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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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For the first time in, well, ever, the Higgs boson - the Rolls Royce of mass-embuing theoretical particles - may have just reared its hypothetical, hotly debated little head.
Heavy emphasis on 'may'.For the first time in, well, ever, the Higgs boson - the Rolls Royce of mass-embuing... more
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According to the latest rumors whirling through the world physics community, scientists at the LHC are seeing a signal that could correspond to a Higgs particle with a mass of 125 GeV (a proton is slightly less than 1 GeV).
CERN is scheduled to discuss the latest results from ATLAS and CMS, two of the main LHC experiments, on Dec. 13, following a one day after a closed-door CERN council meeting where officials will get a short preview of their results and discoveries to date.
Rumors rippling through the CERN community suggests that results on the elusive Higgs — which is required under the Standard Model of particle physics to provide mass to different particles — will below the five-sigma threshold needed to definitively declare a discovery in physics.
But if the rumors are true, and the Higgs has been seen at 125 GeV, it could bolster the idea that there is physics beyond the Standard Model that describes the behavior of subatomic particles requiring more complex theories, such as supersymmetry, which requires the existence of a heavier partner to all known particles.
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/12/cerns-lhc-poised-to-make-major-announcement-did-they-locate-the-higgs-boson.htmlAccording to the latest rumors whirling through the world physics community,... 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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Los Angeles Times...
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CONVERSATIONS IN SCIENCE
Tevatron particle accelerator shuts down
Physicist Giovanni Punzi discusses the 4-mile-long accelerator and its shutdown after 26 years of smashing atoms.
PHOTO:
The massive Tevatron particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., has powered down after 26 years of smashing atoms together.
(Fermilab / October 1, 2011)
By Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times
October 1, 2011
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After smashing atoms together for 26 years, the Tevatron particle accelerator powered down on Friday. The 4-mile-long ring-shaped accelerator, located at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., was built to hurl tiny bits of matter at each other in the hopes that they would break apart into the basic building blocks of the universe. Though the Tevatron made major discoveries, it became essentially obsolete after the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva began conducting experiments in 2009.
University of Pisa physicist Giovanni Punzi has worked at the Tevatron since it generated its first collisions in 1985. He talked about the Tevatron on Wednesday, two days before it was shut down.
What made the Tevatron special?
The Tevatron was the highest-energy collider in operation for a very long time.
What does the Tevatron do?
It collides protons and antiprotons. We have particle detectors situated where we can analyze the products of these collisions and find what new particles are there.
Why would you want to do this?
When you get the highest possible energy in collisions of particles, you reproduce a level of energy that doesn't exist today. It only existed at a very early stage in the universe, after the big bang. Creating such energies lets you see new phenomena — including particles that are not found in ordinary matter. So you can study the very basic laws that underlie everything we see and are at the basis of the evolution of the universe.
It's a frontier of knowledge. You get to see things that have never been seen.
What did the Tevatron find that had never been seen?
A number of observations and precision measurements that have added to our understanding of high-energy physics. And the top quark was discovered here in 1995. That was a very big discovery.
Why was it important to find the top quark?
The top quark was crucial because without it, all of our theories of how subatomic particles behave wouldn't work. Quarks are the fundamental particles that combine to make protons and neutrons, and physicists knew there had to be a sixth quark. Everybody was puzzled by the fact that we couldn't find it. The reason we couldn't find it is because its mass was so large that scientists could not produce it until the Tevatron came along.
It was a very long search. If we had not found the top quark, understanding all of the rest of the physics would have been a problem.
How did physicists study basic particles before the Tevatron was built?
Before this machine they had proton-antiproton colliders at CERN [the European Organization for Nuclear Research] in Geneva, but they operated at lower energies.
I remember people saying it would be impossible to put together a thousand magnets and make them work at the same time. But the people here did it. People get used to the idea of doing something that yesterday was considered impossible. It pushes everybody to their best.
Now, of course, the record is going back to Geneva because CERN has built an even bigger machine — the Large Hadron Collider. It's 31/2 times more energetic than the Tevatron.
