayashi explains. "They come in three types, called electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos, and tau neutrinos, which used to be thought to be immutable."
 

Interacting only weakly with matter, neutrinos can traverse the entire earth with vastly less attenuation than light passing through a window. The very weakness of their interactions allows physicists to make what should be very accurate predictions of their behavior, and thus it came as a shock when measurements of the flux of neutrinos coming from the thermonuclear reactions which power our sun were far lower than predicted.

A second anomaly was then clearly demonstrated in 1998 by Super-Kamiokande, when it showed that the flux of different types of neutrino generated within our atmosphere by cosmic ray interactions was different depending on whether the neutrinos were coming from above or below (which should not have been possible given our understanding of particle physics). Other experiments, such as Kamioka Liquid scintillator Anti-Neutrino Detector (KamLAND), have conclusively demonstrated that these anomalies are caused by neutrino oscillations, whereby one type of neutrino turns into another.

The first T2K event seen in Super-Kamiokande is seen in the image above. Each dot is a photomulipler tube which has detected photons. The two circles of hits indicate that a neutrino has probably produced a particle called a π 0, perfectly in time with the arrival of a pulse of neutrinos from J-PARC. Another faint circle surrounds the viewpoint of this image, showing a third particle was created by the neutrino.

The T2K experiment has been built to make measurements of unprecedented precision of known neutrino oscillations, and to look for a so-far unobserved type of oscillation which would cause a small fraction of the muon neutrinos produced at J-PARC to become electron neutrinos by the time they reach Super-Kamiokande.
 

Observing the new type of oscillation would open the prospect of comparing the oscillations of neutrinos and anti-neutrinos, which many theorists believe may be related to one of the great mysteries in fundamental physics—why is there more matter than anti-matter in the universe? "The observation of this first neutrino means that the hunt has just begun," said Koichiro Nishikawa, director of the Institute for Particle and Nuclear Studies at KEK and founder of T2K. "The first physics results are expected later this year." Today's news he says, "is the beginning."

Times Online: The UK research councils (RCUK), which oversees the UK government’s spending on science and technology, has said it believes that many of the obstacles associated with producing fusion power are close to being overcome.

The RCUK wants to commit Britain to a 20-year research and construction plan that would see a fusion power station in operation around 2030. Didcot in Oxfordshire is among the sites under consideration for the European High Power laser Energy Research (HiPER) project: a facility dedicated to demonstrating the feasibility of laser driven fusion as a future energy source.

Nature News: Scientists are foreseeing unprecedented opportunities to send up research payloads on anything from a suborbital trip of a few minutes to a sojourn lasting several weeks on a commercial space station by using a new generation of commercial space launchers such as the Falcon 9.

"We have never had a capability like this in 50 years of human space exploration," says planetary scientist Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Stern is a former science chief for NASA and is helping to organize the first meeting dedicated to research opportunities in suborbital space, to be held on 18–20 February in Boulder.

Nature News: In an effort to put the world's largest scientific experiment back on track after delays and cost overruns, Europe is shaking up the agency overseeing its portion of the multinational ITER reactor.

On 16 February, Frank Briscoe, a UK fusion scientist, will take the reins as interim director of Fusion for Energy (F4E), the agency in Barcelona, Spain, that manages Europe's ITER contribution—the largest of any partner's. Briscoe replaces Didier Gambier, a French physicist who joined the F4E as director when it formed in 2007. Gambier was originally appointed for a five-year term.

Symmetry breaking: A Fermilab shipment of cavities to the Japanese laboratory KEK marks a major milestone in the advancement of US particle accelerator technology and the development of the proposed International Linear Collider (ILC).

Fermilab has shipped two high-gradient nine-cell ILC-type cavities for use in the S1-global effort, a prototype at KEK of the ILC main linac.

Wired.com: The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) project, a joint project between NASA and the German space agency, the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft und Raumfahrt, had its first test flight last month over the Mojave desert.

The converted 747SP flies to a high enough altitude to get above 99% of the water vapor in the atmosphere, making the instrument ideal for carrying out infrared observations of the night sky. IR radiation is generally absorbed by water vapor.

“The biggest modification is that we cut a huge hole in the side of the fuselage” is what NASA spokesman Alan Brown said when asked about the airplane by Wired.com, “it’s about 15 feet long.”

