Absurd scientific theatre written and played by Heiko Buchholz, a CERN artist in residence. In German and French as well.
Location: Meyrin, Switzerland
Link out: http://outreach.web.cern.ch/outreach/FR/eveneme…
Start date: 2 Apr 2012
End date: 4 Apr 2012
New information on neutrinos backs suspicions earlier measurements were somehow flawed
Gran Sasso Lab in Italy
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Physicists can relax a bit this weekend, with Cern’s latest statement on the hubbub surrounding 2011 measurements taken in Italy that appeared to show the first serious deviation from Einstein’s law of relativity.
Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, startled the world 23 September 2011 by stating that neutrinos flying in beams sent through the Earth’s crust the 730km between Cern in Geneva and the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy had been measured traveling at 20 parts per million above “the world’s cosmic speed limit”, the speed of light.
Friday 16 March Cern issued a statement:
“The Icarus experiment at the Italian Gran Sasso laboratory has today reported a new measurement of the time of flight of neutrinos from CEern to Gran Sasso. The Icarus measurement, using last year’s short pulsed beam from Cern, indicates that the neutrinos do not exceed the speed of light on their journey between the two laboratories. This is at odds with the initial measurement reported by Opera last September.
“The evidence is beginning to point towards the Opera result being an artefact of the measurement,” said Cern Research Director Sergio Bertolucci, “but it’s important to be rigorous, and the Gran Sasso experiments, Borexino, Icarus, LVD and Opera will be making new measurements with pulsed beams from Cern in May to give us the final verdict. In addition, cross-checks are underway at Gran Sasso to compare the timings of cosmic ray particles between the two experiments, Opera and LVD. Whatever the result, the Opera experiment has behaved with perfect scientific integrity in opening their measurement to broad scrutiny, and inviting independent measurements. This is how science works.”
“The Icarus experiment has independent timing from Opera and measured seven neutrinos in the beam from Cern last year. These all arrived in a time consistent with the speed of light.”
Cern had earlier announced that tests will be run in May that should provide a clearer understanding of the measurements taken in September.
Background, Cern + neutrinos, GenevaLunch
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – A rundown of some of this week’s news highlights:
Nestlé charged with lack of protection, death of former worker
Charges were filed against Vevey-based multinational Nestlé in Zug by a Colombian trade union and a human rights group for not adequately protecting a former employee, Luciano Romero, who was murdered in Colombia by paramilitaries in 2005. The case could have broad implications according to Germany-based human rights group ECCHR (European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights) because it is the first filed against a Swiss company in Switzerland for a crime committed outside the country. ECCHR – Nestle, Newsletter French, pdf (Fr)
The charges come as world media are focused on the safety of foreign multinational workeres in conflict areas, notably in Nigeria, with the deaths Thursday 8 March of two foreigner workers in Nigeria. In separate news, Nestlé announced Friday morning that it is offering scholarships to a number of its trainees in Nigeria, to bring them to Switzerland to see home office operations.
Solar Boat evades pirates, navigates way to world record
PlanetSolar, the world’s only entirely solar-powered boat, whose home is Yverdon, made it through the pirate-infested waters of the Gulf of Aden. The MS Tûranor PlanetSolar is now navigating the waters of the Red Sea and expects to arrive 4 May 2012 in Monaco, at which point it will become the first solar boat to circumnavigate the globe.
Crans-Montana says yes to Women’s World Cup in 2013 in a turn-about (correction)
World Cup in Crans-Montana, 2012
The Valais resort of Crans-Montana said Monday it would not be hosting the 2013 Women’s World Cup in skiing, despite the success and nearly 50,000 visitors to the men’s event in late February.
A turn-around was announced Thursday 8 March after a meeting Wednesday night when the concerns of some players about hosting the event at the height of the ski season, which could mean closing to the public the popular Nationale run for several days.
The group of communities in the region, ACCM, has thrown its support behind not only a bid for the Cup next year, but an investment of CHF400,000 a year to keep Crans-Montana on the World Cup circuit. The funds require final approval, but the signal at the end of the week was clear: the resort is ready to fight to get the events.
Also under discussion are the re-creation of two or three significant runs.
One former Swiss president gets pie in face, another joins Rousseau protesters in NY
Micheline Calmy-Rey, who completed her year as president of Switzerland in December 2011, was shocked, as were many in the political world, by a pie that was shoved in her face earlier this week by a man angry over her role in the losses incurred by bank BCGE several years ago. The incident, outside the human rights film festival in Geneva, appeared to be more a form of aggression than a humorous incident.
Another former Swiss president, Pascal Couchepin, joins a group in New York Friday 9 March, for Occupy Rousseau, to hold up the Geneva philosopher’s example of fighting inequality and social injustice.
