tagged w/ Large Hadron Collider
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The most coveted prize in particle physics – the Higgs boson – may have been glimpsed, say researchers reporting at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva.
CERN - LHC Control Room
The particle is purported to be the means by which everything in the Universe obtains its mass.
Scientists say that two experiments at the LHC see hints of the Higgs at the same mass, fuelling huge excitement.
But the LHC does not yet have enough data to claim a discovery.
Finding the Higgs would be one of the biggest scientific advances of the last 60 years. It is crucial for allowing us to make sense of the Universe, but has never been observed by experiments.
This basic building block of the Universe is a significant missing component of the Standard Model – the “instruction booklet” that describes how particles and forces interact.
The Higgs Boson
The Higgs boson
The Higgs is a sub-atomic particle that is predicted to exist, but has not yet been seen
It was proposed as a mechanism to explain mass by six physicists, including Peter Higgs, in 1964
It imparts mass to other fundamental particles via the associated Higgs field
It is the last missing member of the Standard Model, which explains how particles interact
Two separate experiments at the LHC – Atlas and CMS – have been conducting independent searches for the Higgs. Because the Standard Model does not predict an exact mass for the Higgs, physicists have to use particle accelerators like the LHC to systematically look for it across a broad search area.
At a seminar at Cern (the organisation that operates the LHC) on Tuesday, the heads of Atlas and CMS said they see “spikes” in their data at roughly the same mass: 124-125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV).
“The excess may be due to a fluctuation, but it could also be something more interesting. We cannot exclude anything at this stage,” said Fabiola Gianotti, spokesperson for the Atlas experiment.
Guido Tonelli, spokesperson for the CMS experiment, said: “The excess is most compatible with a Standard Model Higgs in the vicinity of 124 GeV and below, but the statistical significance is not large enough to say anything conclusive.
“As of today, what we see is consistent either with a background fluctuation or with the presence of the boson.”
‘Exciting’
Prof Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director-general of Cern, told BBC News: “Such signals can come and go… Although there is correspondence between the two experiments, we need more solid numbers.”
None of the spikes seen by the experiments is at much more than the “two sigma” level of certainty.
Statistics of a ‘discovery’
Particle physics has an accepted definition for a “discovery”: a five-sigma level of certainty
The number of standard deviations, or sigmas, is a measure of how unlikely it is that an experimental result is simply down to chance rather than a real effect
Similarly, tossing a coin and getting a number of heads in a row may just be chance, rather than a sign of a “loaded” coin
The “three sigma” level represents about the same likelihood of tossing more than eight heads in a row
Five sigma, on the other hand, would correspond to tossing more than 20 in a row
Unlikely results can occur if several experiments are being carried out at once – equivalent to several people flipping coins at the same time
With independent confirmation by other experiments, five-sigma findings become accepted discoveries
A level of “five sigma” is required to claim a discovery, meaning there is less than a one in a million chance the data spike is down to a statistical fluke.
Another complicating factor is that these tantalising hints consist only of a handful of events among the billions of particle collisions analysed at the LHC.
Professor Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director-general of Cern told BBC News: “We can be misled by small numbers, so we need more statistics,” but added: “It is exciting.”
If it exists, the Higgs is very short-lived, quickly decaying – or transforming – into more stable particles. There are several different ways this can happen, which provides scientists with different routes to search for the boson.
Large Hadron Collider - CERN
They looked at particular decay routes for the Higgs that produce only a handful of events, but have the advantage of having less background noise in the data. This background noise consists of random combinations of events, some of which can look like Higgs decays.
Other decay modes produce more events – which are better for statistical certainty – but also more background noise. Prof Heuer said physicists were “squeezed” between these two options.
Prof Stefan Soldner-Rembold, from the University of Manchester, called the quality of the LHC’s results “exceptional”, adding: “Within one year we will probably know whether the Higgs particle exists, but it is likely not going to be a Christmas present.”
The simple fact that both Atlas and CMS seem to be seeing a data spike at the same mass has been enough to cause enormous excitement in the particle physics community.
http://rencadesign.com/wp/2011/12/higgs-boson-god-particle-close/#.TueYWGO5Ou8The most coveted prize in particle physics – the Higgs boson – may have... more
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Eloi Cole, a bizarrely dressed and (undoubtedly) intense young man, claims to be from the not-so-distant future. He's travelled back to our time to prevent the controversial LHC from discovering the elusive Higgs boson particle, tearing up the time-space continuum and destroying the Universe as we know it.
