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The newspaper was founded in November 1957
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Rochester Conference in Dubna. 1964
FROM THE EDITORS
The International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) is one of the most prestigious international scientific events. It was first held in 1950 in Rochester that is why it is often called the Rochester Conference, although since then it has been held in various cities around the world that are noted for achievements in the field of elementary particle physics.
Thanks to the commissioning of the synchrophasotron and the scientific discoveries implemented at this legendary research facility, in 1964, JINR scientists were able to host the Rochester Conference in Dubna. The preparation for this event deserved special attention. For several months, construction of the New Road, the Hotel "Dubna" and an extension to the Cultural Centre were underway in Dubna. And it was only the tip of the iceberg visible to the townspeople. Providing Conference participants and journalists with everything they needed - from transcripts to currency exchange, a cultural programme, excursions, translation… Today, it seems routine, but back then everything required multiple approvals and a lot of organizational work.
For ten days, on 5 - 15 August, 1964, Dubna became the centre of world science... The Conference Organizing Committee is today perceived as the Areopagus of Russian science - many of those on this list eventually headed the country's largest institutes and became founders of scientific fields:
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| The Conference hall during the opening. Photo by Yu. Tumanov. "For Communism", No. 63, 1964 |
We invite the newspaper's readers to briefly immerse themselves in the "golden age" of nuclear physics, to feel the heat of passions in the discussions of experimental results, the burning interest in colleagues' reports, the excitement that accompanied the research search. The journalistic approach to covering events was also in the spirit of the times - immersion in the topic, numerous interviews, clarity of presentation. It is obvious that the correspondent's work resonated with the general mood.
The retrospective publication is preceded by several colorful sketches about the preparation for the event and the "moment of silence" before the arrival of guests.
When reprinting, the author's punctuation, as well as the designations of particles, nuclear reactions and other physical phenomena have been largely preserved.
There are two weeks left until the hotel is completed
The last stage of the hotel construction started - receipt of finished rooms by floors and furniture arrangement. This work began two weeks later. The reason for this is not the lack of labor and supplies of materials, but the poor organization of work by foremen and craftsmen. At the beginning of painting work, there was insufficient instruction with workers. Craftsmen were not demanding during the preparatory work for high-quality painting of walls and carpentry. Therefore, painters had to putty and repaint almost half of the carpentry.
There are only two weeks left until the project is handed over. But there is still a lot to do. The plastering of the building's basement and terrace is currently delayed. Foreman A.Poroshkov needs to get serious about this work, since subsequent processing of the basement with bush hammers will take a lot of time. It is time for master A.Klushin to finish the work in the attic.
Despite the comments of the technical inspection, the window drains are installed at different levels, poorly secured and have different slopes. It spoils the exterior of the building. Foreman A.Poroshkov should assign a tinsmith, a plasterer and a car with a lift for defect repairs.
The team of carpenters of V.Koptelov began to install oak railings of the spiral staircase. The work is complex and labor-intensive, requiring special tools. The carpenters could buy the tool in the store, but the accounting department does not pay for it. The directorate of builders urgently needs to buy the tool, for it will cost no more than 10 rubles.
A big request to the workers that install furniture in the rooms is not to damage the walls, to bring in the furniture more carefully. Director of the hotel A.I.Lilin needs to assign responsible persons that would monitor it.
There is still a lot of auxiliary work on cleaning the premises and the territory, preparing metal structures for painting, bush-hammering the base.
The city committee of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, the Komsomol committee of the Institute provide assistance to the builders of the hotel, but it is far from sufficient. The teams of Komsomol members from city organizations engaged in cleaning the premises are very small - 3-4 people.
The chief - secretary of the City Committee of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League L.Sinitsyna needs to more widely attract young people to Sundays. The duty of the Komsomol members is to help the hotel builders.
V. VERKHOVODKO, OCSA engineer
"For Communism", No. 13, 1963
Reconstruction of the Cultural Centre
What will the Cultural Centre look like after the reconstruction? Many readers of our newspaper ask this question. We asked the deputy chief engineer of the Construction and Assembly Department V.I.Merteshev to answer it. Here is what he told our correspondent:
- The reconstruction of the Cultural Centre is aimed at making the auditorium larger, where international conferences can be held, films can be shown, plays can be staged, symphony orchestra concerts and other entertainment events can be held. The new hall will accommodate 750 people. It is built in the form of an amphitheater that will create greater convenience for the audience. The current hall will become a foyer, if necessary, this space can be used as an auditorium, since there will be removable chairs and a projection booth.
