Current Status and Future Plans for Experiment AD-4 Biological Effectiveness of Antiproton Annihilation

Current Status and Future Plans for AD-

Restoring Order in Global Health Governance: Do Metagovernance Norms Affect Interorganizational Convergence? CES Open Forum Series #23, 2014-2015

This paper theorizes about the convergence of international organizations in global health governance, a field of international cooperation that is commonly portrayed as particularly hit by institutional fragmentation. Unlike existing theories on interorganizationalism that have mainly looked to intra- and extraorganizational factors in order to explain why international organizations cooperate with each other in the first place, the paper is interested in the link between causes and systemic effects of interorganizational convergence. The paper begins by defining interorganizational convergence. It then proceeds to discuss why conventional theories on interorganizational- ism fail to explain the aggregate effects of convergence between IOs in global (health) governance which tend to worsen rather than cushion fragmentation — so-called "hypercollective action" (Severino & Ray 2010). In order to remedy this explanatory blind-spot the paper formulates an alternative sociological institutionalist theory on interorganizational convergence that makes two core theoretical propositions: first that emerging norms of metagovernance are a powerful driver behind interorganizational convergence in global health governance, and secondly that IOs are engaged in a fierce meaning-struggle over these norms which results in hypercollective action. In its empirical part, the paper’s core theoretical propositions are corroborated by analyzing discourses and practices of interorganizational convergence in global health. The empirical analysis allows drawing two far-reaching conclusions. On the one hand, interorganizational harmonization has emerged as a largely undisputed norm in global health which has been translated into ever more institutionalized forms of interorganizational cooperation. On the other, discourses and practices of interorganizational harmonization exhibit conflicts over the ordering principles according to which the policies and actions of international organizations with overlapping mandates and missions should be harmonized. In combination, these two empirical findings explain why interorganizational convergence has so far failed to strengthen the global health architecture

Are Antiprotons Forever?

Up to one million antiprotons from a single LEAR spill have been captured in a large Penning trap. Surprisingly, when the antiprotons are cooled to energies significantly below 1 eV, the annihilation rate falls below background. Thus, very long storage times for antiprotons have been demonstrated in the trap, even at the compromised vacuum conditions imposed by the experimental set up. The significance for future ultra-low energy experiments, including portable antiproton traps, is discussed.Comment: 12 pages, latex; 4 figures, uufiled. Slightly expanded discussion of expected energy dependence of annihilation cross section and rate, and of estimates of trap pressure, plus minor text improvement

Do Metagovernance Norms Explain Inter-Organisational Convergence?

This paper proposes a theoretical account of institutional transformation and the emergence of order in global inter-organisational relations, which is centred on the concept of “metagovernance”. It does so by theorising on the advent of governance architectures in global health governance—relationships between international organisations (IOs) in this field that are stable over time. Global health governance is routinely portrayed as an exceptionally fragmented field of international cooperation with a perceived lack of synergy and choreography between international and transnational organisations. However, our paper starts from the observation that there are also movements of convergence between international organisations. We seek to explain these by looking at the effects of international norms that define good global governance as orderly and harmonised global governance. We conceptualize such norms as “metagovernance norms” that are enacted in reflexive practices which govern and order the relationships between international organisations. Empirically, this paper traces changing interactions and institutional arrangements between IOs (World Health Organization; World Bank; Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria) in global health governance since the late 1940s and shows how patterns therein reflect and (re)produce broader discursive perceptions of what “health” is about and how the governance thereof ought to be organised

ELENA: An Upgrade to the Antiproton Decelerator

A small decelerator ring with electron cooling is proposed to produce dense antiproton beams at very low energies. The ring should be installed between the existing AD and the experimental area

Low-energy Antiproton Interaction with Helium

An ab initio potential for the interaction of the neutral helium atom with antiprotons and protons is calculated using the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. Using this potential, the annihilation cross section for antiprotons in the energy range 0.01 microvolt to 1 eV is calculated.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, LaTe