Bepcii and Besiii
The Beijing Electron Collider has been upgraded (BEPCII) to a two-ring collider with a design luminosity of $1 \times 10^{33}$cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$ at a center-of-mass energy of 3.78 GeV. It will operate between 2 and 4.6 GeV in the center of mass. With this luminosity, the BESIII detector will be able to collect, for example, 10 billion $J/\psi$ events in one year of running. This will be a unique facility in the world opening many physics opportunities. BEPCII and BESIII are both currently being commissioned, first events have been obtained, and data taking will take place in fall 2008.
A high density time to digital converter module for BESIII end-cap TOF upgrade
This paper describes the high precision time measurement for the end-cap time of flight (ETOF) upgrade of a Beijing Spectrometer (BESIII). After upgrade, ETOF will be built using Multigap Resistive Plate Chambers (MRPC) and will have 1728 readout channels which is a big challenge for the readout electronics. The time resolution of the readout electronics system is required to be better than 25 ps. A 9U VME module with 72 time measurement channels is designed to perform particles flight time measurement. The signals, which are produced by the detector and then amplified and discriminated by the frontend electronics, are sent to the time-to-digital converter (TDIG) module to be digitized. The TDIG module uses the CERN HPTDC technique to achieve high precision time-to-digital converter and totally applies nine HPTDC chips to realize 72 channels. The primary hit measurements from HPTDC chips are forwarded to one Altera field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to be processed. Finally, the data are sent to DAQ server by Ethernet. The VME interface logic is implemented in an Altera CPLD. The TDIG module can also accept an external trigger and pick out the expected events which are correlated with the given trigger. A series of experiment tests show that the time resolution of the TDIG module is better than 20 ps.
The Invention of the Jewish People
'All modern nation states have a story of their origins, passed down through both official and popular culture, and yet few of these accounts have proved as divisive and influential as the Israeli national myth. The well-known tale of Jewish exile at the hands of the Romans during the first century AD, and the assertion of both cultural and racial continuity through to the Jewish people of the present day, resonates far beyond Israel's borders. Despite its use as a justification for Jewish settlement in Palestine and the project of a Greater Israel, there have been few scholarly investigations into the historical accuracy of the story as a whole. In this bold and ambitious new book, Shlomo Sand shows that the Israeli national myth has its origins in the nineteenth century, rather than in biblical times - when Jewish historians, like scholars in many other cultures, reconstituted an imagined people in order to model a future nation. Sand forensically dissects the official story - and demonstrates the construction of a nationalist myth and the collective mystification that this requires. A bestseller in Israel and France, Shlomo Sand's book has sparked a widespread and lively debate. Should the Jewish people regard themselves as genetically distinct and identifiable across the millennia - or should that doctrine now be left behind and if the myth of the Jewish state is dismantled, could this open a path toward a more inclusive Israeli state, content within its borders?'