Cern's LHC team - excitement over latest beam collisions record
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – It’s been a busy and record-breaking week at Cern, the European Nuclear Research Centre on the French-Swiss border, with LHC (Large Hadron Collider) researchers achieving a significant milestone and elusive antimatter held for 1,000 seconds for the first time.
Trapping antimatter for longer opens new research vistas
“The Alpha experiment at Cern reports that it has succeeded in trapping antimatter atoms for over 16 minutes: long enough to begin to study their properties in detail. Alpha is part of a broad programme at Cern’s antiproton decelerator investigating the mysteries of one of nature’s most elusive substances,” the organization reports, following publication Sunday 5 June of the news in the scientific journal Nature (article free online).
Nature in November 2010 reported on Alpha’s capture of antimatter then, saying it was the first significant milestone in the field since 2002, but this week’s report takes the research work to a new level. “For physicists, a bit of antimatter is a precious gift indeed,” said the November Nature report. “By comparing matter to its counterpart, they can test fundamental symmetries that lie at the heart of the standard model of particle physics, and look for hints of new physics beyond. Yet few gifts are as tricky to wrap. Bring a particle of antimatter into contact with its matter counterpart and the two annihilate in a flash of energy.”
The new achievement raises the question of how long anitmatter can be held, say Cern scientists, and it opens new research possibilities.
Vaud police issue warning on illegal lasers
US Air Force laser experiment (photo, wikipedia)
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Switzerland recorded 80 incidents in 2010 where aircraft pilots were injured by lasers pointed at them. The figure was double that of the previous year, with 40 in 2009. Rega, the helicopter emergency service, filed 11 complaints, two of which resulted in charges being pressed, although they were dropped in one case.
Police in canton Vaud say that the problem involves legal pointers, the kind used in presentations, but also far more powerful ones.
Legal pointers range from 0.4 to 1 mW (milliwatt), but other lasers are available, notably online, from 5 to 2,000 mW.
Cern Opera experiments bring in exciting results
Cern Opera experiment detector, Geneva
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – A significant step forward in our understanding of physics was announced in Italy Monday 31 May, by a team at the Gran Sasso laboratory: the first direct observation of a tau particle in a muon neutrino beam sent through the Earth from Cern, 730km away.
The team has been working as part of the Opera experiments at Cern in Geneva.
The tau particle sighting provides the missing link to a puzzle that has intrigued physicists since it was described in the 1960s by US scientist Ray Davies, whose work on it led to a Nobel Prize. Cern reports:
He observed far fewer neutrinos arriving at the Earth from the Sun than solar models predicted: either solar models were wrong, or something was happening to the neutrinos on their way. A possible solution to the puzzle was provided in 1969 by the theorists Bruno Pontecorvo and Vladimir Gribov, who first suggested that chameleon-like oscillatory changes between different types of neutrinos could be responsible for the apparent neutrino deficit.
Several experiments since have observed the disappearance of muon-neutrinos, confirming the oscillation hypothesis, but until now no observations of the appearance of a tau-neutrino in a pure muon-neutrino beam have been observed: this is the first time that the neutrino chameleon has been caught in the act of changing from muon-type to tau-type.
The chameleon-like change has enormous potential significance for the world of physics.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - “Ready for collision” said the screen at Cern (European Nuclear Research Organization) shortly after 08:30. The first attempt at 7 TeV collisions of two 3.5 TeV beams, about three to four times the collisions currently done at the Fermilab in the US, is expected to occur around 10:30 this morning.
A beam was lost around 06:00 this morning, but was recovered fairly quickly. The beams are now circulating in their pipes but a collision in advance of the planned schedule is avoided by keeping them magnetically separated. The mood in the control centre is upbeat and excited although given the complexity of the task, it could be hours before a collision occurs.
- Watch the webcast live.
- Background, GenevaLunch
- Cern LHC pages
Updated 24 November 08:00 Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) began to run over the weekend after a year-long delay, but Monday was the real day of excitement at its home at Cern (European Organization for Nuclear Research). The LHC is designed to study the world’s smallest known particles, the building blocks of the universe. Two beams have been circulating in opposite directions since the 20 November startup, alternating, but today they began to circulate at the same time, crossing at two points.
