THE ROLE OF EVALUATION FOR A COMPETITIVE SCIENCE

Interview with A. J. Stewart Smith, Professor emeritus at Princeton University, former President of the International Evaluation Committee of INFN

The INFN fully understands and values the importance of unbiased evaluation for it to remain a centre of excellence and maintain its competitive edge. For this reason, since 1997 its research activities have been evaluated by an International Evaluation Committee (Comitato di Valutazione Internazionale – CVI) made up of six international experts in the fields of economics, industry, and research. Each year the CVI issues a report on the INFN’s research activities, along with its recommendations for improving overall performance. This report and the INFN three-year plan is sent to the Italian Ministry for Universities and Research. The last meeting of the CVI with the INFN’s management and representatives was held on October 12-14 and was hosted by the Bari Division. It was also the last meeting to be chaired by Professor Smith, a senior particle physicist and an internationally renowned scientist, Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, who successfully led the BaBar experiment at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, in California, USA.

You served for eight years as Chair of the INFN International Evaluation Committee, and your mandate just ended, on December 31st. How was this experience, from a professional and personal point of view?

Simply sensational on both counts! Professionally it has been an honour and privilege to help INFN strengthen and hone its already outstanding science programs and advise its management on plans for the future. I loved learning about areas outside my experience as a traditional high-energy physicist: KM3Net, Virgo, Einstein Telescope, XENONnT, Eupraxia projects, to name a few.

RESEARCH

VELA, A PULSAR AT THE LIMIT OF POLARISATION

Pulsars, rapidly rotating neutron stars, emit a wind of high-energy particles, permeated by magnetic fields, which can collide with the gas it encounters along its path. In this collision, synchrotron radiation is produced, literally "lighting up" the nebulae. An investigation of the properties of the light from such a celestial object, the Vela Pulsar Wind Nebula (PWN), observable in the southern sky, shows that it is polarised.

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OPEN SCIENCE

THE LHCb COLLABORATION MAKES AVAILABLE ITS DATA

The LHCb collaboration, working on the large experiment at CERN's LHC accelerator dedicated to the study of heavy quarks, has for the first time made public a large package of data acquired from the detector. The data, already available on CERN's open data portal, represents approximately 20% of the total information produced by proton-proton collision events during LHC Run 1.

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