Tag: CERN

Inside the world’s largest particle accelerator

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…You can see scientists try to make space for a giant 360 degree camera-ball while they’re hard at work helping uncover the origins of the universe: the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) unveiled two new panoramic videos today of the Large Hadron Collider — you know, the same giant underground machine that found evidence of the Higgs boson back in 2012.

Both videos were taken during the Large Hadron Collider’s first long shutdown in 2013. During this time, called “consolidation,” crews performed accelerator element maintenance that’d help it run at a higher energy once they turned it back on in 2015. And that it did — at almost twice the energy as before, its proton beams colliding at an energy of 13 TeV (teraelectronvolts).

Ah, yes. Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress made damned certain we never built anything like this in our god-fearing nation.

CERN’s potential new particle discovery is a game changer

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❝The team at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland may have discovered a new particle. In its first set of significant results since the upgrade earlier this year, LHC researchers have observed large spikes in energy that could be the result of particle collisions between a new boson even larger than the Higgs.

If it turns out that the data does indeed represent a new particle it would be “a total game changer,” Gian Francesco Giudice, a CERN theorist who wasn’t involved in the discovery, told Nature. “The Higgs boson pales in comparison, in terms of novelty.”

❝The results appear to confirm speculation about a new discovery at the LHC that has been circulating on social media for the last couple of days. Judging by the results, the particle — if it is a new discovery — would be about four times larger than the top quark, the heaviest particle so far discovered. And it would be six times bigger than the Higgs.

The announcement comes after the researchers spotted unexpected spikes in energy that reflect a collision between super-high energy protons. The different teams working at the LHC have similar results — they both saw an excess number of pairs of photons each carrying around 750 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) of energy. They believe this could have come from the decay of a new 1,500 GeV particle…

❝The reason CERN has published the results — which it wouldn’t normally do with so little evidence — is that both the Atlas and CMS teams saw the same thing. Atlas saw 40 incidences of the 750 GeV energy pairs, and CMS saw 10.

But it could just be a statistical bump, which occurs all the time. “We expect about ten times as much data next year, which should help resolve this question – but quite likely throw up new ones,” Dave Charlton continued.

The researchers expect to verify whether this represents a new particle or just a bump in 2016.

Between Congressional beancounters and a guy named Clinton in the White House offering wimp-class support, the attempt to build a superconducting super-collider in the United States failed. It would have been three times more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider v1.0.

We had lots of money and time left after that to devote to the Crusades in the Middle East, Homeland Insecurity and the War on Terror, though. American politicians surely know how to organize priorities, eh?

Nutball claims LHC is Stargate – and the invasion of Earth less than 3 weeks away

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This is NOT the Large Hadron Collider and the scientific staff of CERN

Bad news, citizens of Earth: those evil physicists at CERN are once again hellbent on vaporizing the Earth and ending the universe as we know it as the Large Hadron Collider ramps up to unprecedented energies. That’s according to Lonnie Robinson, intrepid correspondent/prophet of doom for The Daily Reporter in Coldwater, Michigan, who sees the signs of our imminent destruction everywhere he looks (including The Simpsons). He even pegs the specific day on which we can probably expect global annihilation: September 24, 2015.

The good news: Lonnie Robinson is full of shit.

Seriously, I am baffled that this article ever found its way into The Daily Reporter. At first I thought it had to be The Onion or a similar satirical site, but no — it’s an actual newspaper. Were the editors asleep at the wheel?…

..These are words that Robinson actually wrote, and presumably some editor at The Daily Reporter approved: “Two of the major goals for CERN is to collapse and break apart the God Particle that creates and maintains our physical world and to tear a hole through the veil that is the barrier protecting our physical universe from the unknown, non-physical universes and other non-physical dimensions believed to be located outside our physical universe…. CERN destroys matter, and everything in our universe is matter. Destroying physical matter eliminates the restrictions and barriers produced by physical matter that keeps us from entering the non-physical universes around us.”

There is so much wrong in that short excerpt, it’s not even worth debunking. This is the full-on crazy mode of the hardcore conspiracy theorist, made crystal clear by this little gem:

“CERN is being used as a stargate, so that human scientists will be able to go to and from currently unknown, perhaps very hostile, non-physical worlds and dimensions located and currently unseen, outside our physical universe.”…

…Note to Robinson: The Stargate franchise is not a documentary. And neither was Interstellar.