The Tevatron played a big role in the search for the elusive Higgs boson, the so-called "God particle" that gives rise to mass.
Yes — the Tevatron was able to restrict the possible mass of the Higgs boson to quite a small range.
And even though the collider will no longer operate, you'll continue that search?
Yes. We've used just a fraction of the data we have, and we've been improving analysis techniques over time. So now we want to give it our best possible shot and see what we can figure out about the Higgs boson.
The Large Hadron Collider is also looking for the Higgs. But we look for different modes of decay of the Higgs boson: two different faces of the same coin. Even if the Higgs is seen in Geneva, being able to see it here will be very important to confirm and to understand the nature of this particle, which up to now is completely mysterious. We will be certainly adding to the knowledge of this thing.
Who decided to shut down the Tevatron?
The Department of Energy (which operates Fermilab) and the lab directors decided it was time to go into new projects. We proposed last year to keep going and take some more data, but the decision was to begin exploring what's known as the "intensity frontier."
What does that mean?
Rather than going for the highest-possible energy of collisions, we will go for very intense beams with very large numbers of particles. Using these, Fermilab will produce a large number of collisions that will let scientists look for very rare processes. What they cannot make in terms of energy they try to make up in terms of intensity and frequency of the collisions.
There are a whole lot of things that have been developed here, especially on the side of neutrino physics, that require very intense beams.
Last week, physicists at CERN reported that they had measured neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. Scientists around the world are now trying to see if they can replicate that result — including a team at Fermilab, right?
Yes. This raised lots of discussion. Most of us were thinking this is too strange to be true. If it is really true it's a violation of the fundamental laws of physics. It's really beyond anything we've seen in the past.
What will happen during the shutdown on Friday?
We'll simply stop doing what we've been doing. People will turn off the accelerator and turn off our detectors. Then we will concentrate on trying to get the final results from the data we've already collected.
How long will that take?
It depends on how interesting the results are. In principle it can go on for several years without a problem, but I anticipate that most of the things will probably come within a couple of years, no more.
Are people at Fermilab emotional this week?
How can't you be emotional when it's been so long and such a successful program? As I said, we have a group of people who are still willing to do more. People never got bored, for all this time.
How many colliders remain in the world?
Well, we have this very big one in Geneva. Apart from that we have smaller machines for doing specialized kinds of physics.
What will become of the Tevatron itself?
It's my understanding that Fermilab will reuse some pieces for the next accelerator and put others on display in a museum.
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This interview was edited for space and clarity.
.Los Angeles Times...
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CONVERSATIONS IN SCIENCE
Tevatron particle accelerator... more
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Physicists reported Thursday that sub-atomic particles called neutrinos can travel faster than light, a finding that -- if verified -- would blast a hole in Einstein's theory of relativity.Physicists reported Thursday that sub-atomic particles called neutrinos can travel... more
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Puzzling results from Cern, home of the Large Hadron Collider, have confounded physicists because subatomic particles seem to have beaten the speed of light.
Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away in Italy seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early.
The result - which threatens to upend a century of physics - were put online for scrutiny by other scientists.
In the meantime, the group says it is being very cautious about its claims.
They will be discussing the result in detail in a conference at Cern on Friday afternoon, which can be viewed online.
"We tried to find all possible explanations for this," said report author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration.
"We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't," he told BBC News.
"When you don't find anything, then you say 'Well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this.'"
Caught speeding?
The speed of light is the Universe's ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics - as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity - depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it.
Thousands of experiments have been undertaken to measure it ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a particle breaking the limit.
But Dr Ereditato and his colleagues have been carrying out an experiment for the last three years that seems to suggest neutrinos have done just that.
Neutrinos come in a number of types, and have recently been seen to switch spontaneously from one type to another.
The team prepares a beam of just one type, muon neutrinos, sending them from Cern to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy to see how many show up as a different type, tau neutrinos.