Related Physics Today articles
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Science: If there's one thing you can be sure about with particle accelerators, it's that they're expensive to build. The €3 billion Large Hadron Collider at CERN is the most extreme example. But even at the other end of the scale, a hospital that wants an accelerator for proton beam therapy for cancer patients will likely have to fork out more than $100 million, and neither of the two most common existing technologies—cyclotrons and synchrotrons—is well-suited to the task. Now a handful of accelerator physicists are experimenting with a new type of machine—a cross between a cyclotron and a synchrotron—that avoids many of the shortcomings of both and is simpler and cheaper to build.

CDMS group/Physics Today: The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) experiment, located a half mile underground at the Soudan mine in northern Minnesota claims to have seen two events that may be dark matter. The evidence however, is not conclusive, but does limit the interaction range for seeing dark matter, and rules out some theories on how dark matter behaves.

A more detailed story will appear on the Physics Today Update section on the 28 December.

What is dark matter?

Astronomical observations from telescopes, and satellites, and measurements of the cosmic microwave background have led scientists to believe that most of the matter in the universe neither emits nor absorbs light.

This dark matter would have provided the gravitational scaffolding that caused normal matter to coalesce into the galaxies we see today. In particular, scientists think that our own galaxy is embedded within an enormous cloud of dark matter. As our solar system rotates around the galaxy, it moves through this cloud.

Particle physics theories suggest that dark matter may be composed of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). Scientists expect these particles to have masses comparable to, or perhaps heavier than, atomic nuclei.

Although such WIMPs would rarely interact with normal matter, they may occasionally scatter from an atomic nucleus like billiard balls, leaving a small amount of energy that might be detectable under the right conditions.

Detecting WIMPS

The CDMS experiment uses 30 germanium and silicon detectors in an attempt to detect such WIMP scatters.

The detectors are cooled to temperatures very near absolute zero.

Particle interactions in the crystalline detectors deposit energy in the form of heat, and in the form of charges that move in an applied electric field. Special sensors detect these signals, which are then amplified and recorded in computers for later study.

A comparison of the size and relative timing of these two signals can allow the experimenters to distinguish whether the particle that interacted in the crystal was a WIMP or one of the numerous known particles that come from radioactive decays, or from space in the form of cosmic rays.

These background particles must be highly suppressed if we are to see a WIMP signal. Layers of shielding materials, as well as the half-mile of rock above the experiment, are used to limit the background "noise."

New results

The CDMS experiment has been searching for dark matter at Soudan since 2003. Previous data have not yielded evidence for WIMPs, but have provided assurance that the backgrounds have been suppressed to the level where as few as one WIMP interaction per year could have been detected.

The CDMS group is now reporting on a new data set taken in 2007-08, which approximately doubles the sum of all past data sets.

With each new data set, the CDMS group must carefully evaluate the performance of each of the detectors, excluding periods when they were not operating properly.

Detector operation is assessed by frequent exposure to sources of two types of radiation: gamma rays and neutrons.

Gamma rays are the principal source of normal matter background in the experiment.

Neutrons are the only type of normal matter particles that will interact with germanium nuclei in the billiard ball style that WIMPs would, although neutrons frequently scatter in more than one of our detectors.

Those calibration data are carefully studied to see how well a WIMP-like signal (produced by neutrons) can be seen over a background (produced by gamma rays).

The expectation is that no more than one background event would be expected to be visible in the region of the data where WIMPs should appear.

Since background and signal regions overlap somewhat, achievement of this background level required the CDMUS group to throw out roughly 2/3 of the data that might contain WIMPs, because these data would contain too many background events.

All of the data analysis is done without looking at the data region that might contain WIMP events. This standard scientific technique, sometimes referred to as "blinding," is used to avoid the unintentional bias that might lead one to keep events that have some of the characteristics of WIMP interactions but that are really from background sources.

After all of the data selection criteria have been completed, and detailed estimates of background "leakage" into the WIMP signal region are made, the CDMUS group must "open the box" and see if there are any WIMP events present.

In this new data set there are indeed two events seen with characteristics consistent with those expected from WIMPs.

However, there is also a chance that both events could be due to background particles. A strict set of criteria for determine whether a new discovery has been made, in essence that the ratio of signal to background events must be large enough that there is no reasonable doubt.

Typically there must be less than one chance in a thousand of the signal being due to background. In this case, a signal of about 5 events would have met those criteria. The CDMS group estimate that there is about a one in four chance to have seen two backgrounds events, so the CDMS group is not claiming to have discovered WIMPs.

Instead they say that the rate of WIMP interactions with nuclei must be less than a particular value that depends on the mass of the WIMP. The numerical values obtained for these interaction rates from this data set are more stringent than those obtained from previous data for most WIMP masses predicted by theories.