Cern technology behind Geneva airport’s solar panels
The airport in Geneva Friday received delivery of the first of some 300 high-temperature solar thermal panels that will cover a surface of 1,200m2 on the roof of the main terminal building. The panels will be used to heat the buildings during winter and cool them in summer. Their vacuum technology was developed at Cern for particle accelerators.
Nuclear power plant told by judge it must close early
Muehleberg, Switzerland’s aging nuclear power plant that has been the focus of protesters’ calls for closure because of the high cost of keeping it safe, was told it must shut down by June 2013. Safety issues were cited as the reason. The decision was made by the Swiss Administrative Court 1 March but announced the 7th, Wednesday. It is one of five nuclear power plants in the country and was scheduled to be phased out as Switzerland gets rid of its nuclear energy programme, but the decision speeds up the process by several years.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay came down hard on Sri Lanka's post-war report
(Land mine information corrected) GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Geneva’s international profile was particularly high during the past week.
The Human Rights Council condemned Syria but also highlighted growing concerns over Sri Lanka, the World Trade Organization picked up the Acta Internet freedom debate, Cern announced it will be using cloud computing to help handle massive LHC data and a campaign was kicked off to to raise awareness about anti-personnel landmine issues.
The International Red Cross Saturday morning 3 March has a team ready to provide emergency supplies to badly hit Baba Amr in Homs, Syria, after being told it could go in, with permission then denied.
Highlights from international Geneva actions during the week of 28 February – 2 March:
Cern and the computing cloud GenevaLunch story 1 March; Reuters
Human Rights Council Syria: GenevaLunch story 1 March, NY Times, Palestine News Network, Ria Novosti. Sri Lanka: The country’s ambassador to the country, Tamara Kunanayakam, reacted strongly, as did media in Sri Lanka, to a resolution presented by the US and the European Union that call for Colombo to speed up efforts to restore peace. The resolution came as Sri Lanka published a report by its Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), which was also criticized by UN Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay, who said it fell short of the accountability process demanded by UN Experts.
Kunanayakam argued that the council is overstepping bounds in not allowing the LLRC, a domestic panel created by the president, to complete its work, and she called the US in particular “impatient”, saying that “the majority of the international community supports Sri Lanka’s efforts and its stand that a functioning domestic mechanism should not be circumvented by interference until its conclusion. ‘The hypocrisy and the double standard thus displayed (by the US and the European Union), if should they be encouraged would affect the credibility and undermine gravely the legitimacy of the Council,’ the Sri Lankan ambassador warned,” reports Colombo Page.
Marla Otero, a US under-secretary of state, speaking to the council in Geneva 2 March, said “We know from experience that there can be no lasting peace without reconciliation and accountability, but the United States is concerned that, in Sri Lanka, time is slipping away. The international community has waited nearly three years for action, and while we welcome the release of the LLRC report, the recommendations of the report should be implemented. ”
ICBL, International Campaign to Ban Landmines, a Nobel Laureate organization, kicked off its “Lend your leg” action to call attention to the landmine issue and to urge governments to put a full stop to the devastating harm mines cause in the run-up to mine awareness day 4 April. The 13th anniversary of the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention was 1 March.
ICRC, International Red Cross, was told by the Syrian government 1 March that it could enter the battered city of Homs to provide emergency food and medical supplies to thousands of civilians who have been the victims of weeks of shelling. But Friday 2 March the head of the ICRC said they were not allowed to enter the area as promised. “It is unacceptable that people who have been in need of emergency assistance for weeks have still not received any help,” said ICRC president Jakob Kellenberger. “We are staying in Homs tonight in the hope of entering Baba Amr in the very near future. In addition, many families have fled Baba Amr, and we will help them as soon as we possibly can.”
WTO, World Trade Organization Media attention to Acta, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, has been focused mainly on the European Commission and European Parliament arguments over the hotly debated legislation, but it was also under scrutiny this week in Geneva.
IP Watch carries a lengthy article on the Acta debate, which prompted 2.5 million people to sign a petition given to the European Parliament, opposing it. IP Watch reports that Acta was discussed in the WTO “in the context of enforcement trends on the agenda of the Council on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS),” which met at the start of last week. It cites one unnamed participant: “Acta was considered one of the ‘tools’ governments had against counterfeiting and piracy, but now there is misinformation about it that is leading to reactions, the participant said. In particular, the Acta debate gets ‘mixed up’ with copyright issues, when copyright itself is not addressed in Acta, the participant said.
“‘Acta enforces copyright. It does not say something is legal or illegal,’ the participant said. ‘Acta gives a tool to address illegality. Acta does not say what is a copyright infringement.’”
Strong opposition to Acta is linked in part to international opposition to Pipa, a US law that prompted Wikipedia and scores of other major Internet organizations to call a one-day whiteout 17 January 2012.
