The summer school of the CERN Baltic countries group took place in Palanga

All participants were welcomed by Kaunas University of Technology Vice-Rector for Research and Innovation Leonas Balaševičius, Director of Kaunas University of Technology Institute of Materials Science Sigitas Tamulevičius and representative of Lithuanian Innovation Center Marijus Muralis.

Dr. Brigita Abakevičienė, Chair of the Organising Committee and Vice-Chair of the CERN Baltic Countries Group, and Dr. Ants Koel (Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech)) CERN Baltic States Group Chairman gave an informative presentation and introduced everyone to the development of the CERN Baltic Group.

The school featured lectures and workshops given by high-level experts who have worked in the CERN environment and who are currently working there:

• Maurizio Vretenar is an accelerator physicist who joined CERN in 1988 to take part in the design, construction, and operation of linear accelerators. In recent years, he has been increasingly active in the field of accelerator applications for society, particularly in the medical field, where he is currently leading the Next Ion Medical Machine Study (NIMMS), a new CERN initiative in the field of accelerators for cancer therapy with ions. Presentations: “Introduction to Particle Accelerators: Principles, Technologies, Challenges” and “Accelerators for Society: Health, Environment, Industry”.
• Jonathan Ellis (University of London (GB)) is a theoretical physicist with research interests in elementary particle physics beyond the Standard Model (predictions for collider experiments and the interpretation of their results), high-energy astrophysics, cosmology (dark matter and strategies to detect it, as well as dark energy and cosmological inflation) and quantum gravity. He is actively working on searches for supersymmetric particles at the LHC and as astrophysical dark matter. He was one of the first to study how the Higgs boson could be produced and discovered. He also studies possible future particle accelerators, such as the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) and future circular colliders. Presentations: “Beyond Standard Model / New Physics”, “Dark Matter” and “Gravitational waves”.
• Yuri Dokshitzer – former Director Recherche CNRS, France, Lecturer at Riga Technical University and Leading scientist at St. Petersburg Nuclear physics institute. He is a physicist with research interests High Energy Particle Physics and Quantum Chromodynamics. In 2020 Prof. Dokshitzer joined the team of the RTU Centre of High-Energy Physics and Particle Accelerators (HEP&AT Centre), where he has been educating and training the young researchers of both RTU and the University of Latvia (UL). Presentation title: “QFT and High Energies”.
• Leonid Rivkin is member of the PSI Board of Directors since 2006, taking charge of the division of Large Research Facilities and being responsible for operation of all of the PSI accelerators, as well as for accelerator R&D for future projects at PSI and in industry. Projects at CERN include work on future upgrades of LHC and associated accelerators, as well as research and development towards the future high energy frontier electron-positron linear collider. Presentations: “Accelerator Science and Technology” parts I-III.
• Kārlis Dreimanis is a Team Leader for the CMS Latvia Group at CERN. Research interests mainly include precision physics precision measurements in electroweak and top physics analyses as well as the investigation of the collision processes at the soft, low energy/momentum transfer regime at the LHC. Presentation: “Experimental Particle Physics at LHC”.
• Aleksas Mazeliauskas is an Emmy Noether junior group leader at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Heidelberg University, Germany. He works on many-body phenomena emerging from interactions of elementary particles in a hot and dense nuclear matter created in high-energy proton and heavy-ion collisions. In particular, his group is developing detailed numerical simulations of QCD thermalisation in hadron collisions using QCD kinetic theory. Presentation: “High-Density QCD Physics with Proton and Heavy-Ion Beams”.
• Grossman’s research on theoretical physics concentrates on high energy physics phenomenology: model building, astroparticle physics, neutrino physics, leptogenesis, anti-matter, dark matter, and collider phenomenology. His main focus is on interpreting experimental data and suggesting new analyses to experiments. His research work at the Cornell Laboratory for Accelerator-based Sciences and Education focused on flavor physics including: lepton flavor symmetries, leptogenesis, CP violation, composite neutrinos, and spin determination. In recent years, Prof. Grossman has mainly worked on B physics and neutrino physics. In the next few years, he expects to continue to research on topics related to Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Presentations: “A Different Way to Look at QFT”, “Model building” and “The Standard Model”.
• Joao Seco is a Professor of Biomedical Physics in Radiation Oncology at the Heidelberg University and Department Head of DKFZ German Cancer Research Center. His research focuses on novel imaging technologies to reduce Bragg peak positioning errors in patients as well as on investigating the mechanism of radiation triggered DNA damage via reactive oxygen species. Presentations: “Overview of Physics and Biology in Radiation Therapy Applications” and “Particle Therapy in Fighting Cancer”.
• Toms Torims is representative of Latvia at CERN (Institute of Particle Physics and Accelerator Technologies) and Advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs. His research focuses on manufacturing technologies, particle accelerator application in the industry and additive manufacturing. Presentation: “Advanced Particle Therapy Centre for the Baltic States”.
• Tiziano Camporesi’s (LIP, Lisbon, Portugal and Boston University, USA) research is focused on the studies of the Standard Model (which represents what we know about Nature behaviour at the fundamental level), search for the Higgs boson, extra dimensions, supersymmetry and particles that could make up dark matter. Presentation: “The Birth of a Modern Particle Physics Detector”.

The summer school aimed not only to promote the preparation of young researchers, conduct research and improve their scientific qualification but also to establish contacts and create the CERN community in the Baltic countries, promote cooperation and create a multidisciplinary communication platform where individual scientists, research groups and companies from the Baltic States could find opportunities for synergy and cooperation.

Although the school is an initiative of the CERN Baltic Group (CBG), the CERN Baltic Summer School covers the entire spectrum of CERN and its related activities: research, engineering, computing, industry, politics, etc.

The large number of sponsors of the event emphasises the synergistic relationship between science-industry-politics. General sponsors: LMT, JSC “Inospectra”; sponsors: JSC “Holtida”, JSC “Power of Eye”, JSC “Nanoversa”, JSC “PrintaPrint”.