People and things. CERN Courier, Oct 1995, v. 35(7)

The article reports on achievements of various people, staff changes and position opportunities within the CERN organization and contains news updates on upcoming or past events: Gentner-Kastler Prize: T he prestigious Gentner-Kastler Prize, jointly awarded by the French and German Physical Societies, goes this year to Walter Schmidt-Parzefall of DESY, formerly leader of the Argus group at the DORIS electron-positron collider at the DESY Laboratory Hamburg, which has made many significant contributions to heavy quark spectroscopy. Subsequently he joined Hamburg University, and has recently played a prominent role in establishing the HERA-B experiment at DESY's HERA electron-proton collider. Before working at DESY, Schmidt-Parzefall spent some time at CERN's Intersecting Storage Rings.; Thirty ISR years: A discreet lunch event at CERN marked the 30th anniversary of the historic decision to go ahead with the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR) at CERN. Among those present were Victor Weisskopf, CERN's Director General at the time, and Mervyn Hine, responsible for CERN's longterm planning under Weisskopf. The ISR, the world's first proton collider, came into operation in 1971, ahead of schedule, but was shut down in 1984, also ahead of schedule, as part of the bid to divert funds to LEP construction. The ISR, which used the idea of particle stacking to build up the stored beam intensity, was long regarded as a masterpiece of accelerator building, and blazed a trail for CERN's future accelerator projects. Many CERN specialists cut their accelerator teeth at the ISR.; ICTP Dirac Medal: The International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste, is awarding its 1995 Dirac Medal to Michael Berry of Bristol for his discovery of the non-integrable phase that arises in adiabatic processes in quantum theory. This effect was first detected in 1986 in an optics experiment by Tomita and Chiao in which the rotation of the polarization plane of a wave propagating in a twisted optical fibre was interpreted as a Berry phase. In the same year it was found that the frequency splitting in the nuclear quadrupole resonance spectra of a slowly rotating nucleus could be ascribed to a Berry phase phenomenon. The Berry phase is now known to play a significant role in many different areas of microscopic physics ranging from chemistry and molecular physics to optics, nuclear and solid state physics and relativistic quantum field theory. In all these areas the recognition of the nonintegrable phase has led to a deepening of our understanding of the underlying quantum dynamics. ICTP instituted the Dirac Medals in 1985. They are awarded for contributions to theoretical physics and mathematics, but are not awarded to Nobel Prize or Wolf Foundation Prize winners