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.”
By Bob Evans
Audio files at the end
The beauty of a collision: first proton-proton collisions, Cern, 16 December 2009
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch.com) - Did you go over the Moon when you first heard Mike Oldfield’s “Music of the Spheres”? Did you go into ecstasies over Gustav Holst’s “Planets” Suite? Well, soon you can fall in love with the Higgs Boson Sonata, the Dark Matter Cantata and perhaps eventually the Black Hole Symphony—or perhaps something like them.
Such works could emerge in the not too distant future from the unlikeliest of sources, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at the Cern particle physics research centre near Geneva. Scientists there are converting the cosmic phenomena they are chasing through the huge underground machine into music in their state-of-the-art computers.
To do it, they use a technique that changes pure scientific data gathered from the LHC experiments into sound, says physicist Lily Asquith.
The detectors in the machine, which is probing the origins of the universe, can reconstruct the pathway of the particles after they are smashed together at near light-speed and calculate how much energy each leaves along its path.
“If you use the right software, you can get really nice music out of the particle tracks,” explains Asquith, who works on the LHC’s Atlas, one of its six detectors, and was one of the originators of what is called the LHC sound project.
A key aim of the enterprise is to help promote awareness among the wider public of the work of Cern, the European Centre for Nuclear Research, and especially the high-cost LHC experiment.
With this in mind, the project team has launched a chatty website dubbed “The Sounds of Science” with a nod to the 1960s hit song by Simon and Garfunkel, “Sounds of Silence.”
“We want everyone to be able to share in the wonder and excitement of what we are doing, and this seems a good way of showing the awe-inspiring magnificence of it all,” says Asquith.
Aerial view Cern - Photo Cern
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has announced a new programme to guide the collaboration between physics research and the medical field.
The newly presented strategy stems from a February workshop that discussed the synergy between physics and health. It gathered over 400 healthcare professionals and physicists in the Swiss-French border.
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.
Title: Science film at CERN
Location: Meyrin
Link out: Click here
Description: A short film by Carlo Ippolito, Music by Xavier Dayer Première and the Makrokosmos quartet. Reservations required.
Date: 2010-04-15
© 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.
Great excitement at Cern just after first collision occurs 30 March 2010
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Beams collided at 7 TeV in the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at 13:06 Swiss time Tuesday 30 March, a successful physics breakthrough after 20 years of preparatory work that marks “the start of the LHC research programme,” notes Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in a press release. “Particle physicists around the world are looking forward to a potentially rich harvest of new physics as the LHC begins its first long run at an energy three and a half times higher than previously achieved at a particle accelerator.”
The mood at Cern was clearly one of high excitement.
“‘It’s a great day to be a particle physicist,’ said Cern Director General Rolf Heuer. ‘A lot of people have waited a long time for this moment, but their patience and dedication is starting to pay dividends.’”
It took three attempts Tuesday morning before a collision occurred, but overall the process was relatively smooth and quick, several Cern scientists remarked.
Background, GenevaLunch and webcast, Cern
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