Robinson may be serious. I think it more likely the article was produced as clickbait for a smalltown newspaper with nothing else to do to pass the time. Who knows? By the 24th they may have acquired a sponsor or two, someone selling gold for Ron Paul?

CERN ready to continue the search for exotic particles

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Click to enlarge — Martial Trezzini/European Pressphoto Agency

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is once again getting ready to smash protons together, hoping to find evidence of elusive and exotic particles that have never been detected before.

The largest and fastest particle accelerator in the world, located in Geneva, will officially start up again in March. When it is turned on, scientists and engineers say the two beams of protons that fly around its 17-mile loop at close to the speed of light will collide with nearly double the energy of the previous run.

The collider’s first stint of proton smashing led to the discovery of the Higgs boson or Higgs particle — a long theorized but never before seen subatomic particle. It exists for just a fraction of a second, and yet its discovery helps explain the existence of all the mass in the universe.

Scientists are not sure what they will find this time around, but some possibilities include particles associated with dark energy and dark matter, as well as particles that could provide evidence for a theory known as supersymmetry. This theory holds that there is a mirror universe made up of invisible particles that have mass but do not react with light, and that correspond to particles that we can detect…

For the last two years the collider has been undergoing repairs and changes in preparation for its next, super-powered run. Already it has already been cooled to its normal operating temperature of 1.9 degrees Kelvin, or -456.25 degrees Fahrenheit.

I surprised we haven’t yet suffered the onslaught of popsci/junksci Talking Heads predicting the end of the world as soon as the the ON-switch is thrown at CERN.

Not that it requires any original thought. Less-than-competent conspiracy nuts have been predicting a human-made end of the earth since the first nuclear reaction. I don’t doubt the Leyden Jar provoked as much fear and trepidation. You’d think the expanding base of real knowledge would diminish fear-mongers.

But, then, who would be left to vote for Prohibition?

CERN recreating the world’s first website

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To old fogeys like me, it seems like only yesterday that the coolest way to go online was to dial up the AP wire service bulletin board on a 300-baud modem, but it was actually two decades ago that the web as we know it burst onto our world. On Tuesday, it was 20 years ago that the World Wide Web went public, when CERN made the technology behind it available on a royalty-free basis. To mark the occasion, the organization announced that it is recreating the world’s very first website for posterity.

It wasn’t much to look at – just text and hyperlinks – and the subject was the World Wide Web itself, so it wasn’t exactly like finding a treasure trove of LOLcats or a Kirk vs Picard flame war, but the first website did mark a significant jump forward. Flash animation, Java plugins, apps, streaming video and even images and audio were still in the future, but that first site turned the internet from the domain of computer scientists and hobbyists into the information super system that modern society now depends upon.

Invented in 1989 at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee, the web was first designed as a way for physicists around the world to share information. It was by no means the first or only way to share information online, but by making the software to run a web server available for free and then throwing in a basic browser and code library, CERN was able to do for the internet what Henry Ford did for the motor car. It went from the plaything for the few to being the workhorse for the masses…

Unfortunately, like many historic firsts, there wasn’t much incentive to preserve the first website that Berners-Lee hosted on a NeXT computer. After a few years, the site was retired and the URL merely redirected to another site. The NeXT machine that acted as the original web server was still at CERN, but it was a museum piece.

Now, to celebrate 20 years of people typing “WWW,” CERN is bringing the first website back to life. The NeXt machine has been refurbished and the URL has been reactivated as CERN starts a project to collect and preserve the information assets that made up that first foray into our modern digital world.

One of those “old fogies” – I remember getting “onto” this new WWW-thingie as soon as it started up. I’d been online since 1983 – first as a necessity. I wouldn’t receive my sales commissions unless orders were sent online directly to the company’s one online server the other side of the country.

Then, to BBS and communications online. Traveling my sales territory with my Tandy Model 100 laptop computer and 300 baud modem. Which I still have somewhere in the closet next to my study. How far we have come in such a comparatively short period. How welcome and useful it all is, now.

Touring the world’s greatest science labs

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The CERN lab near Geneva, like many other research facilities, offers tours of the premises

They may be at work pursuing the greatest mysteries of the physical world—yet the men and women who operate the world’s most prestigious physics and astronomy laboratories aren’t necessarily too busy to host guests. Throughout the world, physics and astronomy labs—many of them shimmering like stars in the wake of tremendous discoveries and achievements, some on mountaintops, others underground—welcome visitors to tour the premises, see the equipment, look through the telescopes and ponder just why they almost always make you wear a hardhat.

