Geneva, 21 December 1994. The CERN1 Council, where the representatives of the 19 Member States of the Organization decide on scientific programmes and financial resources, held its 101st session on 16 December under the chairmanship of Prof. Hubert Curien (F).
Director General's Report The Director-General, Prof. Chris Llewellyn Smith, reported that CERN celebrated its 40th birthday year with excellent physics results on all fronts. Progress towards the LHC culminated in a superbly successful test of a fully connected string of superconducting magnets early in December (see Press Release PR 15.94), and has been crowned by CERN Council's approval of the project at the historic closing of its 100th session.
At the isotope generator ISOLDE, successes ranged from production of isotopes for studies leading to better dose control techniques for use in palliative bone cancer therapy, to new laser-based insights into the 'cooking' of heavy elements during the Big Bang and inside stellar 'ovens' such as supernovae.
At the Low Energy Antiproton Ring (LEAR), fed by the 35-year old Proton Synchrotron PS, a group of experiments is exploring the basic symmetries of nature. The charge/parity/time (CPT) conservation has been tested with a precision of 10-9 by comparing the mass of the proton and the antiproton, and mechanism of CP violation is studied in detail. Several other experiments have observed candidate glueballs, gluon-rich blobs of quarkless matter. At the SPS, the first-ever high energy lead beam, produced in a new injector, built in collaboration with several European laboratories, which was inaugurated on 12 December, has been shot on lead targets producing dramatic events featuring well over 500 collision fragments.
Results from the 'energy amplifier' of CERN's ex-Director General Prof. Carlo Rubbia, agree well with computer simulations of sub-critical controllable nuclear fission. The understanding of the scientific principals is now complete and the path is open to elaboration of practical applications.
The new neutrino beam line was commissioned this year and experiments CHORUS and NOMAD are examining whether neutrinos have non-zero mass, which would have important cosmological and astrophysical implications. Another mystery is being probed by the Spin Muon Collaboration (SMC), namely that the spin of the three quarks inside a proton accounts for only about a third of the total spin of the particle.
High precision Z0 data pouring out of the Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider experiments are constraining the masses of the elusive top quark and the Higgs boson into an ever diminishing energy range. Indeed, the 'top' results from Fermilab earlier in the year were in extraordinary agreement with LEP predictions. Record luminosity at LEP1, and a promise of more to come thanks to a new so-called bunch train collision technique, bode well for LEP2, as does the satisfying performance of the super-conducting accelerating cavities needed to double LEP energy to 90 GeV per beam.
To end, and accompanied by a real-life, real-time performance, the Director-General paid tribute to the CERN inventors of the World-Wide Web (WWW), a networked data access system which has brought over 50 million documents just a mouse-click away from millions of users every day. Born of the need for particle physicists to share information rapidly and easily wherever they or it may be, WWW is a direct and immediate spin-off from high energy physics with enormous benefits to society.
Resolution on the respective contributions of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and the Slovak Republic At the time of their admission to CERN membership, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and the Slovak Republic were individually granted by Council a transition arrangement including in particular an annual reduced contribution to the CERN Budget. It was also decided to examine in the course of 1994 the exact rate of increase of the contribution of each country. Council decided that for each of these Member States, a baseline of 40% should be reached in 1998 and that each transition arrangement should end in the year 2002 with the full rate of contribution.
Budget for 1995
The budget of the Organization proposed by the CERN Management of 918.7 MCHF (at 1994 prices) was approved by Council. A zero Cost-Variation Index was voted by Council.
Elections
Prof. Hubert. Curien (F) was re-elected President of Council for the period of one year.
Dr Paul Levaux (B) was elected Vice-President of Council for the period of one year.
Dr Marcello Gigliarelli Fiumi (I) was elected Chairman of the Finance Committee for a period of one year.
Dr Günter E. Wolf, DESY, Hamburg (D) was re-elected as Chairman of the Scientific Policy Committee (SPC) for a period of one year.
Prof. Jacques Lefrançois, Laboratoire de l'Accélérateur Linéaire, Orsay, (F) was elected to the Scientific Policy Committee for three years from 1 January 1995.
Dr Willem C. Middelkoop (NL) was re-elected as Vice-Chairmen of the Governing Board of the Pension Fund for one year.
Appointments to senior posts
Directorate : Dr Lyndon Evans (GB) was appointed to the Directorate as LHC Project Leader. Dr Maurice Robin (F) was appointed to the Directorate as Head of Administration for 3 years as of 1 January 1995.
The leadership of the CERN Divisions as from 1 January 1995 is : Theory (TH) : G. Veneziano (I) Particle Physics Experiments (PPE) : G. Goggi (I) Electronics and Computing for Physics (ECP) : M. Turala (P) Computing and Networks (CN) : D. Williams (GB) Mechanical Technologies (MT) : G. Bachy (F) Proton Synchrotron (PS) : D. Simon (F) SPS + LEP (SL) : K. Kissler (D) Accelerator Technologies (AT) : J-P. Gourber (F) Technical Support (ST) : F. Ferger (D) Administrative Support (AS) : J. Ferguson (GB) Personnel (PE) : W. Middelkoop (NL) Finance (FI) : A. Naudi (CH/GB) Technical Inspection & Safety Commission (TIS) : B. de Raad (NL)
1. CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Israel, the Russian Federation, Turkey, Yugoslavia (status suspended after UN embargo, June 1992), the European Commission and Unesco have observer status.