In the course of doing the experiments, the researchers noticed that the particles showed up 60 billionths of a second sooner than light would over the same distance - a tiny fractional change, but a consistent one.
The team measured the travel times of neutrino bunches some 15,000 times, and have reached a level of statistical significance that in scientific circles would count as a formal discovery.
But the group understands that what are known as "systematic errors" could easily make an erroneous result look like a breaking of the ultimate speed limit, and that has motivated them to publish their measurements.
"My dream would be that another, independent experiment finds the same thing - then I would be relieved," Dr Ereditato said.
But for now, he explained, "we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy".
"And of course the consequences can be very serious."Puzzling results from Cern, home of the Large Hadron Collider, have confounded... more
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"Scientists at the CERN physics center have discovered neutrino particles that travel faster than the speed of light, overturning some fundamental assumptions in physics.
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If confirmed, the discovery would overturn a key part of Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that nothing in the universe can travel faster than light."
One more illustration of how what we know evolves with the tools we are able to conceive and build.
If there is laughter after death, one can envision ol Al yucking it up about this one."Scientists at the CERN physics center have discovered neutrino particles that... more
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"Celebrate The World Wide Web’s 20th Birthday — Ask Your Lawmakers To Oppose The Internet Blacklist Bill"
http://blog.demandprogress.org/2011/08/celebrate-the-world-wide-webs-20th-birthday-ask-your-lawmakers-to-oppose-the-internet-blacklist-bill/
"It was twenty years ago this week that Tim Berners-Lee, while working at CERN, put the world’s first website online. It announced his new creation: the World Wide Web. Last year while urging Internet users to sign Demand Progress’s petition against the Internet Blacklist Bill, Berners-Lee wrote this about the principles that underpin his project:
“No person or organization shall be deprived of their ability to connect to others at will without due process of law, with the presumption of innocence until found guilty. Neither governments nor corporations should be allowed to use disconnection from the Internet as a way of arbitrarily furthering their own aims.”
The Internet Blacklist Bill — S.968, formally called the PROTECT IP Act — would violate those principles by allowing the Department of Justice to force search engines, browsers, and service providers to block users’ access to websites that have been accused of facilitating intellectual property infringement — without even giving them a day in court. It would also give IP rights holders a private right of action, allowing them to sue to get sites prevented from operating. Demand Progress’s new mash-up, posted here, explains the bill in more detail.""Celebrate The World Wide Web’s 20th Birthday — Ask Your Lawmakers To... more
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Get ready for the next big bombshell in the man-made warming debate. The world’s most sophisticated particle study laboratory—CERN in Geneva—will soon announce that more cosmic rays do, indeed, create more clouds in earth’s atmosphere. More cosmic rays mean a cooler planet. Thus, the solar source of the earth’s long, moderate 1,500-year climate cycle will finally be explained.
Cosmic rays and solar winds are interesting phenomena—but they are vastly more relevant when an undocumented theory is threatening to quadruple society’s energy costs. The IPCC wants $10 gasoline, and “soaring” electric bills to reduce earth’s temperatures by an amount too tiny to measure with most thermometers.
In 2007, when Fred Singer and I published Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years, we weren’t terribly concerned with cosmic rays. We knew the natural, moderate warming/cooling cycle was real, from the evidence in ice cores, seabed sediments, fossil pollen and cave stalagmites. The cycle was the big factor that belied the man-made warming hysteria of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
When Willi Dansgaard and Hans Oeschger discovered the 1,500 year cycle in the Greenland ice cores in 1984, they knew immediately that it was solar-powered. They’d seen exactly the same cycle in the carbon 14 molecules in trees, and in the beryllium 10 molecules in ice cores. Both sets of molecules are formed when cosmic rays strike our atmosphere. The cycle had produced a whole series of dramatic, abrupt Medieval-Warming-to-Little-Ice-Age climate changes.
