Standing Out From The Crowd In Large Collaboration

As someone who has never been involved in these huge collaborations that we see in high energy physics, I've often wondered how a graduate student or a postdoc make a name for themselves. If you are one of dozens, even hundreds, of authors in a paper, how do you get recognized?

It seems that this issue has finally been addressed by the high energy physics community, at least in Europe. A working group has been established to look into ways for students, postdocs, and early-career researches to stand out from the crowd and have their effort recognized individually.

To fully exploit the potential of large collaborations, we need to bring every single person to maximum effectiveness by motivating and stimulating individual recognition and career choices. With this in mind, in spring 2018 the European Committee for Future Accelerators (ECFA) established a working group to investigate what the community thinks about individual recognition in large collaborations. Following an initial survey addressing leaders of several CERN and CERN-recognised experiments, a community-wide survey closed on 26 October with a total of 1347 responses. 

Still, the article does not clarify on exactly how these individual recognition can be done. I'd be interested to hear how they are going to do this.

Zz.

Spotlight On Flash

{There was a pun in there.}

Here's a good video to introduce you to FLASH, the FEL facility at DESY.



This, of course, is a counterpart to LCLS at SLAC. It looks like FEL facilities are popping up all over the place as the new "in-fashion" light source. This is almost like 20 years ago when synchrotron centers were the rage as light sources.

Zz.

Europe Plans Future Research Facilities

The European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures is recommending several major research facilities covering many different areas to be built in Europe.

The first roadmap in 2006 recommended 34 projects to be completed across all research areas within the next ten years. These included seven in the physical science such as the €950m European Extremely Large Telescope, an underwater neutrino detector in the Atlantic and the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) currently being constructed in Darmstadt, Germany.

Let's hope the economic slowdown will not affect such plans.

Zz.