Such upper limits are still quite valuable in eliminating a number of theories that might explain dark matter.

What comes next?

While the same set of detectors could be operated at Soudan for many more years to see if more WIMP events appear, this would not take advantage of new detector developments and would try the patience of even the most stalwart experimenters (not to mention theorists). A better way to increase the sensitivity to WIMPs is to increase the number (or mass) of detectors that might see them, while still maintaining the CDMS group's ability to keep backgrounds under control.

This is precisely what CDMS experimenters (and many other collaborations worldwide) are now in the process of doing. By summer of 2010, the CDMS group hopes to have about three times more germanium nuclei sitting near absolute zero at Soudan, patiently waiting for WIMPs to come along and provide the perfect billiard ball shots that will offer compelling evidence for the direct detection of dark matter in the laboratory.

Vanityfair.com: Compared with the market-driven, killer-app insta-culture of the Digital Age, the new Large Hadron Collider exists in a near-magical realm, a $9 billion cathedral of science that is apparently, in any practical sense, useless.

The LHC is an almost unimaginably long-term project. It was conceived a quarter-century ago, was given the green light in 1994, and has been under construction for the last 13 years, the product of tens of millions of man-hours.

It's also gargantuan: a circular tunnel 17 miles around, fitted out with more than $9 billion worth of steel and pipe and cable more reminiscent of Jules Verne than Steve Jobs.

The believe-it-or-not superlatives are so extreme and Tom Swiftian they make you smile. The LHC is not merely the world's largest particle accelerator but the largest machine ever built.

The goal--and it's a hope, a dream, a set of strong suspicions, rather than a certainty--is to achieve a deeper, better, truer understanding of the fundamental structure and nature of existence.

In other words, it's one of the most awesome scientific enterprises of all time, even though it looks like a monumental folly. Or else, possibly, the reverse.

Physics Today: VISTA, the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy, has officially gone operational.

Jim Emerson, one of the VISTA project leaders said, "history has shown us some of the most exciting results that come out of projects like VISTA are the ones you least expect—and I'm personally very excited to see what these will be."

VISTA is a survey telescope working at infrared wavelengths and is the world's largest telescope dedicated to mapping the sky. At the heart of VISTA is a 3-ton camera containing 16 detectors sensitive to infrared light, with a combined total area of 67 million pixels.

To avoid swamping the faint infrared radiation coming from space, the camera is cooled to -200 °C and is sealed with the largest infrared-transparent window ever made.

The first image to be released publicly (see right) shows a 14-minute exposure of the star-forming region known as the Flame Nebula, or NGC 2024, in the constellation of Orion. At optical wavelengths, the object is hidden by giant dust clouds. VISTA, which works at infrared wavelengths can see through the dust at the cluster of very young stars at the object's heart.

The wide-field VISTA view also includes the glow of the reflection nebula NGC 2023, just below center, and the ghostly outline of the Horsehead Nebula (Barnard 33) towards the lower right.

The bright bluish star towards the right is one of the three bright stars forming the Belt of Orion.

Its large mirror, wide field of view, and very sensitive detectors will reveal a completely new view of the southern sky.

Location, location, location

The telescope is based near the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Paranal, Chile, an ideal spot for carrying out infrared observations due to the low water content of the atmosphere—water absorbs most infrared light—and the high altitude of 2635 meters above sea level—which limits the amount of atmospheric turbulence that can effect the air above the telescope.

VISTA's main mirror is 4.1 meters across and is the most highly curved mirror of this size and quality ever made—its deviations from a perfect surface are less than a few thousandths of the thickness of a human hair.

Because VISTA has a large field of view it can both detect faint sources and also cover wide areas of sky quickly. Each VISTA image captures a section of sky covering about 10 times the area of the full Moon and it will be able to detect and catalog objects over the whole southern sky with a sensitivity that is 40 times greater than that achieved with earlier infrared sky surveys such as the Two Micron All-Sky Survey.

VISTA was originally conceived and developed by a consortium of 18 universities in the United Kingdom led by Queen Mary, University of London. When the UK joined ESO, VISTA was offered to the organization as an in-kind contribution as part of the UK's accession agreement.

ESO formally took over VISTA on 10 December 2009 at a ceremony at ESO's headquarters in Garching, Germany.

