Accelerators, both circular and linear, have been stretching their limits in order to deliver appropriate conditions for high energy physics experiments. Are accelerators like the LHC at the limit of what technology can achieve on the earth? Will future accelerators have to be designed and built in ...
Proton linac, PS Booster, PS, SPS and the two transfer channels from SPS to LHC are used for LHC proton injection. The lectures will review the features of these faithful machines and underline the modifications required for the LHC era. Moreover, an overview of the LHC lead ion injector scheme from...
Operating high-energy accelerators unavoidably leads to prompt radiations, activation of components, detectors, shielding materials and to activation of the environment, cooling, ground water and air. Measures must be taken to protect men and the environment as well as radiation sensitive equipment ...
Electron-positron linear colliders offer a promising complement to the LHC. These future facilities are intended to reach centre of mass energies up to 5 TeV and high-luminosities in order to address the particle physics burning questions of mass, flavour and unification. This series of lectures wil...
Genetic Algorithms (GA) are a method of "breeding" computer programs and solutions to optimization or search problems by means of simulated evolution. Processes loosely based on natural selection, crossover, and mutation are repeatedly applied to a population of binary strings which represent potent...
For many years the dominant database technology has been the relational model, as implemented in products such as Oracle (deployed at CERN for nearly 20 years), Microsoft Access and Open Source packages such as PostgreSQL and MySQL.
More recently, systems referred to as Object Databases, e.g. ...
Will Microsoft and Apple continue struggling to seize larger parts of their market? Or will users massively drop them in favour of open (and free) standards like Linux? Is the major user backoff/withholding from Windows-XP a message against pushing licensing so far?
Are hybrid systems (such as Mac O...
This lecture series addresses the technical aspects of the technology involved in Internet Security, and how the different problems may be solved. This includes the risks users are exposed to when surfing the web, reading email, copying files, and installing new applications on their computers. Tech...
Bioinformatics is a melding of biology, computer science, informatics and information engineering into a single discipline that enables new discoveries in biology and related fields.
Many questions in biology, medicine, and agriculture today can best or only be answered using extensive computing sk...
The course will address to non-specialists the main technological challenges of LHC experiments. It will discuss aspect such as
1) the design of a large high field superconducting coil, the different aspects of the fabrication of their main components (conductor, mandrels, coil casings, feet...), t...
The course, intended for non-specialists, will cover fields of applied superconductivity such as science and technology of superconductors and their applications, electronics (including analog and digital circuits, large-scale superconducting devices), materials.
Pulsed superconducting magnets are being studied and designed for future machines. The use of these devices for accelerator machines is reviewed, and the main parameters (frequency of the cycle and increase rate of magnetic field) are discussed. We review the main issues and challenges of these type...
The technology of biometrics is used for human identification and
authentification. It is proposed to extend this sytem to cover our
passports and many other security systems where authentification
is mandatory. Cost will play an important role when discussing
the feasibility of these systems.
Lectu...
The ITER project will involve several states in an unprecedented joint effort towards controlled nuclear fusion. After an overview of the basic principles of the nuclear fusion and of the physics of the plasma, these lectures will focus on the more critical technological aspects needed in the constr...
Developing an appropriate asset allocation policy is one of the
key steps in effectively managing a pension fund. The development
of a sound asset allocation policy must take into account the
fund's risk tolerance, its pension liabilities, and its investment
time horizon. Asset allocation/asset-liab...
The lecture series held in Spring 2000 provided an overview of the energy problem related to demography, risk evaluation, waste and cost, and discussed alternative energy sources like the energy amplifier, Americium and win...
The problem of waste disposal is becoming a more and more critical issue in our consumer society. In this series of lectures, we give a classification of the risk associated to the different types of waste, and the main techniques used for disposal. An overview of the status of recycling techniques,...
The lectures will review the motivations and key objectives for the missions “Mars-Express” (ESA) and “Spirit” and “Opportunity” (NASA) as well as the material embarked and the methods used for the in-situ analysis. Focus will be given on the first results available and their interpretation and impl...
Will future transport systems be safer and less energy hungry?
During the 19th and the first half of the 20th century railroads were constructed, taking a major part in land transport. During the 20th century road transport took over, but at the start of the 21<...
Modern medicine is a large consumer of physics technologies. The series should address subjects like medical imaging by ultrasonic, hyperfine techniques, Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and give as well a historic overview, a survey of recently introduced techniques like IMR, as techniques in the...
Global climate change is a real challenge which opens a number of questions: which are the real causes of this phenomenon? To which extent the human activity is responsible of the increase of the temperature in several regions of the planet? How reliable are the physical models predicting the evolut...