European consortium establishes cloud computing system
Cern's computing storage needs were huge even before the LHC in 2008 began to require the data storage equivalent of a stack of CDs 20 km tall, per year. To handle this amount of data, Cern developed the Grid, allowing processing power to be shared between computer centres around the world. The time has come for Helix Nebula, the next step in storage space solutions.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Three major European science organizations are joining forces to build a heavy-duty cloud computing systems that will bear the weight of their scientific research data, Cern in Geneva announced 1 March.
Cern (European Centre for Nuclear Research) will be the first to use it, to have more computing power to process data from its international Atlas experiment at the LHC (Large Hadron Collider).
“Helix Nebula”, or the science cloud, “will support the massive IT requirements of European scientists, and become available to governmental organizations and industry after an initial pilot phase”, says Cern.
Two-year pilot projecct
Helix Nebula will be deployed and tested during two years, based on three flagship projects proposed by Cern, EMBL (European Molecular Biology Laboratory) and ESA (European Space Agency): to accelerate the search for the elusive Higgs particle, to boost large-scale genomic analyses in biomedical research and to support research into natural disasters.
The partnership is looking to establish a sustainable European cloud computing infrastructure. Industry will be called on to support it in order to provide “stable computing capacities and services that elastically meet demand”, but the names and commitments of these partners were not revealed Thursday.
From Higgs to genomes to earthquakes, all in the cloud
The EMBL is setting up a new service to simplify the analysis of large genomes, such as those from mammals. “The quantities of genomic sequence data are vast and the needs for high performance computing infrastructures and bioinformatics expertise to analyse these data pose a challenge for many laboratories,” says Rupert Lueck, head of IT services at the EMBL. Its cloud-based whole-genome-assembly and annotation pipeline relies on expertise from the Genomics Core facility in Germany, the EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute, and its Heidelberg’s IT Services.
The ESA is partnering with the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) in France, and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) is collaborating with the National Research Council (CNR) in Italy, to create an Earth observation platform focusing on earthquake and volcano research.
Albert Einstein in 1921, the year he won the Nobel Prize for physics
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The uproar in the physics world was almost as loud Wednesday 22 February as in September 2011: the American Association for the Advancement of Science said Wednesday that a loose wire was suspected as being responsible for what may have been incorrect readings of neutrinos announced in September in 2011 by Cern’s Opera project.
Scientists at Gran Sasso labs in Italy said in November that their colleagues working with Cern had been mistaken, adding to the confusion. The September announcement had called into question a basic tenet of physics, Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Thursday morning Cern issued an unusually short statement to clarify the situation:
“The Opera collaboration has informed its funding agencies and host laboratories that it has identified two possible effects that could have an influence on its neutrino timing measurement. These both require further tests with a short pulsed beam. If confirmed, one would increase the size of the measured effect, the other would diminish it. The first possible effect concerns an oscillator used to provide the time stamps for GPS synchronizations. It could have led to an overestimate of the neutrino’s time of flight. The second concerns the optical fibre connector that brings the external GPS signal to the Opera master clock, which may not have been functioning correctly when the measurements were taken. If this is the case, it could have led to an underestimate of the time of flight of the neutrinos. The potential extent of these two effects is being studied by the Opera collaboration. New measurements with short pulsed beams are scheduled for May.”
The neutrinos in question travelled from Cern to Italy’s Gran Sasso research centre and Bob Evans reports for Reuters that “physicists at the Cern research institute near Geneva appeared to contradict Albert Einstein’s 1905 Special Theory of Relativity last year when they reported that sub-atomic particles called neutrinos could travel fractions of a second faster than light.”
Aerial view Cern - Photo Cern
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Cern (European Organization for Nuclear Research) will start running Large Hadron Collider (LHC) beams again in March, until November, but at a higher beam energy, 4 TeV, which is 0.5 TeV higher than last year, the group announced Monday 13 February.
The higher speed will allow more experiments to be run before the LHC is shut down for 20 months to prepare it to operate at yet higher speeds.
“By the time the LHC goes into its first long stop at the end of this year, we will either know that a Higgs particle exists or have ruled out the existence of a Standard Model Higgs,” Research Director Sergio Bertolucci says. “Either would be a major advance in our exploration of nature, bringing us closer to understanding how the fundamental particles acquire their mass, and marking the beginning of a new chapter in particle physics.”
Cern, in a statement issued Monday 13 February, says “The LHC’s excellent performance in 2010 and 2011 has brought tantalising hints of new physics, notably narrowing the range of masses available to the Higgs particle to a window of just 16 GeV. Within this window, both the Atlas and CMS experiments have seen hints that a Higgs might exist in the mass range 124-126 GeV. However, to turn those hints into a discovery, or to rule out the Standard Model Higgs particle altogether, requires one more year’s worth of data. When the LHC’s technical stop takes place at the end of this year it will prepare for running at full design energy, around 7 TeV per beam.
