Demolition Derby Uncovers
Clues on Subatomic Glue
By James Glanz

Particle physicists are known as the demolition crews of the very small, smashing tiny bits of matter together to find the even tinier bits that they are made of. So it may come as a surprise that the field has recently found a powerful new engine of discovery: gluing it all back together again, sometimes in weird ways that seldom occur in nature, if ever. Robert Cahn, a particle physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who works on what is called the BaBar experiment at Stanford, gave the particle interregnum a name: the non-S.S.C. era. Full story (registration required).

Science 'Breakthrough':
Dark Energy's Details

Science Magazine's annual "Breakthrough of the Year" issue in 1998 celebrated the discovery, by Berkeley Lab scientists and others that the universe is expanding. Five years later, cosmology is again number one. Microwave mapping, which eliminated all doubts about the existence of dark energy, takes top honors in Science for 2003. Again, Berkeley Lab played a role -- the article cites new supernova observations, including those at the Lab, as contributing to understandings of dark energy, which comprises 73% of the universe (4% ordinary matter, the stuff of stars and trees and people; 23% exotic matter: dark mass that astrophysicists believe is made up of an as-yet-undetected particle). Download a PDF of the article here.

Berkeley Lab employees who missed the December 9 program of talks that paid tribute to the anniversaries of the National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM's 20th) and the Advanced Light Source (ALS's 10th) can relive the celebration on videotape. Copies of the 90-minute program -- which featured scientists Gareth Thomas, Jay Marx, Uli Dahman and Neville Smith, moderated by Deputy Director Pier Oddone -- are available on loan from the Lab Library in Building 50.