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.
The Gravity Probe B results proving Einstein's theories on the geodetic and frame-dragging effects. (photo, ©Nasa)
Data from Nasa’s Gravity Probe B (GP-B), a satellite launched in 2004 to investigate two parts of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, confirms that he was right, Nasa announced 3 May. The final results published online in the journal Physical Review Letters were presented at a press conference in Washington DC Wednesday 4 May.
The first part of Einstein’s theory that the satellite was out to research is the geodetic effect, or the warping of space and time around a planet or a star. The second is frame-dragging, the amount of space and time that a spinning object pulls with it as it rotates.
“Imagine the Earth as if it were immersed in honey. As the planet rotates, the honey around it would swirl, and it’s the same with space and time,” says Francis Everitt, GP-B principal investigator at Stanford University in a Nasa press release. “GP-B confirmed two of the most profound predictions of Einstein’s universe, having far-reaching implications across astrophysics research. Likewise, the decades of technological innovation behind the mission will have a lasting legacy on Earth and in space.”
Links to other sites: BBC, Nasa, New York Times, Stanford
A material that is both flexible and has the property of bending light visible to the human eye has been created by researchers at the University of St. Andrews in Kentucky, USA reporting in the New Journal of Physics 4 November. Physicists say it is a “huge step forward” in developing materials that will bend light in predictable ways. Potential uses for the so-called meta-flex material are as camera lenses or contact lenses, scientists say.
Materials with these properties have been limited to electromagnetic waves beyond the range of the human eye, and have been rigid, flat materials. The new three dimensional flexible metamaterial uses a different production technique to be flexible, said Andrea Di Falco, one of the authors of the report.
Links to other sites: BBC, Technology Review
Professor Stanislav Smirnov of Unige wins Fields medal
India and Switzerland (GenevaLunch.com) – A professor at the University of Geneva, Unige, is among four scientist awarded the top mathematics prize in the world: the Fields Medal.
Stanislav Smirnov, 40, received the award for proving two fundamental conjectures in statistical physics. Specifically, the 2010 Fields medal was given to Smirnov for the “proof of conformal invariance of percolation and the planar Ising model in statistical physics.”
The award was presented to Smirnov on 19 August, opening day of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Hyderabad, India.
According to the description of his work given during the ceremony, Smirnov “gave elegant proofs of two long-standing, fundamental conjectures in statistical physics, finding surprising symmetries in mathematical models of physical phenomena.”
The mathematician was born in St Petersburg and after attending university in Russia moved to the United States to pursue his doctoral degrees. He has been a Professor at Unige since 2003.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Cern, the European Nuclear Research Organization, has scheduled its first collisions at 7 TeV, a record if it is achieved, for 30 March. Or, more precisely, it is scheduling the completion of the alignment process that it hopes will lead quickly to collisions, which are in part designed to find Higgs boson. The process popularly dubbed the hunt for the ”God particle” is expected to push the frontiers of our understanding of physics.
The speed at which Cern’s scientists will be able to create a collision is unknown.
Title: Mini Einstein:physics for tots, Meyrin
Description: Free workshop for 4 to 6 year olds (registration required). CERN is offering a series of workshops designed to teach the ABC of physics to the very young.
Call: +41 (0)22 767 76 76 for further info or email: cern.reception@cern.ch
Start Date: 14 Jan 2009
End Date: 25 Feb 2009
Two Japanese researchers, Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa, and one American, Yoichiro Nambu, are sharing the Nobel prize for physics, all for work done in the area of sub-atomic physics. Still to be announced: prizes for chemistry (8 October), literature (9 October), peace (10 October) and economics (13 October). Nobel Prize