“When we started operating the LHC for physics in 2010, we chose the lowest safe beam energy consistent with the physics we wanted to do,” says Steve Myers, Cern’s director for accelerators and technology. “Two good years of operational experience with beam and many additional measurements made during 2011 give us the confidence to safely move up a notch, and thereby extend the physics reach of the experiments before we go into the LHC’s first long shutdown.”
The decision is part of a broader strategy to “optimize LHC running to deliver the maximum possible amount of data in 2012 before the LHC goes into a long shutdown to prepare for higher energy running. The data target for 2012 is 15 inverse femtobarns for Atlas and CMS, three times higher than in 2011. Bunch spacing in the LHC will remain at 50 nanoseconds,” the group says in its statement.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Researchers at Cern, working with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), this week say they have turned up a boson, a particle that carries force, although it is not the famously sought-after Higgs boson. The Chi-b (3P) appears likely to be the first sub-atomic particle found since the LHC went to work in 2009.
As for Higgs, Cern this week published this statement in relation to the 13 December conference it held about the Atlas and CMS experiments: “The main conclusion is that the Standard Model Higgs boson, if it exists, is most likely to have a mass constrained to the range 116-130 GeV by the Atlas experiment, and 115-127 GeV by CMS. Tantalising hints have been seen by both experiments in this mass region, but these are not yet strong enough to claim a discovery.”
Details: Wired
©2011 Chappatte, distributed by Globe Cartoon. More cartoons on Chappatte’s web site. Geneva-based Patrick Chappatte works for the International Herald Tribune, for Geneva newspaper Le Temps, and for NZZ am Sonntag. All cartoons reproduced with permission.
CMS control room at Cern
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The birth of the child called Higgs Boson might or might not be coming soon, depending on what media you follow, but today is in any event a big day at Cern in Geneva, when the suspension ends and we’ll all learn out what scientists are seeing, thanks to the LHC (Large Hadron Collider).
Higgs Boson is not, of course, a child at all. The Cern website offers this explanation: “According to theory, the Higgs mechanism works as a medium that exists everywhere in space. Particles gain mass by interacting with this medium. Peter Higgs pointed out that the mechanism required the existence of an unseen particle, which we now call the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson is the fundamental component of the Higgs medium, much as the photon is the fundamental component of light. The Higgs boson is the only particle predicted by the Standard Model that has not yet been seen by experiments.”
Cern is holding a seminar where scientists will present their findings, with an announcement at the end of the day. Rumours are flying thick and fast that they have indeed spotted evidence of the elusive Higgs Boson, despite Cern’s dry warning:
“Atlas and CMS experiments will present the status of their searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson. These results will be based on the analysis of considerably more data than those presented at the summer conferences, sufficient to make significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the Higgs.”
The Cern teams are already focusing on how the LHC must be developed further to carry research to the next stage. a luminosity upgrade workshop in mid-November brought together scientists and engineers from 14 European institutions, with others from Japan and the USA.
Luminosity gives a measure of the collision rate in a particle accelerator and therefore gives an indication of its performance, says Cern, and an upgrade is scheduled for 2020.
“The LHC already delivers the highest luminosity beams of any high energy proton accelerator in the world, which is vitally important for physicists wanting to study extremely rare processes”, Cern notes in a press release. “With the LHC colliding hundreds of millions of particles each second, some of the processes we’re interested in will happen just a few times a day,” according to Cern research director Sergio Bertolucci, and “with processes so rare, extra luminosity makes a big difference to our ability to make precision measurements and discover new things.”
Background reading: Cern, CS Monitor, Guardian, S California Public Radio KPCC
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – A group of scientists with Italy’s Gran Sasso research centre say their measurements of neutrinos sent by the Cern labs in Geneva indicate colleagues are mistaken in thinking these have travelled faster than the speed of light. They published their findings Saturday 19 November.
Another group of Gran Sasso researchers, working south of Rome with the Opera programme at Cern in Geneva, claimed in September 2011 that they measured neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light. Their finding provoked a flurry of scientific debate, given the implications for physics of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Robert Evans of Reuters in Geneva reports that the second Gran Sasso group, working far below the ground, published a paper on the Cornell University Library site Saturday that refutes this: “Icarus, another experiment at Gran Sasso—which is deep under mountains and run by Italy’s National Institute of National Physics—now argues that their measurements of the neutrinos energy on arrival contradict that reading.”
The new paper comes just days after other reports came in that appeared to confirm the Opera group’s initial findings. The Cern team that announced its findings in September were careful to say they were not announcing a discovery, but rather the results of their tests, inviting speculation and debate over the implications of these.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Cern (European Organization for Nuclear Research) ended its 180-day 2011 proton run programme on the LHC (Large Hadron Collidor), Sunday evening 30 October. The proton-proton collisions have been providing data for research programmes.
