Large-Scale International Collaborations and the Future of Physics
AAAS 08 Symposium

Lawrence M. Krauss, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH; Maria Spiropulu, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
organized by

Leaders of six international collaborations -- including the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva; the International Linear Collider, a machine proposed to follow the Large Hadron Collider; ITER, a large-scale international fusion effort; the Next Generation Space Telescope; the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, an international astronomy collaboration; and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory international energy projects -- address how large-scale international collaboration is a part of the changing face of physics. The subject matter spans much of physics and astronomy, and the nature of each international collaboration presents its own unique challenges and opportunities.
s y n o p s i s

Hynes Convention Center, Third Level, Room 309
place

Friday February 15, 1.45 - 4.45
time

  • Opening Remarks, Lawrence Krauss
  • Physicists and Global Energy Concerns, Steven Chu Lawrence Berkeley LaboratoryA
  • The Large Hadron Collider, Robert Aymar CERN Geneva Switzerland
  • The International Linear Collider, Barry Barish, California Institute of Technology
  • The Space Telescope and Science at NASA, John C. Mather, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
  • Atacama Large Millimeter Array, Anneila Sargent, California Institute of Technology
  • Q & A
  • Harvard Physics reception at Harvard Faculty Club (by inviattion only)
program

press

Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Professor of Physics, Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley

Steven Chu is Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Professor of Physics, Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley. Previously, he was at Stanford and Bell Laboratories. His research includes tests of fundamental physics, the development of methods to laser cool and trap atoms, polymer physics, and single molecule biology. He is active in the energy problem and is co-chairing an InterAcademy Council (IAC) study “Lighting the Way: Toward a Sustainable Energy Future”. Chu has numerous awards, including the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academia Sinica, and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Korean Academy of Science and Engineering. At Stanford, he helped start Bio-X, a multi-disciplinary initiative linking the physical and biological sciences with engineering and medicine. He serves on the Boards of the Hewlett Foundation, the University of Rochester, NVIDIA and the Scientific Board of the Moore Foundation, Helicos and NABsys. He has served on a number of other committees such as the Augustine Committee that produced “Rising Above the Gathering Storm”, the Advisory Committee to the Directors of the NIH and the National Nuclear Security Agency, the Executive Committee of the NAS Board on Physics and Astronomy. Professor Chu received A.B. and B.S. degrees in mathematics and physics from the University of Rochester, a Ph.D. in physics from UC Berkeley, and ten honorary degrees.
Directeur General, CERN
Robert Aymar

Born in 1936, R. Aymar, after studying at the Ecole Polytechnique, entered the Corps des Poudres (a former government agency involved in basic and applied research). Following his secondment to the CEA in 1959, R. Aymar's career has been focused on fundamental research in plasma physics and its application in controlled thermonuclear fusion research. In 1977, R. Aymar was appointed Head of the Tore Supra Project, to be built at Cadarache. He directed the Project from its conceptual design in 1977, throughout its construction up to its operation in 1988 when the first plasma was produced. The objectives of Tore Supra are both technological - using superconducting coils cooled at 1.8 K by superfluid Helium - and scientific - confining hot, dense plasmas for long pulses towards steady-state operation. In 1990, R. Aymar was appointed Director of the Direction des Sciences de la Matiere of the CEA. In this position, he directed a wide range of basic research programmes - both experimental and theoretical - including astrophysics, particle, nuclear and high-energy physics, physics and chemistry of condensed matter, paleo-climatology, as well as thermonuclear fusion by magnetic confinement. In his capacity as CEA Director, R. Aymar served on many Councils and Committees at national level (management of the Large Research Facilities) and at international level as a French delegate (Institut Laue Langevin [ILL, European Synchrotron Research Facility [ESRF], Joint European Torus [JET] Consultative Programme Committee of the European Union). Nevertheless, R. Aymar has maintained a personal role in the Fusion Programme, acting as chairman of the European Fusion Technology Steering Committee and as a member of the JET Scientific Council and of the ITER Technical Advisory Committee. In 1993, he was appointed chairman of the LHC External Review Committee mandated to evaluate the LHC Project and presented the results to the CERN Scientific Policy Committee and the Committee of Council in December 1993. R. Aymar was appointed ITER Director by the ITER Council in July 1994 and International Team Leader in July 2001, until September 2003. In December 2001 R. Aymar was appointed Chairman of an External Review Committee mandated to review and evaluate the whole CERN programme (LHC and non LHC) and its management: R. Aymar presented the results to the CERN Council and its sub Committees in June 2002. Dr R. Aymar was appointed Director-General of CERN as of 1st January 2004 for a period of five years.
Linde Professor of Physics, Emeritus, Caltech