The vacuum energy plays a very important role in quantum field theory, with ramifications in various phenomena in condensed matter and particle physics. The recent indications for the existence of a non-vanishing
cosmological constants or of a dark-energy density have stimulated new research on the ...
Connecting experimental data to the fundamental parameters of the
Standard Model often involves a theoretical calculation of hadronic
matrix elements. Lattice QCD combined with numerical simulations
currently provides the most powerful framework for such calculations.
The method also yields importan...
The field of Cosmology has made vast progress during the last years. We now have a Cosmological model that includes dark matter, dark energy, inflation and baryogenesis as important components. Particularly the
precision and consistency between different measurements
for the ordinary matter/dark...
These lectures will discuss the exciting topic of baryogenesis: why do we live in a 'matter' world?
An introduction will be given to recent ideas to understand the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the Universe. Scenarios
for electroweak baryogenesis, GUT baryogenesis and leptogenesis will be outlined
These lectures will review our state of the art knowledge
on the formation and existence of heavy stellar objects,
such as black holes and neutron stars.
Global warming is one of the pressing problems touching almost all parts of
our society. In order to understand what it really means we will give an
introduction to the basics of climatology and meteorology, and an overview of
the state of
the art of the research currently underway in this field. Th...
In living cells there is an enormous diversity of peptides and other
large molecules, whose molecular structure may be known but not
necessarily how that structure maps to a particular biological
functionality. Physical imaging techniques (such as NMR) are being
used since many years to study the co...
Statistical analyses are part of every days life of a physicist confronted
with data. These lectures will review the statistical methods and pitfalls,
illustrated with practical examples.
During the last years a wealth of data on charmed and
bottom quarks became available from the B-factories, but
also many other experiments. These lectures will discuss
the latest experimental results, and review our present understanding of heavy flavour physics dynamics and spectroscopy. In particu...
Several experiments have recently reported the observation of a narrow
resonance with a mass in the region of 1540 MeV. The decays imply a
state which has as minimal composition in the consitiutent quark model
4 quarks and 1 strangeness anti-quark, and has thus been interpreted as a
pentaquark, a ...
TeVatron Run-II officially started om March 1, 2001 and is expected to deliver data until the LHC starts. An increase of energy from 1.8 to 2 TeV, supplemented by a factor of 100 more integrated luminosity by the end of the decade, will allow the results of Run-I to be first
confirmed and then exten...
While presently a lot of attention goes to present and future collider experiments, there exsist still an exciting
program for fixed target experiments at accelerators.
These lectures will give a tour of recent data and
in particluar future plans for such experiments at the
various laboratories ar...
There is a large interest in a linear e+e- collider with an energy of at
least 500 GeV, covering up to about 1 TeV. These lectures will expand
on the physics program of such a collider and on its complementarity with the
LHC. An overview will be given of the different projects
proposed. The physi...
Beside machines at the energy frontier and flavour factories, several
programs of smaller size may bring tests of the electroweak model and
interesting indirect information on physics beyond the SM. One can quote g-2, Electric Dipoles (mu, neutron, mercure,..), Atomic Parity Violation (Cesium, Fra...
Experimentation in space is a fast developing field.
Satelite experiments such as WMAP have recently allowed us to make large
progress on the measurements of the fundamental cosmological parameters
with unprecedented precision. Other experiments are active to
measure gamma-ray sources, d...
What will an experimentalists life look like at the LHC? In
these lectures we discuss possible run scenarios at the LHC, background
problems, effects of beam loss, and implications of the machine on
small angle physics. Also luminosity measurements and uncertainties will
be discussed.
The advances in SR sources have opened a new window to experimental
techniques. For example existing, and under
construction, ultrahigh brightness sources allow ultrahigh resolution
spectroscopy and spectromicroscopy, the
availability of coherent x-rays allow refraction x-ray imaging, FEL are
us...
For future programs, like a TeV class linear collider, a possible luminosity upgrade of LHC, and CLIC, and possibly in other fields (like astroparticles,..), it is important to
understand the new physics requirements concerning all
aspects of calorimetry, outline the improvements one can foresee re...
The spectrum of cosmic rays has now been measured over more than ten orders in magnitude in energy and about 30 orders in magnitude in flux.
The high energy end of this spectrum, events with energy around or above 10**11 GeV, is puzzling for reasons which will be explained. The ongoing and foreseen ...
We propose a review of the rapidly evolving field of Monte Carlo event
generators for high-energy hadronic collisions. A summary of the
theoretical ingredients for such calculations, of the existing
limitations and of the work taking place to improve these tools will be given.