The Geneva-based organization is now preparing the LHC for four weeks of lead-ion running, “but in a new development this year, the world’s largest particle accelerator will also attempt to demonstrate that large can also be agile by colliding protons with lead ions in two dedicated periods of machine development. If successful, these tests will lead to a new strand of LHC operation, using protons to probe the internal structure of the much more massive lead ions,” Cern says in a statement.
“This is important for the lead-ion programme, whose goal is to study quark-gluon plasma, the primordial soup of particles from which the ordinary matter of today’s visible universe evolved.
“‘Smashing lead ions together allows us to produce and study tiny pieces of primordial soup,’”said ALICE Spokesperson Paolo Giubellino, ‘but as any good cook will tell you, to understand a recipe fully, it’s vital to understand the ingredients, and in the case of quark-gluon plasma, this is what proton-lead ion collisions could bring.’”
The objective for the LHC at the start of 2011 was “to deliver a quantity of data known to physicists as one inverse femtobarn during the course of 2011.
The first inverse femtobarn came on 17 June, setting the experiments up well for the major physics conferences of the summer and requiring the 2011 data objective to be revised upwards to five inverse femtobarns. That milestone was passed by 18 October, with the grand total for the year being almost six inverse femtobarns delivered to each of the two general-purpose experiments Atlas and CMS.”
Steve Myers, director for accelerators and technology, says, “The present data production rate is a factor of 4 million higher than in the first run in 2010 and a factor of 30 higher than at the beginning of 2011.”
Cern triggered a heated and ongoing scientific debate when it announced in September that its Opera project had measured neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light, a finding that if confirmed upsets one of the tenets of physics, Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Ed. note: Irish musicians who sang for US President Barack Obama at his inauguration in 2008 are now releasing a new song, taking the mickey out of Albert Einstein and Cern. Ger Corrigan, the band’s lead singer, says “for the moment we are backing Albert and his theory, I’m no Einstein but he was.”
From 10-15 October the Festival of Science takes place in Pays de Gex, neighbouring France and in CERN. On the occasion of the 100 years of Superconductivity. Several activities for kids and grown up are planned around this theme.
Location: Pays de Gex
Link out: http://outreach.web.cern.ch/outreach/FR/eveneme…
Start date: 10 Oct 2011
End date: 15 Oct 2011
Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Faster than a speeding bullet, faster even than the speed of light, neutrinos flying in beams sent through the Earth’s crust the 730km between Cern in Geneva and the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy are astonishing the world scientific community. Initial measurements of the neutrinos have given scientists startling results, showing them to travel at 20 parts per million above “the world’s cosmic speed limit”, the speed of light.
Neutrinos are elementary particles that are electrically neutral.
The Opera project, which has thus far measured some 15,000 neutrino events, has prompted Cern to open access to other scientists to better understand the results, the Geneva group says in a statement Friday, linked to a seminar on the results. The surprising results, which fly in the face of accepted science, must be independently verified, says Cern. Checks for faulty equipment and methodology have turned up nothing.
“The Opera measurement is at odds with well-established laws of nature, though science frequently progresses by overthrowing the established paradigms,” Cern notes in its Friday statement. “For this reason, many searches have been made for deviations from Einstein’s theory of relativity, so far not finding any such evidence. The strong constraints arising from these observations makes an interpretation of the Opera measurement in terms of modification of Einstein’s theory unlikely, and give further strong reason to seek new independent measurements.”
“This result comes as a complete surprise,” said Opera spokesperson, Antonio Ereditato of the University of Bern. “After many months of studies and cross checks we have not found any instrumental effect that could explain the result of the measurement. While Opera researchers will continue their studies, we are also looking forward to independent measurements to fully assess the nature of this observation.”
“When an experiment finds an apparently unbelievable result and can find no artefact of the measurement to account for it, it’s normal procedure to invite broader scrutiny, and this is exactly what the OPERA collaboration is doing, it’s good scientific practice,” says Cern’s research director Sergio Bertolucci.
To celebrate the European Researchers’ Night, CERN is opening its doors to the public and inviting everyone, especially the youngsters (13-18), to look at science in a simple and entertaining manner.
Location: Meyrin, Geneva
Link out: http://nuitdeschercheurs.web.cern.ch/en/home
Date: 23 Sep 2011
Atlas detector, Cern
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The elusive Higgs-Boson particle is proving to be ghost-like, says Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva. Results from Cern’s Atlas and CMS projects were presented at the biannual Lepton-Photon conference in Mumbai, India 22 August.
Results of these collaborative projects using the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) “show that the elusive Higgs particle, if it exists, is running out of places to hide. Proving or disproving the existence the Higgs-Boson, which was postulated in the 1960s as part of a mechanism that would confer mass on fundamental particles, is among the main goals of the LHC scientific programme,” the group says in a press release.