Continue reading on Examiner.com Future Man and the Large Hadron Collider - National Apocalypse | Examiner.com http://www.examiner.com/apocalypse-in-national/future-man-and-the-large-hadron-collider#ixzz1fHPWzSUnEloi Cole, a bizarrely dressed and (undoubtedly) intense young man, claims to be from... more
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We’re going way beyond innovation here. Instead of the latest technology, we’re getting a tantalising glimpse of something that doesn’t yet exist, but is making exciting progress in the lab and would be responsible for enormous advances in many fields of science and technology if it fulfils its promise.We’re going way beyond innovation here. Instead of the latest technology,... more
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A leaked internal memo at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, contains unconfirmed reports that one of the detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has picked up signals that could be the long sought after Higgs boson or God particle. If so, that would be an enormous coincidence at Easter.
One of the main scientific goals of the world's largest atom smasher, costing some 9 billion dollars, is to prove the existence of the Higgs boson or God particle, which makes the universe possible by giving mass to everything including all of us and the objects we can touch!
Rumours that scientists working on the LHC have found evidence of the Higgs boson have begun to circulate after parts of the internal memo were posted on the internet. The leaked note suggests that the ATLAS particle-detection experiment may have picked up a signature of the elusive Higgs particle. Despite the official caution from CERN and other nuclear physicists, there is intense speculation on internet blogs and scientific websites that the results described in the memo signal the first discovery of the Higgs boson.
(more at link)A leaked internal memo at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, contains unconfirmed reports... more
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At Particle Lab, a Tantalizing Glimpse Has Physicists Holding Their Breaths
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: April 5, 2011
Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are planning to announce Wednesday that they have found a suspicious bump in their data that could be evidence of a new elementary particle or even, some say, a new force of nature.
The results, if they hold up, could be a spectacular last hurrah for Fermilab’s Tevatron, once the world’s most powerful particle accelerator and now slated to go dark forever in September or earlier, whenever Fermilab runs out of money to operate it.
“Nobody knows what this is,” said Christopher Hill, a theorist at Fermilab who was not part of the team. “If it is real, it would be the most significant discovery in physics in half a century.”
One possible explanation for this mysterious bump, scientists say, is that it is evidence of a new and unexpected version of the long-sought Higgs boson. This is a hypothetical elementary particle that, according to the reigning theory known as the Standard Model, is responsible for endowing other elementary particles with mass.
Another explanation might be that it is evidence of a new force of nature — in addition to gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces we already know and are baffled by — that would manifest itself only at very short distances like those that rule inside the atomic nucleus.
Either could shake what has passed for conventional wisdom in physics for the last few decades. Or it could be there is something they do not understand about so-called regular physics.
Giovanni Punzi, the Fermilab physicist who is spokesman for the international team that did the work, said by e-mail that he and his colleagues were “strongly thrilled at the possibility, and cautious at the same time, because this would be so important that almost scares us — so we think of all possible alternative explanations.”
Physicists outside the Fermilab circle said they regarded the results, which have been widely discussed in physics circles for several months, with a mixture of awe and skepticism.
“If it holds up, it’s very big,” said Neal Weiner, a theoretical physicist at New York University. Lisa Randall, a theorist at Harvard, said the same thing: “It is definitely interesting, if real.”
But Nima Arkani-Hamed of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., said he did not find the bump convincing, saying it could be an artifact of how the data was sliced and diced.
The important thing, he said, was that if this and other anomalies recently reported at the Tevatron are real, then the Large Hadron Collider, a rival machine run by CERN, “will see dramatic evidence in not too long — that’s certainly what I’m waiting for.”
The key phrase, everyone agrees, is “if it holds up.” The experimenters estimate that there is a less than a quarter of 1 percent chance their bump is a statistical fluctuation, making it what physicists call a three-sigma result, enough to attract attention but not enough to claim an actual discovery. Three-sigma bumps, as every physicist knows, can come and go.
The Tevatron has been colliding beams of protons and their opposites, antiprotons, that have been accelerated to energies of one trillion electron volts, for more than two decades looking for new forces and particles. The bump showed up in an analysis of some 10,000 of those collisions collected by the Collider Detector at Fermilab, one of two mammoth detectors at the facility, which is outside Chicago.
