New Director-General for DESY

Helmut Dosch Image courtesy of Max Planck Institute

Professor Helmut Dosch takes the Chair of the DESY Directorate

Professor Helmut Dosch will become the new Chair of the Directorate of the Research Centre DESY. Solid-state physicist Helmut Dosch, born in Rosenheim, Bavaria, is at present Director of the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research in Stuttgart and professor at the University of Stuttgart. On March 1, 2009, he will replace Professor Albrecht Wagner as Chair of the DESY Directorate who has served as DESY Director since 1999.

"DESY is a brand name standing for top research worldwide. With the new accelerator facilities which are currently built in Hamburg, DESY will shed light on so far unexplored dimensions in nanospace and will continue to play a leading role in the international top league of large-scale research," explains Helmut Dosch. "Particularly, we will further strengthen the collaboration with CERN and the University of Hamburg and create a magnet for junior scientists."

Albrecht Wagner, present Chair of the Directorate: "I am very pleased to be able to welcome Helmut Dosch - an outstanding scientist and experienced leader - as my successor. With him at the helm, DESY will be well prepared for future challenges."

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A fine-grained approach to "cool" simulations

When deciding how best to design equipment in a chemical plant that produces liquid nitrogen, designers must know the properties of a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen gas at various stages as it cools and compresses. Researchers at the State University of New York at Buffalo have developed a new simulation technique that makes calculating these properties much more efficient.

OSG is "the ideal workhorse"

The new technique involves running simulations on the grid unfeasible on a single computer because they require large amounts of computing power. Andrew Schultz, a SUNY-Buffalo chemical and biological engineering researcher, said Open Science Grid (OSG) is "the ideal workhorse" to run these simulations. Schultz and his team have run more than 60,000 jobs on OSG resources since January-an order of magnitude jump in productivity.

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-- Amelia Williamson, iSGTW

How to repair the biggest science experiment in the world

From Nature News, Oct. 29, 2008

Physicists get CSI on the LHC

Physicists are close to finalizing a repair plan for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator located at CERN, near Geneva in Switzerland.

The LHC has been out of commission since mid-September after an electrical fault destroyed part of the machine and caused several tonnes of liquid helium to leak into the tunnel (see 'Eight month delay for LHC'). The incident damaged up to 29 of the LHC's superconducting magnets and contaminated the pristine 'beam pipe' that carries protons around the collider's ring. Physicists hope to have the machine repaired and ready for first collisions by May or June 2009.

But simply replacing the damaged magnets will not be enough - physicists and engineers at CERN must also ensure that a similar accident cannot occur in the future. "The real question is how did this happen?" says Lucio Rossi, a CERN physicist who's helping to oversee the repairs.

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