High Energy Physics in Mexico: Historical Sketch and Implications

AIP Conference Proceedings, 2006

The Mexican School of Particles and Fields was borne at a time when scientific communications in Mexico, specially with the first world community, were very slow and inefficient. Nowadays, after 22 years, the school is well attended every two years by students and young researchers from Mexico and Latin America. By introducing participants to the fast moving frontier of scientific developments in the area of of high energy physics and astroparticle physics, the School has played an important role in fostering the career of young researchers working in these fields.

Scientometrics

We present a statistical overview of the publications in theoretical high energy physics (HEP), which emerged in Latin America (LA) in the period from 1990 to 2012. Our study captures the eight Latin American nations, which are dominant in this field of research:

2017

We present a statistical overview of the publications in theoretical high energy physics (HEP), which emerged in Latin America (LA) in the period from 1990 to 2012. Our study captures the eight Latin American nations, which are dominant in this field of research: Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Venezuela, Uruguay and Cuba. As an intercontinental benchmark, we compare them with India, Canada, South Korea, Belgium and South Africa. We consider the productivity of research papers in specialized high-impact journals, and the corresponding numbers of citations. The goal is to document the efforts in LA to catch up with the most wealthy countries, in a field of research without direct practical benefits. The restriction to theoretical HEP excludes large international collaborations, which enables a fair evaluation of national achievements. We further investigate how these records are correlated with three socio-economic indices: the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the Human Deve...

Minerva, 2005

Experimental high-energy and nuclear physics was created in Spain thanks to Joaquı´n Catala´de Alemany, who founded the Institute of Corpuscular Physics (IFIC) at the University of Valencia in 1950. The physics of photographic emulsions, cheap and easy to manipulate, were well adapted to the depressed situation in Spain following the Civil War. This essay describes how, using these techniques, Catala´de Alemany created a group, established links with international laboratories, and fostered a tradition that continues today.

AIP Conference Proceedings, 2006

The field of heavy-ion physics in Mexico is a rather young but nonetheless very successful enterprise. The community of practitioners working in the field has been growing steadily both in quantity and degree of specialization; during this year, the field counted with about 18 Ph. D's and about the same number of students pursuing different degrees, coming from 4 different institutions in Mexico. The amount of people along with the quality of their research make this team one of the strongest in high energy physics in Mexico. The key to the success lies on the ability of the community to cluster around well defined goals and to work coherently to solve specific tasks. The effort has been both experimental and theoretical, which adds to the strength of the collaboration. The defining moment that made the launching of the enterprise possible was the early involvement in the ALICE collaboration and in particular the taking of the responsibility for the design and construction of two of its detectors, the V0A and ACORDE triggers. In this short review, I concentrate in describing the contributions to the field by colleagues whose research has been developed in Mexico, on theoretical, phenomenological and Monte Carlo simulation aspects.

Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 2012

This paper aims to offer a programmatic agenda for a social history of science and technology of Mexico during the Cold War period (from 1950 to the mid-1980s). We take into account recent trends in the field of science studies, such as the inclusion of postcolonial studies and a robust attention to the circulation of knowledge, understood as the traveling of scientific practices, people, tools and materials. After a brief survey on the international literature on Cold War science, including Latin America and Mexico, we introduce two requirements: a symmetrical treatment of global and local (Mexican) historical trajectories, and the necessity to write interconnected stories to account for the co-construction of the US scientific and technological hegemony after World War II. Finally, we provide a set of specific questions to be answered by historians of Mexican physics and life sciences during this period.

Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 2016

The story-line of the activities that have produced the first group of scientists in Mexico working on particle accelerator science and technology is briefly presented.

S1) In 1935, the Japanese physicist Hideki Yukawa published a paper in which he proposed the existence of a particle whose weight was between the proton and the electron. Some years and a World War after that, in 1947, Cesar Lattes, a Brazilian physicist, exposed to cosmic rays an emulsion plate loaded with Borax in a sky club spot at Chacaltaya Mountain, 5.200 meters above the sea level, near to La Paz, Bolivia. Lattes had the technic of "how to see" the tracks of mesons in emulsion plates and went to Berkeley University to use its 184-inch particle accelerator aiming to see them in the nucleon collisions that were already been done. One week after his arriving, he got the "artificially" produced mesons tracks. So, from experiments performed with cosmic rays and accelerators, the scientific community "observed" the existence of new sub-atomic particles. (S2) The excitement in the scientific world around Lattes was enormous. Yukawa received the Nobel of physics in 1949 for his paper of 1935 and Lattes was one of the indicated in 1949, for his observations in 1946-1947. But, the winner of the 1950 prize was the head of the Bristol Laboratory, Cecil Powell. At this lab, a group of physicists, that Lattes was part, was working on a best understanding of the emulsion technic as a tool of particle physics in accord with their strategy of detection. The importance of this historical situation was that a new field of investigation with a lot of new questions could arise from the intersection of an improved scientific practice of men from Bristol Laboratory and the machines of Berkeley Lab. Some of the questions were: What are the existent composite sub-atomic particles? Which properties do they have? How are the dynamics of their production? In this sense, the physics of elementary particles has emerged.