They found that in about 250 more cases than they expected, what came out of the collision were two jets of lightweight particles, like electrons, and a heavy-force-carrying particle called the W boson were produced. The team found that in about 250 times more cases than expected, the total energy of the jets clustered around a value of about 144 billion electron volts, as if they were the decay products of a hitherto unsuspected particle with that mass-energy. For comparison, a proton weighs about one billion electron volts.
This could not be the Standard Model Higgs, Dr. Punzi and his colleagues concluded, because the Higgs is predicted to decay into much heavier particles, namely quarks. Moreover, the rate at which these mystery particles were being produced was 300 times greater than Higgs bosons would be produced.
If real, it was something totally new, Dr. Punzi said. The result had recently been strengthened, he said, by new calculations of interactions between quarks, which are notoriously difficult to compute. “It is so new, so astonishing, we ourselves can barely believe it,” he said. “We decided we had to let the whole world know.”
Dr. Punzi and his colleagues have submitted a paper that was to be posted on a physics Web site Tuesday night and has been submitted to Physical Review Letters.
Joe Lykken, a Fermilab particle theorist, said Dr. Punzi’s group would have four times as much data in an analysis later this year. “This would be enough to claim a definitive major discovery,” he wrote in an e-mail, “just as the Tevatron — and perhaps Fermilab itself — is being shut down for budget savings.”At Particle Lab, a Tantalizing Glimpse Has Physicists Holding Their Breaths
By DENNIS... more
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This is exciting but can this really happen? US researchers believe they are one step closer to creating time travel. Researchers from the Vanderbilt University said that they believe they could use the Large Hadron Collider to send types of matter called the Higgs matter into the past.
Researchers say this theory does have a down side that they are unsure if Higgs particle or also called as Higgs singlet actually exists and if the machine can produce it. According to a report by AP, the LHC is supposed to create the Higgs Boson particle and if it does that the Higgs singlet may also appear. Higgs Boson is also called the God Particle but was never supposed to be there without its Singlet.
Scientists say that the singlet may be able to jump through space and time and travel through a hidden dimension and re-enter our dimension forward or backward in time. Graduate fellow Chui Man said that using a singlet to travel through time avoids all the major paradoxes which include things such as things that will let you travel through time and change things in the past.
However Scientists said that time travel was limited and it might not be possible atleast in near future for man to be able to travel back in time. Simple tasks such as sending SMS Text messages into past can be achieved with the singlet.
http://bit.ly/fzM6e0This is exciting but can this really happen? US researchers believe they are one step... more
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When you peel off a strip of Scotch tape, you’re holding a tiny particle accelerator. Think of this during the upcoming holiday season. As you wrap present after present, you’re simultaneously creating an electric field powerful enough to accelerate any free electrons hovering around. Under the right conditions, this can coax the electrons into spewing out X-rays. The good news: As long as you aren’t playing Santa in a vacuum, you don’t need to worry about the radiation exposure—the electrons will bump into air molecules long before they get a chance to start emitting any X-rays. Science News explains:
http://ramanan50.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/make-a-particle-accelerator-with-tape/When you peel off a strip of Scotch tape, you’re holding a tiny particle... more
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GENEVA (Reuters) - Scientists at the CERN research center say their "Big Bang" project is going beyond all expectations and the first proof of the existence of dimensions beyond the known four could emerge next year.
In surveys of results of nearly 8 months of experiments in their Large Hadron Collider (LHC), they also say they may be able to determine by the end of 2011 whether the mystery Higgs particle, or boson, exists.
Guido Tonelli, spokesman for one of the CERN specialist teams monitoring operations in the vast, subterranean LHC, said probing for extra dimensions -- besides length, breadth, height and time -- would become easier as the energy of the proton collisions in it is increased in 2011.
Other CERN physicists say the success so far of the world's largest scientific project suggests that some great enigmas of the universe they have in their sights could be at least partly resolved much sooner than they thought.
"One year ago, it would have been impossible for us to guess that the machine and the experiments could achieve so much so quickly," said Fabiola Gionotti, spokeswoman for another research team in the surveys, issued on CERN's website (www.cern.org).
RESULTS ALL THE TIME
"We are producing new results all the time," she added. The existence or otherwise of the Higgs, never yet spotted but believed to provide the glue giving mass to matter, should be settled one way or another by the end of next year.
The $10 billion LHC, whose operation and monitoring involves scientists and research centers in 34 countries, went into full operation on March 31, smashing protons together at near the speed of light with increasing energy.