The IPCC, for its part, announced that the sun could not be the forcing factor in any major climate change because the solar irradiation was too small. IPCC did not, however, add up the other solar variations that could amplify the solar irradiation. Nor had the IPCC programmed its famed computer models with the knowledge of the Medieval Warming (950–1200 AD), the Roman Warming (200 BC–600 AD), or the big Holocene Warmings centered on 6,000 and 8,000 BC.
The IPCC apparently wanted to dismiss the sun as a climate factor—to leave room for a CO2 factor that has only a 22 percent correlation with our past thermometer record. Correlation is not causation—but the lack of CO2 correlation is deadly to the IPCC theory.
Henrik Svensmark of the Danish Space Research Institute added the next chapter in the climate cycle story, just before our book was published. His cloud chamber experiment showed natural cosmic rays quickly created vast numbers of tiny “cloud seeds” when our mix of atmospheric gases was bombarded with ultra-violet light. Since clouds often cover 30 percent of the earth’s surface, a moderate change in cloud cover clearly could explain the warming/cooling cycle.
Svensmark noted the gigantic “solar wind” that expands when the sun is active—and thus blocks many of the cosmic rays that would otherwise hit the earth’s atmosphere. When the sun weakens, the solar wind shrinks. Recently, the U.S. Solar Observatory reported a very long period of “quiet sun” and predicted 30 years of cooling.
Last year, Denmark’s University of Aarhus did another experiment with a particle accelerator that fully confirmed the Svensmark hypothesis: cosmic rays help to make more clouds and thus could cool the earth.
The CERN experiment is supposed to be the big test of the Svensmark theory. It’s a tipoff, then, that CERN’s boss, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, has just told the German magazine Die Welt that he has forbidden his researchers to “interpret” the forthcoming test results. In other words, the CERN report will be a stark “just the facts” listing of the findings. Those findings must support Svensmark, or Heuer would never have issued such a stifling order on a major experiment.
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Henrik Svensmark did the documentary, The Cloud Mystery, I watched it to actually do research on climate change and learn about science. It debunks AGW Global Warming, just like Galileo debunked the geocentric. I never knew how hard it was to convince people that the Sun actually affected temperatures on Earth!Get ready for the next big bombshell in the man-made warming debate. The world’s... 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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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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Scientists capture antimatter atoms in particle breakthrough
By Thair Shaikh, CNN
November 18, 2010 12:21 p.m. EST
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
* Antihydrogen atoms were trapped in a magnetic field
* Matter and antimatter annihilate each other on contact
* "It's taken us five years to get here," says Professor Jeffrey Hangst
* CERN's next ambition is to create a beam of antimatter
(CNN) -- Scientists have captured antimatter atoms for the first time, a breakthrough that could eventually help us to understand the nature and origins of the universe.
Researchers at CERN, the Geneva-based particle physics laboratory, have managed to confine single antihydrogen atoms in a magnetic trap.
This will allow them to conduct a more detailed study of antihydrogen, which will in turn allow scientists to compare matter and antimatter.
Understanding antimatter is one of the biggest challenges facing science -- most theoretical physicists and cosmologists believe that at the Big Bang, when the universe was created, matter and antimatter were produced in equal amounts.
However, as our world is made up of matter, antimatter seems to have disappeared.
Understanding antimatter could shed light on why almost everything in the known universe consists of matter.
Antimatter has been very difficult to handle because matter and antimatter don't get on, destroying each other instantly on contact in a violent flash of energy.
It's taken us five years to get here, this is a big milestone
--Professor Jeffrey Hangst
In a precursor to today's experiment, in 2002 scientists at CERN produced antihydrogen atoms in large quantities, but they had an incredibly short lifespan -- just several milliseconds -- because the antihydrogen came into contact with the walls of their containers and the two annihilated each other.
In this latest experiment the lifespan of the antihydrogen atoms was extended by using magnetic fields to trap them and thus prevent them from coming into contact with matter.
The researchers created 38 antihydrogen atoms and held on to them for about a tenth of a second, which is long enough to study them says Professor Jeffrey Hangst, one of the team of CERN scientists who worked on the program.