There will be more rooms for amateur art groups, utility rooms and cloakrooms will be expanded. Three foyers will be in the Cultural Centre. The stage in the new auditorium will be much larger than the current one. Its size will be: 18 meters wide, 12 meters deep. A wide screen will be mounted on it.
A few words about the design of the auditorium. Externally, it will resemble the Palace of Congresses. A suspended ceiling made of corrugated slate, walls finished with wooden slats covered with light green plastic will make the hall modern and beautiful.
The Cultural Centre is a shock construction site. The builders will have to complete a huge amount of work in a very short time. 25 July is the deadline for the completion of the Cultural Centre. And it is clear why the builders working on this most important construction site in our city work with such enthusiasm. Not an hour, but every minute counts here. The work is done in two shifts. It is headed by young masters V.Goncharov and V.Shapiev. Having joined the pre-May socialist competition, the teams of carpenters of P.Melnichuk, the teams of masons of A.Tsvetkov, the teams of welders of Sadikov and the youth teams of masons of Savinov and Kapatsyn work without sparing their strength.
The tight deadlines require precise work by the builders and those who fulfill their orders. The construction site already needs embedded parts for the truss supports and this order has not yet been fulfilled by the non-standard equipment plant (Director Comrade Gogidze). It is necessary to speed up the production of floor trusses that are needed today.
The builders work ahead of schedule, therefore, the reinforced concrete products plant (Director Comrade Khmara) should also hurry with the production of concrete floor slabs, beams and other construction components.
The labor symphony at the Cultural Centre does not cease day or night. The builders do everything so that the International Conference can be held in its hall in August.
"For Communism", No. 33, 1964.
On the eve
White-winged seagulls circle over the blue expanses of the Volga. They either gently descend or soar into the distance of the blue sky. The Volga waves beat against the shore of the very young city of Dubna. In the shade of curly birches stands a beautiful hotel, flower beds spread freshness and aroma around and near the hotel itself there is a small fountain: water, rolling down the stones, forms a small pond, in the middle of which there is reed, lilies and even duckweed bloom. The swamp and thickets are a thing of the past and on warm evenings, the citizens walk along the shady alleys, go out to the bank of the Volga.
It is always lively in the city centre - on the Mir Square. The city is being built. Beautiful houses designed by Bulgarian architects have risen near the park. The Volga embankment is being transformed. In the evening, neon lamps form the words: "House of Commerce", cafe "Summer", hotel "Dubna". Life is in full swing everywhere. Not far from the shore, in the thicket of firs, green and flowerbeds, the building of the Cultural Centre is white. Today, the International Conference on High Energy Physics is opening there. The secretary of the organizing bureau for holding the Conference comrade A.N.Tavkhelidze answered my question on this matter, "Reports on new developments in high energy physics, exchange of experience between countries - this is, perhaps, the main thing."
Deputy Director of the Laboratory of High Energies for Science I.N.Semenyushkin noted, "The Conference will be interesting for physicists. It will involve an exchange of experience and it will be of great benefit to physicists."
On the eve of the Conference, new mechanical workshops were put into service in the Laboratory of High Energies.
"The advantage of the new workshops," Secretary of the Party Organization V.A.Baranov says, "is enormous, there is a lot of light in the spacious large building, a special crane is installed in it that makes it easy to repair machine tools and to move heavy weights along the workshop."
So let us wish success to the physicists in their fruitful work.
M. VASILIEV
"For Communism", No. 63, 1964
XII International Conference on High Energy Physics
"For Communism", No. 63, 1964
Today, the XII International Conference on High Energy Physics opened, with leading scientists from more than 30 countries taking part in it.
Conference participants in the Conference hall. Photo by P.Zolnikov
Our correspondent M.Lebedenko asked Chairman of the Organizing Committee of the Conference, Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences Dmitry Blokhintsev to briefly talk about the objectives of the Conference, as well as its place in international scientific cooperation.
"The history of international conferences on high energy physics is of considerable interest," Professor Blokhintsev said, "as an example of excellent cooperation and reasonable competition between scientists from different countries.
High energy nuclear physics, one of the most important scientific fields of our time, attracts the attention of thousands of scientists, theorists and experimenters working in hundreds of laboratories, institutes and universities in both hemispheres. This research work that requires enormous forces, very complex and expensive equipment, has as its goal in-depth investigation of the structure of the microworld: the laws of life and the interaction of the simplest elementary particles. There is no doubt that the knowledge accumulated by high energy physics will give humanity new opportunities and new resources for its creative goals, perhaps titanic forces.
The science we are talking about now could not develop successfully without a constant exchange of information about the results of research, an exchange of ideas and critical comments. One of the important forms of such exchange is an international conference. Here, well-known physicists that hold leading positions in the science of their countries and young scientists whose work and talent have allowed them to achieve outstanding scientific results meet, give reports, discuss and sometimes argue with each other.