GENEVALUNCH – The race is on at Cern, the European Nuclear Research Centre in Geneva, to complete results on a number of experiments in time for the physics world’s major summer conferences, and Friday 17 June a landmark was reached that is encouraging researchers.
“Today at around 10:50 CEST, the amount of data accumulated by LHC (Large Hadron Collider) experiments Atlas and CMS clicked over from 0.999 to 1 inverse femtobarn, signalling an important milestone in the experiments’ quest for new physics,” Cern says in a statement. “The number signifies a quantity physicists call integrated luminosity, which is a measure of the total number of collisions produced. One inverse femtobarn equates to around 70 million million (70×1012) collisions, and in 2010 it was the target set for the 2011 run. That it has been achieved just three months after the first beams of 2011 is testimony to how well the LHC is running.”
The Higgs mechanism and supersymmetry are among the new physics sought by the experiments.
“The Higgs mechanism, and its associated particle, is the last missing ingredient of the so-called Standard Model of particle physics that explains the behaviour and interactions of the fundamental particles that make up the ordinary matter from which we and everything around us are made. The Higgs mechanism gives rise to the masses of certain particles.”
“Ordinary matter, however, appears to be only around 4% of what the Universe is made of. Supersymmetry is a theory that goes beyond the Standard Model. It is a more elegant theory of ordinary matter, and could also explain the mysterious dark matter that makes up about a quarter of the universe. With one inverse femtobarn there’s a real chance that, if these theories are correct, they will start to manifest themselves in the data.”
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.
Cern's AMS being assembled in Geneva
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – An Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) detector developed by a team of 600 scientists from several countries and built in Geneva has now been installed as an external module on the international space station, just three days after leaving Earth, and scientists are receiving data, Cern said 20 May.
Endeavor’s flight earlier in the week was the final one for the US space shuttle.
The AMS (European Organization for Nuclear Research) will now remain in space for 10 years, looking for antimatter and dark matter in space, “phenomena that have remained elusive up to now”, as a Cern statement before the launch noted. Samuel Ting, AMS project spokesperson and Nobel laureate, said last week that the “cosmos is the ultimate laboratory”.
AMS is a particle detector that will study, with very high precision, the flux of cosmic rays—incoming charged particles such as protons, electrons and atomic nuclei—that bombard Earth.
Basel’s stinky flower, Geneva’s sexiest fingers study, Cern’s rumoured Higgs particles, US women skate to gold in Zurich
Cern's Alice experiment, particle collisions
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - A giant stinky flower in Basel, ring fingers that mean true love, thrilling women’s ice hockey world finals – the international population in the Lake Geneva region disappears during the spring holidays, heading off on travels near and far, but the news doesn’t stop.
Here’s a brief roundup of what you might have missed:
Phew! but beautiful to behold, Basel’s corpse flower
Switzerland was on the world news map, with hundreds of articles about the amophophallus titanium, aka the “corpse flower” that pulled in an estimated 25,000 visitors to Basel. Key facts: it is one of the world’s largest flowers (technically: “largest unbranched inflorescence in the world” according to wikipedia), it smells of rotting flesh, and it grows in the wild only in Sumatra, Indonesia. The first cultivated flowering was at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London in 1889 and since then there have been few sightings of the rarely-blooming flower. Basel’s Botanical Gardens‘ two-metre high plant bloomed this weekend, for the first time in its 17 years, and the first such plant to flower in Switzerland in 75 years.
Check out his length, dear
A man’s ring finger length gives clues to his masculinity, researcher Camille Ferdenzi at the University of Geneva in Switzerland shows in her research on 2D:4D, the name for the ratio comparing second and fourth digits. Her work was published 19 April in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biology Letters. For an easier explanation, LiveScience unravels the mysteries of sex and the ring finger.
God or no god particles, Cern is intense
Higg’s boson, success of particle accelerator give LHC an extra year
Excitement at Cern as LHC ramps up (photo 2010, Cern)
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Cern’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will remain in operation until the end of 2012, rather than the end of 2011 as earlier announced, the European Organization for Nuclear Research says, citing the strong success of the LHC in its first year of operation.
“With the LHC running so well in 2010, and further improvements in performance expected, there’s a real chance that exciting new physics may be within our sights by the end of the year,” Cern’s research director, Sergio Bertolucci, said in a statement issued Monday 31 January.
“For example, if nature is kind to us and the lightest supersymmetric particle, or the Higgs boson, is within reach of the LHC’s current energy, the data we expect to collect by the end of 2012 will put them within our grasp.”
Cern earlier caused a stir in the science community when it announced that it would run the LHC for 18-24 months, then shut down, for at least a year, the massive system that runs experiments using a 27km circular tunnel that runs 100m under Geneva and neighbouring France.
