Large Hadron Collider takes a step closer to full power

[Chris]

Scientists at CERN, the European nuclear research agency, announced Friday morning that they had accelerated beams of protons at the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, to energies of 3.5 trillion electron volts. That is a new record, three times the energy of any other machine on earth, and means that the collider, after 15 years and $10 billion, is on the verge of beginning to do physics experiments. Physicists hope to begin colliding the beams by the end of the month.

World Briefing - EUROPE - Switzerland - New Record Set for Speedy Protons - NYTimes.com

 

[driveby]

oh neat ...

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Scientists at CERN, the European nuclear research agency, announced Friday morning that they had accelerated beams of protons at the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, to energies of 3.5 trillion electron volts. That is a new record, three times the energy of any other machine on earth, and means that the collider, after 15 years and $10 billion, is on the verge of beginning to do physics experiments. Physicists hope to begin colliding the beams by the end of the month.

World Briefing - EUROPE - Switzerland - New Record Set for Speedy Protons - NYTimes.com

Wayyyy cool!

Three cheers for real science!

 

[kyzr]

Scientists at CERN, the European nuclear research agency, announced Friday morning that they had accelerated beams of protons at the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, to energies of 3.5 trillion electron volts. That is a new record, three times the energy of any other machine on earth, and means that the collider, after 15 years and $10 billion, is on the verge of beginning to do physics experiments. Physicists hope to begin colliding the beams by the end of the month.

World Briefing - EUROPE - Switzerland - New Record Set for Speedy Protons - NYTimes.com

Wayyyy cool! Three cheers for real science!

Real science? That's like colliding two cars head-on at light speed to see what parts fly out.
From wiki:

Physicists hope that the LHC will help answer the most fundamental questions in physics, questions concerning the basic laws governing the interactions and forces among the elementary objects, the deep structure of space and time, especially regarding the intersection of quantum mechanics and general relativity, where current theories and knowledge are unclear or break down altogether. These issues include:

1. Is the Higgs mechanism for generating elementary particle masses via electroweak symmetry breaking indeed realised in nature? It is anticipated that the collider will either demonstrate (or rule out) the existence of the elusive Higgs boson(s), completing (or refuting) the Standard Model.

2. Is super-symmetry, an extension of the Standard Model and Poincaré symmetry, realiz
sed in nature, implying that all known particles have supersymmetric partners? These may clear up the mystery of dark matter.

3. Are there extra dimensions, as predicted by various models inspired by string theory, and can we detect them?

I can answer this one for a lot less that $10b. The answer is "yes". (Its a "multi-verse, not a "uni-verse") One other problem that they can't answer yet is "prove that we are really here"


4. Are electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force just different manifestations of a single unified force, as predicted by various Grand Unification Theories?

5. Why is gravity so many orders of magnitude weaker than the other three fundamental forces? See also Hierarchy problem.

6. Are there additional sources of quark flavors, beyond those already predicted within the Standard Model?

7. Why are there apparent violations of the symmetry between matter and antimatter? See also CP violation.

8. What was the nature of the quark-gluon plasma in the early universe? This will be investigated by ion collisions in ALICE.

Theoretical Physics?! Astro-physics?! Grand Unification?!

I hope they keep us posted, especially if anyone can ever prove that we actually exist.

 

[saveliberty]

Our existence can only be proven by an outside intellegence. I think they want to see if we can crawl out of our primordial galaxy before they say we exist.

Of course, blowing up the solar system with a collider might generate a little excitement. lol.

 

[Chris]

LHC could discover things that will change all of our lives for the better.

Let's hope so.

 

[Mr. H.]

I gotta hardon for the Hadron.

 

[Mr. H.]

New Behavior of Exotic Antimatter Particle Seen at LHC - Yahoo! News

A rare particle containing equal parts weird antimatter and normal matter has popped up in experiments at the world's largest particle accelerator.

Scientists recently observed new behavior of this particle, called a B meson, at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) atom smasher, a 17-mile long (27-km) underground ring at the CERN laboratory near Geneva. B mesons are made up of one quark (the building block of protons and neutrons) and one anti-quark, which is the antimatter partner to the quark. [The Strangest Little Things in Nature]

 

[waltky]

Granny says dem exotic particles is unstable...

... dey better leave `em alone an' quit messin with `em...

... or dey gonna blow up the world.

 

[Mr. H.]

Granny says dem exotic particles is unstable...

... dey better leave `em alone an' quit messin with `em...

... or dey gonna blow up the world.

Everyone told Chuck Yeager he would commit suicide by climbing into a jet and going supersonic. Mach 1. Pfft.

This is but the Hadron's Mach 1.