"VISTA is a unique addition to ESO's observatory on Cerro Paranal. It will play a pioneering role in surveying the southern sky at infrared wavelengths and will find many interesting targets for further study by the Very Large Telescope, ALMA, and the future European Extremely Large Telescope," says ESO Director General Tim de Zeeuw.

VISTA will spend almost all of its time mapping the southern sky in a systematic fashion. The telescope is embarking on six major sky surveys with different scientific goals over its first five years.

One survey will cover the entire southern sky and others will be dedicated to smaller regions to be studied in greater detail. VISTA's surveys will help our understanding of the nature, distribution, and origin of known types of stars and galaxies, map the three-dimensional structure of our galaxy and the neighboring Magellanic Clouds, and help determine the relation between the structure of the universe and dark energy and dark matter.

Paul Guinnessy

Times Online: One of the most elaborate science experiments ever attempted—the Super-Kamiokande (Super-K) detector in Japan—got underway last month. The experiment involves a vast underground cavern, 50,000 tonnes of ultra-pure water, and thousands of light-sensitive detectors. Super-K's aim is to capture the neutrino, an elusive particle that has frustrated scientists for decades.

The machine, which successfully detected neutrinos for the first time on 22 November, should establish a more precise estimate of their mass as well determining fundamental laws governing neutrino behavior.

Physics Today: The ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider has posted on its website evidence of a record-beating series of proton collisions at 2.36 TeV (1.18 TeV per beam). The previous record holder was Fermilab's Tevatron (at 1.96 TeV collisions).

The collider became the world's most powerful accelerator on 29 November. Since then CERN staff have been increasing the beam intensity, which in turn increases the number of potential collisions that can occur.

The speed at which the LHC is becoming operational has only been surpassed by the speed at which the first LHC paper using collision data was prepared and submitted by the ALICE collaboration. The paper was accepted by the European Physical Journal C on December 1.

The LHC is scheduled to shut down on 18 December for a two-week winter break. Early next year the beams will be increased in energy, first to 2 TeV and then up to 3.5 TeV, roughly half of the final operational energies the machine is expected to run at later in its lifetime.

One unknown side effect to the delays the LHC has faced this year is how expensive running the LHC during the winter will be to CERN. In past years high-energy experiments were shut down for winter, partly to conduct maintenance but also because electricity rates are 45% higher than in the summer.

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Paul Guinnessy

Physics Today: Updated 9:44 EST: The CERN twitter feed reports that both beams at the Large Hadron Collider have passed 1.18 TeV at 00:42 Central European Time on Monday.

The LHC is now the highest-energy accelerator in the world, beating Fermilab's Tevatron collider, which has energies of 0.98 TeV.

"We are still coming to terms with just how smoothly the LHC commissioning is going," said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. "It is fantastic. However, we are continuing to take it step by step, and there is still a lot to do before we start physics in 2010. I'm keeping my champagne on ice until then."

"I was here 20 years ago when we switched on CERN's last major particle accelerator, LEP," said Research and Technology Director Steve Myers. "What took us days or weeks with LEP, we're doing in hours with the LHC. So far, it all augurs well for a great research program."

Next on the LHC's schedule is increasing the beam intensity and delivering large quantities of proton collision rates to the experiments before Christmas.

The current commissioning phase aims to make sure that these higher intensities can be safely handled and that stable conditions can be guaranteed for the experiments during collisions.

This phase is estimated to take around a week, after which the LHC will be colliding beams for calibration purposes until the end of the year.

Related coverage of the LHC

Physics Today: The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has circulated two beams (at 450 GeV) simultaneously for the first time, allowing the operators to test the synchronization of the beams and giving the experiments their first chance to look for proton–proton collisions.

Early in the afternoon, the beams were made to cross at points 1 and 5, home to the ATLAS and CMS detectors; later, beams crossed at points 2 and 8, home to the ALICE and LHCb experiments.

“It was standing room only in the ALICE control room and cheers erupted with the first collisions,” said ALICE spokesperson Jurgen Schukraft. “This is simply tremendous.”

“The tracks we’re seeing are beautiful,” said LHCb spokesperson Andrei Golutvin, “we’re all ready for serious data taking in a few days time.”

Collisions at CMS

“It’s a great achievement to have come this far in so short a time,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “But we need to keep a sense of perspective—there’s still much to do before we can start the LHC physics program.”

Next on the schedule is an intense commissioning phase aimed at increasing the beam intensity and accelerating the beams. All being well, by Christmas, the LHC should reach 1.2 TeV per beam, and have provided good quantities of collision data for the experiments’ calibrations.