These collisions have been creating millions of simulations of the Big Bang which 13.7 billion years ago brought into existence the primordial universe from which stars, planets and life on earth -- and perhaps elsewhere -- eventually emerged.
The LHC operations have been so trouble-free that at the start of this month CERN scientists were able to switch to colliding lead ions, creating temperatures a million times hotter than at the heart of the Sun.
The ion collisions, creating an amalgam dubbed a quark-gluon plasma, give the research teams another way of looking at what happened within a nano-second of the Big Bang and at the first matter produced by that mighty explosion.
CERN scientists say they have already taken research with ions further than those with gold at the long-established Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the U.S. Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island.
These experiments have shown the power of the link-up of 140 computing centers around the world known as the Grid which processes the vast amounts of information that ion collisions produce.
On December 6, the LHC will be shut down for servicing and to avoid draining electricity in the depths of winter from the energy networks of France and Switzerland along whose border CERN lies.
It will start up again in February, then run at full blast, with protons, until the end of the year, when it will close down again until 2013 while engineers prepare it for running at double the energy to the end of the decade and beyond.GENEVA (Reuters) - Scientists at the CERN research center say their "Big... more
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In an experiment to collide lead nuclei together at CERN's Large Hadron Collider physicists from the ALICE detector team including researchers from the University of Birmingham have discovered that the very early Universe was not only very hot and dense but behaved like a hot liquid.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101123112835.htmIn an experiment to collide lead nuclei together at CERN's Large Hadron Collider... more
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UK Researchers working at the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator on the Franco-Swiss border are nearly set to create the Big Bang on a miniature scale.
Mini-versions of the ‘Big Bang’ which gave birth to the universe almost 14 billion years ago have been created within the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the giant machine probing the nature of matter near Geneva.
British scientists working on the LHC’s ALICE experiment were today celebrating the achievement, which opens up a new era in particle physics research.
Since 2009, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been smashing protons together, trying to shed light on the essential nature of matter.
But for the upcoming experiments, planned for early November and running for four weeks, the team will have the accelerator collide lead ions instead.
The collider, managed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), consists of four different experiments and one of them, ALICE, has been designed to smash lead ions together. The goal of the collisions will be to investigate what the Universe looked like at the time of the Big Bang.
More: http://www.theblogismine.com/2010/11/08/birth-of-the-universe-re-created-collider-generates-mini-big-bang/UK Researchers working at the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator on the... more
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The BBC post reports on the 7th November the Large Hadron Collider successfully re created a mini big bang within a controlled environment. It is stated the experiment which smashed lead ions created temperatures hotter than the centre of the sun and is hoped will reveal more data about plasma.
"At these temperatures even protons and neutrons, which make up the nuclei of atoms, melt resulting in a hot dense soup of quarks and gluons known as a quark-gluon plasma."
Quarks and gluons are sub-atomic particles - some of the building blocks of matter. In the state known as quark-gluon plasma, they are freed of their attraction to one another. This plasma is believed to have existed just after the Big Bang."-BBC
The next step after this collision is to smash protons.The BBC post reports on the 7th November the Large Hadron Collider successfully re... more
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Physicists probing the origins of the cosmos at CERN's Large Hadron Collider hope that next year they will turn up the first proofs of the existence of concepts once reserved for the scifi world. Despite centuries of increasingly sophisticated observation from planet Earth, only 4 per cent of that universe is known -- because the rest is made up of what have been called, because they are invisible, dark matter and dark energy.
Billions of particles flying off from each LHC collision are tracked at four CERN detectors -- and then in collaborating laboratories around the globe -- to establish when and how they come together and what shape they take.
The CERN theoreticians say this could give clear signs of dimensions beyond length, breadth, depth and time because at such high energy particles could be tracked disappearing -- presumably into them -- and then back into the classical four.
Parallel universes could also be hidden within these dimensions, the thinking goes, but only in a so-called gravitational variety in which light cannot be propagated -- a fact which would make it nearly impossible to explore them.
As the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva moves into high gear, they are talking increasingly of the "New Physics" on the horizon that could totally change current views of the universe and how it works.
"Parallel universes, unknown forms of matter, extra dimensions... These are not the stuff of cheap science fiction but very concrete physics theories that scientists are trying to confirm with the LHC and other experiments," according to the center's Theory Group, which mulls over what could be out there beyond the reach of any telescope, wrote in the CERN Bulletin this month.