Pedal to the metal.

 

[JBeukema]

LHC could discover things that will change all of our lives for the better.

Let's hope so.

10:1 odds the first thing we do with anything we learn is make a bigger bomb

 

[JBeukema]

Granny says dem exotic particles is unstable...

... dey better leave `em alone an' quit messin with `em...

... or dey gonna blow up the world.

Isn't that the idea?

 

[Mr. H.]

Granny says dem exotic particles is unstable...

... dey better leave `em alone an' quit messin with `em...

... or dey gonna blow up the world.

Isn't that the idea?

The idea is to look inward, not outward. Pre-badda boom.

 

[JBeukema]

Granny says dem exotic particles is unstable...

... dey better leave `em alone an' quit messin with `em...

... or dey gonna blow up the world.

Isn't that the idea?

The idea is to look inward, not outward. Pre-badda boom.

Whatever, philosopher king. If you want funding, give us a bomb

 

[konradv]

LHC could discover things that will change all of our lives for the better.

Let's hope so.

10:1 odds the first thing we do with anything we learn is make a bigger bomb

That would be disappointing. I'm hoping the HLC will lead to practical uses, like the development of fusion power.

 

[JBeukema]

LHC could discover things that will change all of our lives for the better.

Let's hope so.

10:1 odds the first thing we do with anything we learn is make a bigger bomb

That would be disappointing. I'm hoping the HLC will lead to practical uses, like the development of fusion power.

bigger fusion bombs will come first

 

[Mr. H.]

Meanwhile, at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory....

US atom smasher may have found new force of nature - Yahoo! News

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Data from a major US atom smasher lab may have revealed a new elementary particle, or potentially a new force of nature, one of the physicists involved in the discovery told AFP on Wednesday.

The physics world was abuzz with excitement over the findings, which could offer clues to the persistent riddle of mass and how objects obtain it -- one of the most sought-after answers in all of physics.

 

[waltky]

Granny says it don't matter to her...

It's official: Heaviest antimatter found
The reports began circulating a few weeks ago, and today's publication in the journal Nature makes it official: Physicists have detected the heaviest bits of antimatter ever found on Earth. And that record is likely to stand for a long, long time.

Members of the STAR collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, based at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, say they've seen the traces of 18 nuclei of antihelium-4 among about half a trillion particles produced by almost a billion gold-ion collisions at RHIC. These nuclei are like regular helium nuclei, except that instead of having two protons and two neutrons, they have two negatively charged antiprotons and two antiprotons.

The particles existed for only about 10 billionths of a second before they came in contact with ordinary matter particles and were annihilated, but that was long enough to register on STAR's detectors. Physicists can routinely produce antihydrogen nuclei (basically, antiprotons), and last year a research team reported the first detection of antihydrogen atoms (a positron going around an antiproton). Scientists have even detected antihelium-3 nuclei (two antiprotons and an antineutron). But until now, antihelium-4 has eluded them.

RHIC is best-known for smashing together gold ions so forcefully that particles like protons shatter into their constituent quarks and gluons, producing the kind of primordial soup that existed just an instant after the big bang. When that soup congeals, all sorts of combinations of quarks come together — and statistically, there's an ever-so-slight chance that the quarks will arrange themselves into two antiprotons paired with two antineutrons. The odds of that happening are so vanishingly small that RHIC's researchers had to sift through mountains of data to find the 18 events they were looking for.

The bad news is that the chances of finding anything even heavier are even more vanishingly small. So small, in fact, that physicists don't expect to detect them anytime in the foreseeable future, at RHIC or even at Europe's Large Hadron Collider. The good news is that these 18 detections confirm the statistical model that theorists expected to see for the creation of antimatter in the lab. Searching for natural-born antimatter in outer space is one of the top jobs for the $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which is due to be delivered to the International Space Station a week from now. The AMS should be able to detect antihelium nuclei and other subatomic oddities during its years-long run in orbit.

MORE

 

[Mr. H.]

Elusive antimatter trapped over 16 minutes

Gotcha! Elusive antimatter trapped over 16 minutes - CBS News

GENEVA - Nuclear scientists announced Sunday they havefound a way to "trap" for more than 15 minutes elusive antimatteratoms that used to disappear after a fraction of a second.


That will give scientists at the European Organization forNuclear Research time to study the atoms properly, in the hope ofunderstanding what happened during the first moments of the universe.

The achievement is a significant improvement on earlier attemptsto trap antihydrogen, which like all antimatter has a tendency todisappear before scientists have time to examine it.

 

[Mr. H.]

If this project succeed it will ruin normal physics equations.

Uh oh. They may change my college grades from the 70's and flunk me!