Physics Today: Updated: 2:38PM EST and 4:40PM EST: Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), announced that they have sent a particle beam around the 27-kilometer collider.

"It’s great to see beam circulating in the LHC again," said CERN director general Rolf Heuer. "We’ve still got some way to go before physics can begin, but with this milestone we’re well on the way."

The LHC circulated its first beams on 10 September 2008, but suffered a serious malfunction nine days later. It has taken over a year repairing and consolidating the machine to ensure that such an incident cannot happen again.

"The LHC is a far better understood machine than it was a year ago," said CERN’s Director for Accelerators, Steve Myers. "We’ve learned from our experience, and engineered the technology that allows us to move on. That’s how progress is made."

The next important milestone will be low-energy collisions at 450 GeV, expected in about a week from now. Ramping the beams to high energy will follow in preparation for collisions at 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam) next year.

Recent coverage of the LHC by Physics Today can be found here.

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Scientists at Cern hold their breath as they prepare to fire up the LHC The Guardian

Science: Four of Russia's most prominent physics labs are to be merged into a new national research center. The institutes, which have languished in the post-Soviet era, have cautiously welcomed the raised profile the merger will bring.

But a different reform aimed at separating basic and applied research at one of the institutes—the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, Russia's premier lab for nuclear energy research--has researchers up in arms.

The merger, announced in a presidential decree last month, will combine the Institute for High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Protvino, 100 kilometers south of Moscow; the B. P. Konstantinov Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute (PNPI) in St. Petersburg; and two Moscow labs--the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) and the Kurchatov. The reorganization is aimed at smoothing the path of innovations into industry, says Sergei Kiriyenko, chief of the nuclear energy agency Rosatom and one of the key officials behind the decree.

Nature News: Last week, US particle physicists staked their claim in a daring new venture to develop the next generation of accelerators by proposing the world's first muon collider.

The collider could overtake two more-mature concepts, each of which plan to smash together electrons and positrons that have been accelerated through long, straight tunnels.

But some physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, are concerned about the expense and feasibility of the linear colliders, and question whether they would push the boundaries of physics beyond what the Large Hadron Collider is expected to achieve.

They are now trying to rally enthusiasm for a collider that smashes muons, a particle that is about 200 times more massive than the electron.

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Next-generation atom smashers: Smaller, cheaper and super powerful Wired.com

Backreaction: The Heidelberg Ion-Beam Therapy Center (HIT)—the first medical heavy-ion machine in Europe—has opened.

Close to the GSI facility near Darmstadt, the Heidelberg Ion-Beam Therapy Center is a dedicated heavy-ion accelerator for deployment in radiotherapy to treat tumors.

Treatment center at the focus of the HIT Gantry. Credit: HIT

Physicist Stefan Scherer briefly takes a look at this new facility and the physics behind it.

Science Progress: When Mary Ann Mason was graduate dean at the University of California, Berkeley, a frequent question she heard from women graduate students was "when is a good time to have a baby?"

For women in academic science careers, the conventional wisdom was that waiting until she had achieved tenure was the best approach.

In 1985, the national average age of scientists winning tenure was 36. But by 2003, it was over 39.

"So it's increasingly poor advice to wait until you get to tenure," she says.

Her belief is that women researchers should be able to have children whenever they want, and her new report, co-authored with colleagues Marc Goulden and Karie Frasch, explains the work-family policies that are driving women out of the academic pipeline.

Their data, taken from extensive surveys of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers within the University of California system, shows that work-life issues, and particularly decisions about when to get married and when to have children, account for the most significant loss of academic scientists in the pipeline between PhD and tenured positions.

"The leak is almost entirely, or least due primarily to family formation," said Mason, who is currently a professor and co-faculty director of the Berkeley Law Center on Health, Economic, and Family Security at the UC Berkeley.

Science Progress has a podcast discussing these issues with the authors of the study.

Physics Today: Tests on parts of the Large Hadron Collider over the weekend were fairly successful, suggest CERN documents.

Particles up to 450 GeV were injected into four sectors of the storage ring (sector 23, 78, 67, and 56).

For the first time—at 8:00pm local time on Saturday—the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector observed beam "splash" in the LHC, a major milestone for the experiment (see yellow indicators in image below).

Image credit: CERN

These injection tests are the final phase before the main test on 20 November in which particles will traverse across the entire ring. Actual collisions between two opposing beams should occur at roughly the same date.

Over a 24-hour period on Monday, the sectors will be checked for radiation. Once the risk has been minimized, researchers and technicians will inspect the billion-dollar collider for any damage.