The shutdown will be necessary to prepare the LHC to run at its full design energy of 7 TeV.
Asacusa experiment, Cern, July 2009 (photo, Cern)
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The mystery of what ever happened to antimatter, which has long puzzled scientists, has moved a step closer to being solved. Researchers involved in the Asacusa experiment at Cern (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva have succeeded in producing significant numbers of antihydrogen atoms in flight.
Antimatter is the opposite of matter, which is the material that makes up our world. Cern notes in a statement that “matter and its counterpart are identical except for opposite charge, and they annihilate when they meet. At the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have been produced in equal amounts. However, we know that our world is made up of matter: antimatter seems to have disappeared. To find out what has happened to it, scientists employ a range of methods to investigate whether a tiny difference in the properties of matter and antimatter could point towards an explanation.”
One of these is a Cern-developed trap called Cusp that uses a combination of magnetic fields to bring antiprotons and positrons together. They form antihydrogen atoms, referred to by Cern as “this rarest of atoms”.
The moment of impact of two lead ions, quarks in red, blue green, hadrons in white © CERN 2010
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The high-energy collisions at Cern’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are creating conditions that allow scientists to observe the resulting jets, or streams of quarks and gluons, careening away from the point of collision. The collisions recreate the conditions just instants after the Big Bang, particle physicists’ term for the creation of the Universe. One of the things they are seeing is small quantities of a primordial soup known as quark gluon plasma (QMP) in which conditions are too hot for quarks and gluons to combine into protons and neutrons.
“With nuclear collisions, the LHC has become a fantastic ‘Big Bang’ machine,” said Alice spokesperson Jürgen Schukraft. “In some respects, the quark-gluon matter looks familiar,” he notes, adding that “we’re also starting to see glimpses of something new.”
In the lighter proton collisions, particles appear in pairs. The jets that appear in the heavy lead ion collisions are affected by the QMP and lose their energies rapidly, a process known as quenching: “This leads to a very characteristic signal, known as jet quenching, in which the energy of the jets can be severely degraded, signalling interactions with the medium more intense than ever seen before. Jet quenching is a powerful tool for studying the behaviour of the plasma in detail,” according to Cern.
Antimatter trapped and stored - Photo Cern
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – One of the universe’s open questions may be a step closer to being answered thanks to over 30 atoms of antihydrogen that have been trapped and stored by scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, Cern.
This opens the path to new ways of making detailed measurements of antihydrogen, Cern notes in a written statement 18 November. It will allow scientists to compare matter and antimatter, the latter being what annihilates ordinary matter in a single explosive flash of energy.
The finding is related to the re-creation of the mini Big Bang at Cern in early November.
“At the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have been produced in equal amounts. However, we know that our world is made up of matter: antimatter seems to have disappeared,” says Cern. Investigating a “tiny difference in the properties of matter and antimatter could point towards an explanation of what happened.”
Aerial view Cern - Photo Cern
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Cern (European Organization for Nuclear Research) and its two host countries, Switzerland and France, Monday 15 November signed a trilateral agreement covering nuclear safety. The new agreement replaces bilateral ones that Cern has had with each government. Cern has been required, until now, to meet with safety inspectors and meet separate sets of national standards, but the new agreement calls for a trilateral series of meetings to ensure that the research organization meets norms for both. The new agreement resolves a number of practical and technical issues, according to Cern.
Image of lead ion collision captured by ALICE experiment. ©2010 CERN
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has successfully made the transition to collisions using lead ions, instead of lighter protons, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, Cern, announced 8 November. The collision of the much heavier lead ion particles resulted in temperatures a million times hotter than those at the centre of the sun, and tiny quantities of matter called quark-gluon plasma which is believed to have existed micro-moments after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.
The LHC collides beams of particles going in opposite directions in a 27km-long circular tunnel straddling the Geneva-France border. Until 4 November the beams of particles were of protons. It took only four days to make the transition to lead ion beams, Cern said.
Lead ions are lead atoms stripped of their electrons. The collision of lead ion beams will allow scientists to study the origins of the strong nuclear force which binds particles together.
Links to other sites: BBC, Cern, New Scientist
Other programmes will be slowed down to accommodate cost cuts, no Cern accelerators to run in 2012
Aerial view Cern - Photo Cern
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will continue to operate at its current budget level, but several other programmes will be slowed at Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in order to save CHF343 million between 2011 and 2015. Member states will contribute CHF135m less than originally budgeted and a “consolidation” of social security systems.The budget plan, presented to Cern’s Council in June, was revised it the council’s request, with cost-saving measures.
“The plan protects the flagship LHC programme, achieving cost savings by slowing down the pace of other programmes,” the organization said in its official announcement. “Cern management considers this a good result for the Laboratory given the current financial environment.”