Barry C. Barish is the Director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) and a professor of high-energy physics at the California Institute of Technology, where he has taught and conducted research since 1963. In October 2002, Dr. Barish was nominated to the National Science Board, a 24-member board that helps oversee the National Science Foundation (NSF) and advises the President and the Congress on policy issues related to science, engineering, and education. Dr. Barish earned his Bachelor of Arts in physics in 1957 and a Ph.D. in experimental high-energy physics in 1963 from the University of California, Berkeley. At Caltech, Dr. Barish helped develop a new high-energy physics program that utilized the frontier particle accelerators. Among Dr. Barish's noteworthy experiments were those at Fermilab using high-energy neutrinos to reveal the quark substructure of the nucleon. These experiments were among the first to observe the weak neutral current, a linchpin in the Electro-Weak Unification theory of Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg. In the 1980s, Barish initiated an ambitious international effort to build a sophisticated underground detector (MACRO) to search for the magnetic monopole and solve other problems in the emerging area of particle astrophysics. The experiments conducted underground in Italy provided some of the key evidence that neutrinos have mass. Dr. Barish is presently involved in an experiment at the Soudan Underground Mine in Minnesota (MINOS) to further study neutrino properties. Dr. Barish was named the Maxine and Ronald Linde Professor of Physics in 1991. He became the Principal Investigator of the LIGO project in 1994 and was appointed Director of the LIGO Laboratory in 1997. LIGO is an NSF-funded, joint Caltech-MIT collaboration to detect gravitational waves from distant sources such as colliding black holes. The 4-kilometer LIGO interferometers, located in rural Louisiana and Washington State, are designed to detect ripples in space-time far smaller than the size of a proton. LIGO is well into its commissioning and has taken initial data that has already produced some improved limits on gravitational waves from astrophysics sources. Dr. Barish served as co-chair of the subpanel of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) that developed a long-range plan for U.S. high-energy physics. He has served as chair of the Commission of Particles and Fields of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) and is currently chair of the U.S. Liaison committee to IUPAP. In 2002 he received the Klopsteg Award of the American Association of Physics Teachers and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Barish chaired an NRC panel, Neutrino Facilities Assessment Committee, in 2002 that produced the NAS report, Neutrinos and Beyond. In 2003, he is serving as a member of the special panel for NASA that is considering the future of the Hubble Space Telescope and the transition to the James Webb Space Telescope.
Principle Deputy Director General, ITER

Dr. Holtkamp has an M.S. equivalent degree in physics from the University of Berlin and a Ph.D. in physics from the Technical University in Darmstadt (both in Germany). His research interests include high-energy colliders, linear accelerators, storage rings, synchrotron radiation sources, and accelerator-based neutrino physics. He has served on a variety of review com-mittees, dealing with technical, cost schedule and planning issues on Linear Colliders, Neu-trino Factories and Neutrino beams, Synchrotron Radiation and XFEL designs as well as high energy colliders ; more recently also Plasma Physics and Fusion Science. Dr. Holtkamp serves on several program and advisory boards and was a member of the last HEPAP subpanel on long-range planning in high-energy physics As well as the Na-tional Academy of Science panel on Elementary Particle Physics 2010. He chaired the Parti-cle Accelerator Conference in 2005 and the Linac Conference in 2006. Until July 2006 Mr. Holtkamp was the director of the Accelerator Systems Division for Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is a Pulsed Neutron Source based on a 1 GeV H- linac and an accumulator ring that can provide between 1-3 MW of average beam power. The facility was under construction between 1999 and 2006. Before his assignment to SNS (1992-1998), Dr. Holtkamp was a senior staff member at DESY (Hamburg, Germany). In that posi-tion he was responsible for operation of the injector linacs and for a research and develop-ment program for a normal conducting linear collider (S-Band), which included the construc-tion and operation of a 400 MeV electron test linac. After joining Fermilab (1998-2001), Mr. Holtkamp led a multi-laboratory study on the technical feasibility of an intense neutrino source based on a muon storage ring and was involved in the commissioning of the main injector at Fermilab. Since April 1st 2006 Norbert Holtkamp is the Principle Deputy Director General of the ITER project located in Cadarache (France). He is responsible for the construction part of ITER and the technical coordination of a seven party collaboration building the worlds largest Tokamak with a total value of approximately 5 Billion Euro.
Senior Astrophysicist and Goddard Fellow Senior Project Scientist, James Webb Space Telescope

Dr. John C. Mather is a Senior Astrophysicist in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. His research centers on infrared astronomy and cosmology. As an NRC postdoctoral fellow at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (New York City), he led the proposal efforts for the Cosmic Background Explorer (74-76), and came to GSFC to be the Study Scientist (76-88), Project Scientist (88-98), and also the Principal Investigator for the Far IR Absolute Spectrophotometer (FIRAS) on COBE. He showed that the cosmic microwave background radiation has a blackbody spectrum within 50 ppm. As Senior Project Scientist (95-present) for the James Webb Space Telescope, he leads the science team, and represents scientific interests within the project management. He has served on advisory and working groups for the National Academy of Sciences, NASA, and the NSF (for the ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, and for the CARA, the Center for Astrophysical Research in the Antarctic). He is a member of the Astrophysics Subcommittee of the NASA Advisory Committee and of the Standing Review Board for the Kepler project.
Benjamin M. Rosen Professor of Astronomy, Caltech/Vice-Chair of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array Board

Anneila Sargent is the Benjamin M. Rosen Professor of Astronomy and Vice President for Student Affairs at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). She is currently Vice-Chair of the ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array) Board. She was Director of Caltech's Owens Valley Radio Observatory from 1996 through 2007, and founding Director of the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA) from 2003 to 2007. From 2000 to 2003, she was the founding Director of the Caltech/JPL Michelson (Interferometry) Science Center. A native of Scotland, she received her B.Sc. with honors in Physics from the University of Edinburgh (1964), and her Ph.D. in Astronomy from the California Institute of Technology (1977). Her research has concentrated largely on understanding how stars form in our own and other galaxies. In particular, she investigates the way in which other planetary systems are created and evolve using infrared, millimeter, and submillimeter observations. Professor Sargent is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was President of the American Astronomical Society between 2000 and 2002. In 2005 she was Oort Professor at the University of Leiden, and in 2002 was named Alumnus of the Year at the University of Edinburgh. Distinguished lectureships include the George Darwin Lectureship of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2003. Currently, she chairs the National Research Council (NRC) Board of Physics and Astronomy, and is a member of the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). Since 1998 she has been a Trustee of Associated Universities Incorporated. She was a member of the most recent NRC Decadal Survey Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics and chaired NASA's Space Science Advisory Committee from 1994 to 1998.
Agenda Indico Server(protected until Friday Feb 15 2008)
slides of talks

for additional information, email lawrence krauss and maria spiropulu
contact