Patty McBride elected IUPAP commission chair

Patty McBride

A committee of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics has elected Patty McBride, Computing Division's deputy head, as its chair.

Members who attended IUPAP's recent General Assembly meeting, held in Japan last month, also elected her as one of the five chairs who serve as vice president of the IUPAP executive council.

McBride will now head the organization's Commission on Particles and Fields, which promotes the exchange of information and views among the members of the international scientific community.

McBride has previously served as vice chair of the commission. In that position, McBride worked closely with the previous chair on all aspects of the commission business.

"That role was appreciated by all commission members, and she was the natural choice to succeed Gregor Herten as chair," wrote commission member Bill Carithers of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in an e-mail.

"Of course," he wrote, "I would say that Patty's primary qualification is her stature as an internationally eminent scientist." McBride has worked on global projects from the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas to her current role on CMS at the LHC. As high-energy physics becomes increasingly international, Carithers wrote, experience with global cooperation becomes crucial for commission members.

McBride said, "These international meetings put things in a broader context. The commission is a way to look outward."

Three officers and 10 members from 12 countries compose the group.

McBride and the commission will help prepare and supervise two major international conferences in particle physics: the International Conference in High Energy Physics and the International Symposium on Lepton-Photon Interactions at High Energy. As commission chair, McBride will serve as an ex-officio member of the International Committee on Future Accelerators. She and the commission also will award two biannual Young Scientist prizes.

--Kathryn Grim

Repairs to Swiss particle collider will cost $25M

From Associated Press, Nov. 17, 2008

The scientific organization CERN says repairs caused by an electrical fault in the world's largest atom smasher will cost 25-35 million Swiss francs ($21-29 million).

Spokesman James Gillies says the work on the Large Hadron Collider will be covered by the budget of the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Gillies says 15 million francs ($13 million) is the price tag for repairing the machine and preventing a recurrence. Confirming a report in the Swiss newspaper Sonntag, Gillies said Monday the remaining money will be used to replace the spare parts.

An electrical arc on Sept. 19 shut down the particle collider only nine days after the $10 billion machine started up with great fanfare on the Swiss-French border.

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Mining for dark matter, some go wimp-hunting

From Wall Street Journal , Nov. 11, 2008

The exotic particles would explain a lot about the universe, and that promise has scientists going underground

You might think an astrophysicist would spend much of his time with his head in the stars. Instead, Sean Paling often squeezes into a cage with a bunch of burly miners and travels for six minutes in darkness to the bottom of Britain's deepest working mine.

At a lab here, 3,300 feet underground, Dr. Paling is searching for one of the most elusive objects in the universe: a wimp, or weakly interacting massive particle. Wimps are leading candidates for dark matter, which is believed to account for up to 95% of the mass of the universe. Something that big would be easy to spot except for the fact that dark matter is invisible. That doesn't stop the elusive mass from making its presence felt by the immense gravitational tug it exerts on stars, galaxies and other cosmic bodies.

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