Festival of Science 2013

The 2013 Science Festival

For this year's festival, a cycle of 4 presentations for the general public will be given by physicists from LAPTh and LAPP on saturday 12 and Sunday 13 October. These presentations will be held in the auditorium Marcel Vivargent (LAPP/LAPTh) in Annecy-le-Vieux.

Here is the programme (All talks in French) :

Saturday 12 October at 14h : "Voir l’invisible, vues scientifiques et vues d’artistes" par Loic Rolland (LAPP)

Saturday 12 October at 17h : "Un boson nommé Higgs" par Paul Sorba (LAPTh)

Sunday 13 October at 14h : "Défis technologiques : explorer l’espace et la matière" par Armand Fiasson (LAPP)

Sunday 13 October at 17h : "L’image astronomique : du télescope à l’utilisation scientifique" par Richard Taillet (LAPTh)

The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics

The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to François Englert (Belgium) and Peter W. Higgs (U.K). The press release of the Nobel committee is very careful in its wording. First of all the prize is awarded to two theorists "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particle". This Nobel refers to the BEH mechanism (for Brout, Englet and Higgs). In 1964 Brout and Englert wrote a paper putting forth the idea. Within a few weeks the same proposal was made by Higgs albeit in a slightly different language. The mechanism itself was a way to counter a theorem (Goldstone theorem, which in fact was put on firm ground by Goldstone, Salam and Weinberg). The theorem predicts the appearance of massless spin-0 bosons (Nambu-Goldstone bosons) whenever there is spontaneous symmetry breaking. In short this refers to the situation where the dynamics and the equations describing the physics have a symmetry that is not shared by the solution of the equation, in particular by the ground state of the theory.

Read more: The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics

Pasquale Serpico, CNRS Bronze Medal Ceremony

The CNRS Bronze Medal Ceremony Award  was held in Grenoble on 4 October 2013 in Grenoble. The award is in recognition of the work of Pasquale in astroparticles. Pasquale received his medal from Bart van Tiggelen the Associate Director of the Institute of Physics of the CNRS.

Prior to the formal handing of the medal, a presentation of the work of Pasquale was shown to the audience. This was followed by a humorous portrait of Pasquale made by friends and colleagues of Paquale. See both videos here.

Bart van Tiggelen conveyed the congratulations of the CNRS. Upon receiving the medal, Pasquale gave a thank you speech.

GDR Terascale in Annecy

LAPP and LAPTh will host the GDR Terascale from 28 to 30 Oct 2013. The GDR Terascale is a working group involving French theorists and experimentalists working on High energy particle physics and astroparticles with a focus on Higgs, BSM, Dark Matter and Tools and Monte-Carlos needed to pursue such investigations. The Full programme is to be found here.