CERN. It’s the little things in life that really matter to the researchers at CERN, or the European Organization for Nuclear Research. This facility—located near Geneva, Switzerland—has gained superstardom over the last year, after announcing the discovery of what had been a holy grail of physics for decades—sometimes called the “God particle.” First predicted by physicist Peter Higgs in 1964, the then-theoretical particle, which pops from a field that is believed to give other particles their mass—became known as the Higgs boson before more recently assuming its grandiose nickname.

CERN’s $10 billion atom smasher, called the Large Hadron Collider, had been at work for several years in its subterranean home in the Alps, beneath the French-Swiss border, colliding protons at high speeds before rendering what seemed to be evidence for the God particle in 2012.

Should you be in the charming Swiss countryside this summer, consider taking a guided tour of this most distinguished of the world’s great physics laboratories.

RTFA and consider many other tours around the world’s leading science labs. Leave more suggestions if you’re so inclined.

Thanks, Ursarodina

We’re sure this is a Higgs boson – just not which one?

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Click to enlarge

Last July physics researchers at CERN said they thought they had found evidence of the Higgs boson, a theoretical but essential component of our standard model of physics, and the raison d’être of the enormous Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Now they’ve come back with further analysis of their data, and they’re more sure than ever that what they found is the real deal.

How sure? Well, these are scientists so there’s still a note of caution, but Joe Incandela, a spokesman for one of the LHC experiments, went on-record with a pretty confident statement: “The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson.”

However, they’re still not sure what kind of Higgs boson they’re looking at…

“Having analysed two and a half times more data than was available for the discovery announcement in July, they find that the new particle is looking more and more like a Higgs boson, the particle linked to the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles. It remains an open question, however, whether this is the Higgs boson of the Standard Model of particle physics, or possibly the lightest of several bosons predicted in some theories that go beyond the Standard Model. Finding the answer to this question will take time.”

It’s not surprising that this task takes time. CERN said a month ago that its storage systems were holding 100 petabytes of data.

The research organization has been working closely with companies such as Yandex to sift through that information in search of unusual events, and in Thursday’s statement CERN pointed out that finding one event means looking through around a trillion proton-proton collisions.

Probably more demanding than sifting through all the phony corporate fronts in the Cayman Islands.

Higgs boson was just a start – other mysteries await

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Mark Thiessen/National Geographic Society

When it comes to shutting down the most powerful atom smasher ever built, it’s not simply a question of pressing the off switch.

In the French-Swiss countryside on the far side of Geneva, staff at the Cern particle physics laboratory are taking steps to wind down the Large Hadron Collider. After the latest run of experiments ends next month, the huge superconducting magnets that line the LHC’s 27km-long tunnel must be warmed up, slowly and gently, from -271 Celsius to room temperature. Only then can engineers descend into the tunnel to begin their work.

The machine that last year helped scientists snare the elusive Higgs boson – or a convincing subatomic impostor – faces a two-year shutdown while engineers perform repairs that are needed for the collider to ramp up to its maximum energy in 2015 and beyond. The work will beef up electrical connections in the machine that were identified as weak spots after an incident four years ago that knocked the collider out for more than a year…

The particle accelerator, which reveals new physics at work by crashing together the innards of atoms at close to the speed of light, fills a circular, subterranean tunnel a staggering eight kilometres in diameter. Physicists will not sit around idle while the collider is down. There is far more to know about the new Higgs-like particle, and clues to its identity are probably hidden in the piles of raw data the scientists have already gathered, but have had too little time to analyse.

But the LHC was always more than a Higgs hunting machine. There are other mysteries of the universe that it may shed light on. What is the dark matter that clumps invisibly around galaxies? Why are we made of matter, and not antimatter? And why is gravity such a weak force in nature? “We’re only a tiny way into the LHC programme,” says Pippa Wells, a physicist who works on the LHC’s 7,000-tonne Atlas detector. “There’s a long way to go yet…”

The search for dark matter on Earth has failed to reveal what it is made of, but the LHC may be able to make the substance. If the particles that constitute it are light enough, they could be thrown out from the collisions inside the LHC. While they would zip through the collider’s detectors unseen, they would carry energy and momentum with them. Scientists could then infer their creation by totting up the energy and momentum of all the particles produced in a collision, and looking for signs of the missing energy and momentum.