At full throttle, the LHC could provide scientists with new insights into the nature of mass, dark matter and the origins of the universe. But many of them hope that instead of confirming string theory, dark energy, the Higgs-Boson, etc. — something entirely unexpected will emerge from the CERN-run experiment, for example the detection of certain types of supersymmetric particles, that could be seen as what physicist Michio Kaku calls, “signals from the 11th dimension.”
The detection of certain types of supersymmetric particles, aka sparticles, could be seen as what physicist Michio Kaku calls, “signals from the 11th dimension.”
Several of the world's leading cosmologists, Michio Kaku a prime example, believe that we are but one of many universes. As yet, as we know, there is no evidence of there being other universes out there. Some versions of this theory suggest that there is at least one other universe very close to our own, separated perhaps bu a membrane as little as a millimeter away, which, if true, could be detectable by some energy or forces such as gravity leaking through.In fact, as predicted by brane theorists, this "leakage" could be responsible for the production of dark energy from a parallel universe, its influence felt in our own through its gravitational pull.
Many of the multiple universe proponents are awaiting eagerly for the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva to smash the basic components of the universe together at near the speed of light along a 84-kilometer-long underground racetrack, causing an awesomely high energy reaction similar to the temperatures involved at the Big Bang and spew out the secrets to the cosmos. More exciting than the discovery of Higgs Boson, who's function is giving mass to the particles of matter, could be the possible creation of tiny, particle-sized black holes. Real data from these experiments will rewrite the theorists' "Guide to the Quantum Universe."
According to current physics these nano black holes could not be created at the energy levels the LHC is capable of producing. They could only be created if a parallel universe act.
As particles are collided in the vast underground LHC complex at increasingly high energies, what the Bulletin article referred to informally as the "universe's extra bits" -- if they do exist as predicted -- should be brought into computerized, if ephemeral, view, the theorists say.
Optimism among the hundreds of scientists working at CERN -- in the foothills of the Jura mountains along the border of France and Switzerland -- has grown as the initially troubled $10 billion experiment hit its targets this year.
By mid-October, Director-General Rolf Heuer told staff last weekend, protons were being collided along the 27-km (16.8 mile) subterranean ring at the rate of 5 million a second -- two weeks earlier than the target date for that total.
By next year, collisions will be occurring -- if all continues to go well -- at a rate producing what physicists call one "inverse femtobarn," best described as a colossal amount, of information for analysts to ponder.
The head-on collisions, at all but the speed of light, recreate what happened a tiny fraction of a second after the primeval "Big Bang" 13.7 billion years ago which brought the known universe and everything in it into being.
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/10/-cern-scientists-eye-parallel-universe-breakthrough.html#morePhysicists probing the origins of the cosmos at CERN's Large Hadron Collider hope... more
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Scientists answer possibly one of the most important physics questions today, what would happen to your hand if you stuck it in the LHC beam?Scientists answer possibly one of the most important physics questions today, what... more
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We all are well aware of the Large Hadron Collider which physicists and astronomers expect will answer the most basic questions about the universe and how matter came ..
http://bit.ly/dqyFUpWe all are well aware of the Large Hadron Collider which physicists and astronomers... more
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Pictures and history about CERN
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"I don't care if Ricky Martin is gay. I still want to have sex with him." Stand-up comedian Chris Martin emcees at Cameldy at the Camel April 4, 2010 in Richmond, Virginia."I don't care if Ricky Martin is gay. I still want to have sex with... more
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It might not necessarily be news (yet??) but I just love this story asking whether or not the Large Hadron Collider, plagued with problems over the last few months, is the target of time-travelers desperate to stop its attempts to find the Higgs-Boson.
Posted to current.com by Vierotchoka: Is the Large Hadron Collider Being Sabotaged From The Future?
The quest to observe the Higgs boson has certainly been plagued by its share of troubles, from the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider in 1993 to the Large Hadron Collider's streak of technical troubles. In fact, the projects have suffered such bad luck that Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto wonder if it isn't bad luck at all, but future influences rippling back to sabotage them. In papers like "Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal" and "Search for Future Influence From LHC," they put forth the notion that observing the Higgs boson would be such an abhorrent event that the future is actually trying to prevent it from happening.
Related on Current:
- Current Tech
- Current Tech Blog
- The Time Travel group on CurrentIt might not necessarily be news (yet??) but I just love this story asking whether or... more
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