Hangst and his colleagues produced a magnet field which was strongest near the walls of the trap, falling to a minimum at the center, causing the atoms to collect there in a vacuum.
"We could have held them for much longer... I am just full of joy and relief, it's taken us five years to get here, this is a big milestone," Hangst told CNN.
To trap just 38 atoms, they had to run the experiment 335 times, says Nature which published the report findings.
Hangst added: "This was ten thousand times more difficult than creating untrapped antihydrogen atoms.
"This will help us understand the structure of space and time. For reasons that no one yet understands, nature ruled out antimatter... this inspires us to work that much harder to see if antimatter holds some secret."
Malcolm Longair, professor of natural philosophy at Cambridge University, told CNN that CERN's results were a considerable achievement.
"At the Big Bang we believe the temperatures were very very high and we understand in theory why antimatter disappeared but there is no physical theory to back it up."
Antimatter was first predicted in 1931 by the British physicist Paul Dirac, who theorized that antimatter is ordinary matter in reverse.
CERN's next ambition is to create a beam of antimatter which they hope will allow them to unpeel more of the mysteries surrounding it.Scientists capture antimatter atoms in particle breakthrough
By Thair Shaikh, CNN... more
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It was once used to propel Captain Kirk across the stars.
Now scientists say they have captured a sample of real-life antimatter for the first time.
In an astonishing breakthrough, a team of British and international physicists were able to 'trap' 38 atoms of anti-hydrogen in a laboratory for a fraction of a second.
While the experiment is unlikely to lead to the warp engines, anti-matter drives or the faster than light travel of Star Trek, it could shed light on the nature and origins of the Universe. Antimatter is the mirror of ordinary matter. Normal atoms are made up of positively-charged nuclei orbited by negatively-charged electrons.
However, their antimatter counterparts are the wrong way round. They have negative nuclei and positively-charged electrons. When matter and antimatter meet they instantly annihilate each other, releasing a burst of energy.
Since it was first proposed by the British physicist Paul Dirac in 1931, antimatter has been a staple of science fiction.
An antimatter reactor powers the USS Enterprise in the TV and film series Star Trek, while an antimatter bomb hidden under Rome plays a key role Dan Brown's thriller Angels & Demons.
Theoretically, a single pound of antimatter would contain more destructive power than the largest H-bomb. However, creating and holding even a tiny amount of antimatter is so difficult and expensive, the chances of it being used in a superweapon are remote.
The new research, published today in the journal Nature, involved researchers at the European nuclear research facility at Cern, Geneva.
Using the Anti-hydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus, or Alpha, the scientists cooled negatively charged antiprotons - the mirror version of hydrogen nuclei - and squeezed them into a matchstick-sized cloud 20 mm long and 1.4 mm wide.
These clouds of particles were then introduced to a similar cold cloud of positrons - antimatter electrons.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1330593/Physics-breakthrough-Scientists-CERN-capture-atoms-elusive-antimatter.html#ixzz15bjc2ClU
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1330593/Physics-breakthrough-Scientists-CERN-capture-atoms-elusive-antimatter.htmlIt was once used to propel Captain Kirk across the stars.
Now scientists say they... more
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55 minute video on predictions of future world events. Prophecies of Nostradamus interpreted by Astrology charts and the King James version English Bible Code, on future years 2011 to 2015. The rise of the Third Antichrist in Russia, as Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Prophecy of the great French prophet of the 1500s Nostradamus, including number 1 50 about an aquatic triplicity and possibly a hero coming from the U.S.. Also the prophecy on Mabus. Astrology and the King James version English Bible Code are also discussed to interpret the Nostradamus prophecies. Also see my my video on a Nostradamus prophecy of a Black Hole from a particle accelerator in France possibly destroying earth. Copyright 2010 by T. Chase. From the Revelation13.net web site, for more on this see Revelation13.net (Revelation 13: Prophecies of the Future, Astrology, Nostradamus, Bible Prophecy, the King James version English Bible Code.)55 minute video on predictions of future world events. Prophecies of Nostradamus... 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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Russian physicists seriously believe that the Large Hadron Collider can be used for time travel. However, it will only happen when it starts working at full capacity and stops breaking down.