One theory, called supersymmetry, proposes that the universe is made from twice as many varieties of particles as we now understand. The lightest of these particles is a candidate for dark matter…

Another big mystery the Large Hadron Collider may help crack is why we are made of matter instead of antimatter. The big bang should have flung equal amounts of matter and antimatter into the early universe, but today almost all we see is made of matter. What happened at the dawn of time to give matter the upper hand?

The question is central to the work of scientists on the LHCb detector. Collisions inside LHCb produce vast numbers of particles called beauty quarks, and their antimatter counterparts, both of which were common in the aftermath of the big bang. Through studying their behaviour, scientists hope to understand why nature seems to prefer matter over antimatter…

Extra dimensions may separate us from realms of space we are completely oblivious to. “There could be a whole universe full of galaxies and stars and civilisations and newspapers that we didn’t know about,” says Parker. “That would be a big deal.”

Read the whole article. Set your imagination free into science that moves faster than the speed of light.

Scientists turn away from ideology with Sesame synchrotron

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Sesame
Click to enlarge

Amid rising tensions in one of the world’s most volatile regions, an audacious project to use science for diplomacy is taking shape in the heart of the Middle East.

In this land of ancient hatreds, a highly sophisticated scientific installation is being built in Jordan. It has support from countries that are usually openly hostile to each other.

The plan is for a multi-million-pound synchrotron particle accelerator, known as Sesame.

It has backing from several Arab nations, together with Turkey, Pakistan, Cyprus, Iran and – astonishingly – Israel as well.

The Iranian government is publicly committed to Israel’s destruction and Israel has threatened to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. And most recently Israel accused Iran of supplying Palestinian militants with the missiles launched at Israeli cities.

Yet the governments of both these countries and others have pledged to provide more funding to Sesame, and BBC News witnessed their scientists and officials meeting for lengthy discussions in Jordan earlier this month.

After years of doubts about the project’s feasibility, construction is now at an advanced stage and most of the next round of finance is secured. The first science could start as early as 2015…

Synchrotrons have become an indispensable tool for modern science with some 60 in use around the world, almost all of them in developed countries, and this will be the first in the Middle East…

The governing council of Sesame is headed by a British physicist, Prof Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, a former director of Cern, which operates the Large Hadron Collider from Geneva in Switzerland.

During a visit to the facility, in the hills 20 miles northwest of Amman, he told BBC News: “It is pretty remarkable but it’s happened and it’s because the scientific communities in these countries have pushed for this and ignored the political barriers.

“Science is a common language – if we can speak it together, possibly we can build bridges of trust which will help in other areas.”

Bravo!

RTFA for lots more detail – and hope.

Peter Higgs says, “It’s very nice to be right sometimes”

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The British physicist whose theories led to the discovery of the Higgs boson has admitted he has “no idea” what practical applications it could have. Prof Peter Higgs said the so-called ‘God particle’, which is the building block of the universe, only has a lifespan of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a second.

He refused to be drawn on whether the discovery proved there was no God, stating the name ‘God particle’ was a joke by another academic who originally called it the ‘goddamn particle’ because it was so hard to find…

Speaking at Edinburgh University, where he published his theory about the boson’s existence in 1964, he said: “It’s around for a very short time…”It’s probably about a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a second. I don’t know how you apply that to anything useful…

“It’s hard enough with particles which have longer life times for decay to make them useful. Some of the ones which have life times of only maybe a millionth of a second or so are used in medical applications…”

He said he had not originally thought the particle would be discovered in his lifetime and confirmed he has been contacted by Prof Stephen Hawking, who has lost a $100 bet with another academic that it did not exist.

Prof Higgs did not gloat but said in a typically modest manner: “It’s very nice to be right sometimes.” He said it was unusual that a particle bear a scientist’s name and suggested it be renamed simply ‘H’.

It emerged that celebrated the discovery with a can of London Pride ale but is now expected to receive a much more eminent reward, a Nobel prize for science…

Asked if he had ever had any doubts over the last 48 years, he said: “The existence of this particle is so crucial to understanding how the rest of the theory works that it was very hard for me to understand how it couldn’t be there.”

The popular press rarely comprehends what basic research in any science is about, how we as a species got to where we are, how the mechanisms and mechanics of all societies progressed from cave and forest to modern times.

Don’t worry, I won’t try to take the time right now to explain all that. Though, it’s simple and direct enough in my own consciousness after all the decades I’ve watched just the tiny bit of progress we’ve made in my lifetime.

I’ll stand at one side and applaud for a very long time.