The LHC will run at reduced power for the next two years, in an attempt to minimize risk to the magnets.

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The Register: A bird dropping a piece of bread onto outdoor machinery has been blamed for a technical fault at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this week which saw significant overheating in sections of the mighty particle-punisher's subterranean 27-km supercooled magnetic doughnut.

According to scientists at the project, had the LHC been operational—it is scheduled to recommence beaming later this month—the snag would have caused it to fail-safe and shut down automatically.

This would put the mighty machine out of action for a few days while it was restarted, but there would be no repeat of the catastrophic damage suffered last September.

Science: When the Max Planck Society planted institutes across the former East Germany, it recruited scientists from around the world for its ambitious project.

But only two out of more than 60 directors in the newly founded institutes were recruited from the East itself. Today, the society has 267 active directors; only five grew up on the eastern side of the divided Germany. And only one started a career before 1989.

Those statistics are a sign of the mixed blessings that reunification brought for East German scientists.

For many, especially the younger ones, it was a great opportunity. But others were set adrift when entire preexisting eastern institutes were closed or cut to a fraction of their original size.

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Aufbau Ost: Max Planck's East German experiment

guardian.co.uk: It can see to the edge of the observable universe. It can peer back in time to the aftermath of the Big Bang. Just don't ask it to send the secret of creation by e-mail.

The R332 million ($40 million) Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) is an internationally renowned science facility with everything but fast broadband. Its astronomers have found download speeds so slow that they are forced to send their cosmic findings by road.

The problem is all too familiar to South African residents: painfully slow service delivery. Politicians have called on a telephone company to resolve the matter "before the country's standing as a credible international scientific partner is irreparably damaged."

The Observer: At first glance, the piece of metal in Steve Myers's hands could be taken for a harmonica or a pen. Only on closer inspection can you make out its true nature.

Myers, director of accelerators at the CERN particle physics laboratory outside Geneva, is clutching a section of copper piping from which a flat electrical cable is protruding.

It looks unremarkable. Yet a piece of cable like this one was responsible last year for the world's most expensive short circuit.

More than $50 million-worth of damage was done to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most advanced particle accelerator ever built, a few days after its ceremonial opening.

It has taken Myers—and hundreds of other CERN scientists—more than a year to pinpoint the guilty piece of cable and repair the wreckage.

"It was a very small piece, but it did immense damage," he said. It remains to be seen whether Myers can fix CERN's tattered technological reputation in the process—when his team restart their great machine in a few weeks. "I am not a nervous person," said the 63-year-old Belfast-born engineer. "And that is probably just as well."

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Science: For the past 5 years, Jerry Nelson and his colleagues at University of California have been working on plans for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT)—whose primary mirror will be a glinting mosaic of 492 hexagonal segments.

An artist's concept showing the segmented primary mirror, which has 492 hexagonal segments arranged into an f/1 hyperboloidal mirror (credit: TMT)

Meanwhile, Roger Angel and his collaborators have set their sights on building the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMTO)—whose seven monolithic 8.4-meter mirrors, arranged like flower petals, will function as a primary mirror 24.5 meters in diameter.

Artist's concept showing the seven 8.4-meter mirrors. (credit: GMTO)

If the telescopes are built—TMT on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, GMT at Las Campanas—each will capture images up to 10 times sharper than today's best ground-based telescopes.

Both will shoot for the same scientific goals, looking at the first stars and galaxies, studying the formation of planets and stars, the growth of black holes, and probe the nature of dark matter and dark energy. And both will cost between $700 million and $1 billion.

So far, neither telescope has come close to securing the total funding it needs, and if they are built with little federal support, the National Science Foundation would be hard pressed to provide the operating and maintenance costs.

Given the funding challenges, some astronomers say the two sides should join forces to build one telescope to rival the European Southern Observatory's proposed 42-meter segmented-mirror telescope, the European Extremely Large Telescope.

Physical Review Focus: High-energy physicists have finally pinpointed their dust problem. Inside multi-million dollar storage rings, high-speed trains of electrons are often derailed by micron-sized specks of dust. Now a team has shown that dust grains arise from sparks inside a Japanese storage ring, the KEK Photon Factory Advanced Ring as they report in an upcoming paper in Physical Review Special Topics--Accelerators and Beams.

The team also caught on video, one of the tiny grains being swept along in the electron beam. The brief flashes of dust trapped in an invisible electron beam begin about halfway through the 10-second video.