During the meeting. In the foreground, first row (from left to right): A.A.Tyapkin and E.McMillan (USA).
Photo by P.Zolnikov
Despite its outstanding achievements, high energy physics is a very young science. International conferences dedicated to this field of knowledge have been held for a little over a decade. They originated in one of the university cities of the United States of America - Rochester. Then, in turn, they began to be held in Switzerland and the Soviet Union. Currently, the Conference is organized by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), as well as by the scientists from the country where it is held. The ninth conference on high energy physics was held in 1959 in Kiev.
The delegates of the XII Conference on High Energy Physics that will be held in our city are scientists from England, Hungary, the DRV, the USA, France, Canada, India, Italy, Japan, the GDR, the FRG, the DPRK, Poland, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and many other countries. Scientists from 31 countries from all five continents are represented at the Conference.
The work of the Сonference will be very intense. More than 600 papers will have to be considered. The sessions of the sections and plenary sessions will take 10 days, from 5 to 15 August. The Organizing Committee hopes that the XII Conference on High Energy Physics will give an ideological impetus to the further development of science and will promote international cooperation of scientists from all countries of the world. It can already be judged by the articles received from the delegates. There are many very interesting reports on the results of the latest research carried out in the countries participating in the Conference. The key to success is also the good tradition of business cooperation that physicists from all countries highly value.
Dubna is well prepared to welcome the Conference delegates. A first-class hotel has been built here, a new, beautifully decorated auditorium with 750 seats is equipped with a device for simultaneous translation. The Conference participants will be the first to take their seats in the chairs of this auditorium.
The Conference delegates will have the opportunity to visit the laboratories of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, as well as a number of research institutes of the Soviet Union. They will be able to take walks along the Volga and the Moscow Sea.
"For Communism", No. 64, 1964
On 5 August, the XII International Conference on High Energy Physics opened in the Cultural Centre. The Conference was opened by Chairman of the Organizing Committee, Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR D.I.Blokhintsev. He said that the joint intensive research that scientists will carry out in Dubna will facilitate the rapid dissemination of the latest achievements of scientists from different countries. The results of their research will thus become the property of world science. Professor D.I.Blokhintsev also emphasized the significance of the Conference in the further expansion of scientific cooperation.
On the first day, the famous physicist L.Van Hoff, Head of the Theoretical Department at CERN, chaired the meeting of theorists dedicated to the general principles of local theory.
Another parallel session was dedicated to experimental research of the interaction of pions and nucleons with energies up to one billion electron volts. Director of the Laboratory of Nuclear Problems Professor V.P.Dzhelepov chaired it. The evening parallel sessions of the Conference were chaired by both Academician V.I.Veksler and the American scientist Professor V.Panofsky.
The proceedings of the Dubna Conference will fill a huge volume. Readers, of course, understand that it is impossible to give a more or less complete report of even one day of the conference in a newspaper. Therefore, we are publishing a short report here. It tells only about individual moments, about different episodes. And yet, we hope that it will give some idea of the course of the Conference that is held with great success in an atmosphere of businesslike international cooperation.
Physicists look for new ways
Soviet theorist L.D.Soloviev gave an interesting report at the Conference on the infrared singularity in quantum electrodynamics. He obtained interesting results proving that at low photon energies it is possible to obtain exact solutions of the equations of quantum field theory for a number of processes occurring in the microworld.
One of the promising techniques of studying the elementary particle physics is the quasipotential approach in field theory, proposed by scientists of the Joint Institute Doctors of Science A.Tavkhelidze and A.Logunov. They gave reports on the latest data they obtained during the development of this technique.
The further development of the technique was reflected in the report of the famous American scientist R. Blankenbeckler reporting that he already meets individual equations using a similar technique.
Neutrino physics becomes an experimental science
One of the most important events of the first day of the XII International Conference on High Energy Physics was the seminar on neutrino physics. It was not included in the Conference programme and was therefore called unofficial. No special time was allocated for it, free from other sessions. There was no simultaneous translation that has already become customary. The pocket receivers used by the Conference delegates stopped their multilingual chatter.
And yet, the Conference hall of the Laboratory of Nuclear Problems, where the seminar was held, was overcrowded. Those who did not have enough chairs sat on the windowsills, stood in the aisles, filled the doorways. The reports were delivered and discussions were made without a break for almost four hours. People that had already worked hard at the main sessions of the Conference did not seem to feel tired.
What was the reason for such a success of the seminar? Our correspondent talked to many of its participants. The general opinion is that today is only the time when it is really possible to experiment with neutrinos.