If earlier time travel was considered science fiction, now it suddenly turned into the favorite pet project of theoretical physicists. Renowned physicist Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology once said in one of his lectures:
“Once upon a time, time travel was the exclusive prerogative of writers. Serious scientists were shunning it like the plague, even when they were writing novels under a pseudonym or were secretly reading them. The times have changed! Now in serious scientific journals you can find a scientific analysis of time travel, authored by outstanding theoretical physicists. Why this change? Physics simply understood that the nature of time is too important to give it to the mercy of writers.”
Today, there are many different schemes of devices designed for time travel. The main one is the Large Hadron Collider. It was launched in the fall of 2008. This is the most powerful particle accelerator in history located on the border of Switzerland and France. In its 27-kilometer ring scientists are trying to collide beams of protons accelerated to nearly light speed. As expected, this device will provide new information about particles and forces acting in space, as well as will reproduce conditions that existed immediately after the Big Bang gave birth to the universe.
Russia Today: LHC's little brother to beam near Moscow
After launching the collider, people were scared of the giant black hole capable of swallowing the Earth. Yet, scientists quickly calmed the population saying that in case of a collision of particles in the collider, the holes that may appear would be microscopic, or so large that they can be used as a handy tool for time travel.
This sensational proposal was made by two doctors of physical and mathematical sciences, Professors of Institute of Mathematics named after Steklov, Irina Arefyeva and Igor Volovich.
“Modern principles of theoretical mathematical physics allow the possibility of time travel,” explains Volovich, a member of RAS. “One of the admissible models of working time machine is the so-called wormhole, that is, a space-time tunnel leading to another time or space. And the probability of formation of a wormhole in the LHC is comparable to the probability of occurrence of the black hole itself, which can occur when particles collide with high energy.
As explained by the physics, wormhole is a tunnel connecting different parts of space and time. Entrance to the tunnel may be the size of a star, a planet, a house and even a speck of dust, depending on a purpose of the tunnel use. After all, there is a difference between sending a photon or a group of tourists. You can get to another galaxy, or another universe. And you can also get into in the past. In terms of the physical properties, the entrance to the wormhole is very similar to the entrance to the black hole. The difference is that you can come back.
Since the LHC is designed, figuratively speaking, to create a part of space on Earth, then it can be used to obtain dark energy. This is also an important detail of creating the miracle machine. Another necessary condition for making the machine work is to distort space and time so it closes up in a ring. And the LHC is quite capable of that.
“This phenomenon in physics is called “closed time-like curve,” explains Professor Arefyeva. “It allows, at least theoretically, returning to the past.”
“Is it possible to have a paradox described by Bradbury, when a traveler caught in the past accidentally steps on a butterfly, which results in coming to power of a different president in his time? “
“We expected such issues,” says professor Volovich. “We came to this conclusion: time travel may change the course of history, but not very significantly.”
To make time machine the reality, the scientists stress the need for the LHC to reach at least the design capacity (now it is working at half capacity) and stop breaking down.
“So far, our biggest home is that the LHC will demonstrate the existence of wormhole. If some of the collision energy in the collider disappears, this can be explained by the creation of particles that pierce time through wormholes.”
Research and Development Center of the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN), promised that the LHC will start working as expected in September. Then it becomes clear whether Russian physicists were right in their solution of the most intriguing problem of mankind.
http://english.pravda.ru/science/tech/06-08-2010/114515-time_machine-0/Russian physicists seriously believe that the Large Hadron Collider can be used for... more
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"1st extinction event: Leaked CERN documents state LHC has 70% chances to produce ‘ice-9′ strangelets on 11/9."
I'm not a science major so I don't know how worried I should be about this, post up your thoughts below!
http://www.cerntruth.com/?p=125"1st extinction event: Leaked CERN documents state LHC has 70% chances to produce... more
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