Cern’s Director General Rolf Heuer, commenting on the cuts, notes that “it reduces spending on research and consolidation through careful and responsible adjustment of the pace originally foreseen in a way that does not compromise the future research programme unduly. The reductions will be painful, but in the current financial environment, they are fair.”
Details of the social security system cost-saving were not published with the announcement.
Travel bargains, solar panels, antimatter detectors, flying boats and an all-new old solar system!
Hydroptere.ch unveiled near Lausanne: prototype for world's fastest sailboat (photo ©2010 Gilles Martin-Raget)
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Lake Geneva region has been showing its mettle in science and high tech areas this week. The world’s fastest sailboat project unveiled its new prototype, an entrepreneur has won a major award for his travel bargain’s online database, the region’s largest solar panels park has begun soaking up the sun and an unusual new solar system has been found by a team led by Geneva scientists. And Cern packed off a hulking antimatter detector to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where it will join the final shuttle in the US space programme.
World’s fastest sailboat, Hydroptere, unveils new prototype, soon sailing on Lake Geneva
Alain Thebault, Hydroptere founder, pilot (photo ©2010 Gilles Martin-Raget)
Hydroptere.ch was unveiled 23 August in Ecublens. The sailboat is a water-borne lab that will soon be put into Lake Geneva. It is a prototype for Hydroptère maxi “whose purpose is to beat the most famous oceanic records and to follow Jules Verne’s vision: Flying around the planet”, says Alain Thébault, founder and project pilot. The project is working closely with EPFL, the polytechnic institute in Lausanne.
Hydroptère made sailing milestones in 2009 when the 60-foot trimaran became the fastest sailing craft in the world, beating two absolute sailing speed records: 51.36 knots (95 km/h) over 500 metres and 50.17 knots (93 km/h) over one nautical mile.
Thébault told a press conference early in the week that “The objective of this hybrid sailing boat is versatility. Sailing nearly as fast as Archimedean traditional boats and achieving higher speeds in flight. First on Lake Geneva, then in the Mediterranean and abroad, l’Hydroptère.ch should give answers to precise questions related to flight dynamics and she will be an ambassador of the cross-frontier collaboration.”
Unusual new solar system found sparks “a new era in exoplanet research”
The planetary system around the Sun-like star HD 10180 (artist’s impression)
An international research team led by astronomers at the University of Geneva Observatory in Versoix announced Tuesday 24 August they they have uncovered a new solar system with several intriguing features. It has the smallest exoplanet (a planet that orbits a star other than the Earth’s sun) found to date and it has a configuration of planets never seen before, with five Neptune-like planets.
Cern in Geneva, Chinese research delegation visiting the AMS, July 2010, before it leaves for Kennedy Space Center (photo, ©2010 Maximilien Brice / Cern)
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Geneva airport was more than usually busy Wednesday 25 August, even for an end of holidays period, with the hubbub surrounding Cern’s Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) being packed onto a US Air Force Galaxy transport plane.
The AMS flies to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida Thursday, where it will join the final flight (ISS) in the US space shuttle programme, scheduled for the end of February 2011.
The AMS detector “will examine fundamental issues about matter and the origin and structure of the universe directly from space,” according to Cern (European Nuclear Research Organization). “Its main scientific target is the search for dark matter and antimatter, in a programme that is complementary to that of the Large Hadron Collider.”
The detector travelled to the European Space Research and Technology Centre (Estec) in Noordwijk, The Netherlands, in February for testing to certify its readiness for travel into space. It returned to Cern for final modifications.
“In particular, the detector’s superconducting magnet was replaced by the permanent magnet from the AMS-01 prototype, which had already flown into space in 1998. The reason for the decision was that the operational lifetime of the superconducting magnet would have been limited to three years, because there is no way of refilling the magnet with liquid helium, necessary to maintain the magnet’s superconductivity, on board the space station. The permanent magnet, on the other hand, will now allow the experiment to remain operational for the entire lifetime of the ISS,” Cern notes in a press release.
Particle tracks fly out from the heart of Cern's Alice experiment from one the first LHC collisions at a total energy of 7 TeV
Update 27 July Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch.com) – Cern’s LHC (Large Hadron Collider) is starring at ICHEP, the world’s largest international conference on particle physics, which opens in Paris Monday 26 July. More than 1,00o scientists are attending.
Four spokespersons for the LHC’s four main experiments, Alice, Atlas, CMS and LHCb, are presenting data at the conference today.
The data is measurements from the first three months of successful LHC operation at 3.5 TeV per beam, an energy three and a half times higher than previously achieved at a particle accelerator.
The measurements to date are for “the particles that lie at the heart of the Standard Model, the package that contains current understanding of the particles of matter and the forces that act between them,” Cern notes in a press release.
“This is an essential step before moving on to make discoveries. Among the billions of collisions already recorded are some that contain ‘candidates’ for the top quark, for the first time at a European laboratory.”