Until recently, they have joked that neutrinos were specifically invented to provide a convenient but unverifiable explanation for gaps in the theory. And indeed, it is not for nothing that neutrinos are called elusive. After all, it can easily penetrate through barriers equal to, for example, a lead plate, the thickness of which would cover the distance from the earth to the nearest star. Only very recently, it has been possible to find ingenious techniques for experimenting with neutrinos.
Excellent sources of powerful neutrino beams have also appeared. These are modern high energy particle accelerators. Some of the new ideas have already been implemented. Among them are experiments proposed by Soviet scientists Academician B.M.Pontecorvo and Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR M.A.Markov (Dubna). Interesting experimental results were obtained by physicists from the USA and CERN. D.Candy and J. Faisner spoke about them. They also reported the first disappointments that are inevitable in science. The fact is that CERN scientists carefully tested their own investigations that had previously led them to the conclusion about the probable occurrence of certain particles (intermediate bosons with a certain mass) participating in the birth of neutrinos. New experiments have provided additional information indicating that apparently such intermediate bosons do not occur. The participants of the seminar regretted it, since this particle was very "convenient" for constructing a theory. However, the conclusions drawn from this new range of experiments carried out at CERN under the supervision of Giuseppe Bernardini are very important for understanding the microworld. Do bosons involved in reactions with neutrinos occur? If there are no light bosons, then maybe there are heavier ones? This assumption will be tested in Geneva with the help of new experiments. Italian scientist Oreste Piccioni spoke about them.
The famous American scientist F.Reines told about the experiments in which he first observed nuclear interactions caused by neutrinos obtained from nuclear reactors. He reported on plans for major experiments in which further investigations will be carried out.
Academician Bruno Pontecorvo suggested that scientists give neutrinos additional names. As it is known, Pontecorvo once predicted the occurrence of two types of neutrinos depending on their origin - electron and muon. How to designate them more briefly? Some physicists suggested different terms. But they were not recognized, because they caused confusion. At this seminar, B.Pontecorvo suggested calling electron neutrinos "el-neutrinos" and muon neutrinos "mu-neutrinos". The word "neutrino" is for all cases when talking about both types of these particles. D.Bernardini that supervises neutrino experiments at CERN, said that he agrees with this designation system. Obviously, the new names proposed at this seminar will now enter scientific circulation, since many leading physicists involved in neutrino research participated in the seminar.
Experiments with neutrinos are just beginning. The future will show which of the new ideas are destined to become reality. The tiny "cunning" neutrino dwarfs that in addition to their name today received a patronymic in Dubna, will certainly make their contribution to the treasury of human knowledge.
This is how mutual verification occurs
A report by American physicist G.Bright from Yale University caused a great deal of discussion among physicists at the Conference. He spoke about the body of data on phase transitions and the analysis of nucleon-nucleon interactions. Such investigations that are of great significance for understanding the laws of life in the microworld were most completely carried out at Yale University and in Dubna under the supervision of Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Yu.M.Kazarinov.
One of the reasons for the discussion, obviously, included some discrepancies in the data obtained in different places by scientists working independently of each other. However, upon detailed comparison it turned out that the results of the research of Bright and Kazarinov's groups almost completely coincide in their essential parts. Physicists from different countries can use them in their papers as reliable raw data.
Double charge exchange of Pi mesons
A report by Soviet scientist Dr. V.M.Sidorov aroused keen interest at the Conference. The group of employees of the Laboratory of Nuclear Problems headed by him carried out further research on the recently discovered phenomenon of double charge exchange of Pi+ mesons (a previously unknown nuclear reaction in which a particle changes its charge by two units). Similar experiments were subsequently implemented in Geneva. Today, V.M.Sidorov reported that his group of physicists also discovered the double charge exchange of Pi mesons for the first time. However, despite the fact that these two types of particles differ only in sign, the nature of the reaction of their double charge exchange changes significantly for reasons that have not yet been explained (a sharply different cross section, that is, the probability of the reaction). It suggests that there is some kind of mystery, the solution of which may result in new discoveries. The phenomenon of double recharging itself, discovered in Dubna, if the assumptions put forward by a number of physicists are confirmed, may also produce another interesting effect: occurrence of "unexpected nuclei." But this is an issue for the future.
Polarized targets - a new experimental technique
American scientist Herbert Steiner made a report at the Conference on High Energy Physics that attracted widespread attention. Polarized hydrogen targets were used for the first time in experimental practice at the University of Berkeley (California). This promising research technique allowed to measure proton polarization in proton-proton collisions over a wide energy range.
A separate seminar will be dedicated to the technique of polarized hydrogen targets at the Conference in Dubna.
"For Communism", No. 64, 1964