What Matters About Antimatter

Just like the dog that didn’t bark in the night time, the absence of antimatter in the universe worries us. Why there isn’t more of it is one of the biggest mysteries in particle physics, and one which my experiment (LHCb, at Cern’s Large Hadron Collider) was built to explore. On April 24 this year the LHCb experiment unveiled its latest findings. I want to explain here why these results matter, why they are a triumph, and why, despite them, we are little nearer that precious understanding of why and how this has happened.

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(Source: christinetheastrophysicist)

staceythinx:

Alejandro Guijarro photographs the chalkboards of some of the brightest minds in quantum physics for his continuing series Momentum. He went to research facilities like CERN and many of the top universities in the world to find them.

Physicists from CERN team up with TED-Ed to create five lessons that make particle physics child’s play

As part of TEDxCERN, physicists from the famous institution, home of  the Large Hadron Collider (and birthplace of the Word Wide Web), teamed up with animators from TED-Ed to create easy-to-understand animated lessons that explain concepts like dark matter, big data and the Higgs boson in lay terms.

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(via christinetheastrophysicist)

Will Antimatter Obey Gravity’s Pull?

What goes up must always come down, right? Well, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) wants to test if that principle applies to antimatter.

Antimatter, most simply speaking, is a mirror image of matter. The concept behind it is that the particles that make up matter have an opposite counterpart, antiparticles. For example, if you consider that electrons are negatively charged, an antielectron would be positively charged.

This sounds like science fiction, but as NASA says, it is “real stuff.” In past experiments, CERN’s particle accelerator has created antiprotons, positrons and even antihydrogen. Properly harnessed, antimatter could be used for applications ranging from rocketry to medicine, NASA added. But we’ll need to figure out its nature first.

The experiment CERN described snares antihydrogen atoms in a powerful magnetic field (inside a container) for several minutes. As the researchers let these atoms go, they can watch on which walls the atoms crash into. The experiment is called ALPHA, for Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus.

While researchers weren’t originally looking to learn more about gravity, the team working on the experiments came to realize their data “might be sensitive to gravitational effects,” CERN stated.

To be sure, these atoms would have a bit of energy when they are released, so one wouldn’t expect them to hit the ground right away. But what the scientists are doing now are figuring out, with reference to how the antihydrogen atoms moved, what the limit might be on “anomalous gravitational effects.”

The scientists have made new use of the ALPHA data they collected in 2010 and 2011 for other purposes, and now plan to do more experiments in 2014 with gravity specifically in mind.

So far, they’ve been able to begin constraining the gravitational to inertial mass ratio (the particle’s reaction to gravity), but it will take further work to learn more about how gravity affects these particles more generally.

“Based on our data, we can exclude the possibility that the gravitiational mass of antihydrogen is more than 110 times its inertial mass, or that it falls upwards with a gravitational mass more than 65 times its inertial mass,” CERN said on its website.

Already, though, the scientists are starting to talk about what could happen if antimatter behaves differently than matter in the face of gravity.

If antimatter fell up, stated Joel Fajans, an ALPHA physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, this could mean that gravity does not universally affect all types of particles.

“In the unlikely event that antimatter falls upwards, we would have to revise our view of the way the universe works,” he said. “We’ve taken the first steps toward a direct experimental test of questions that physicists and non-physicists have been wondering about for more than 50 years.”

image; What matter and antimatter might look like annihilating one another. credit: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss

Proba-V Carrying Radiation Detector from CERN to Space

As ESA’s Proba-V minisatellite monitors terrestrial vegetation, it will also survey the space surrounding itself. A new detector chip based on technology first developed for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is carried on the satellite’s exterior to measure space radiation.

Less than a cubic metre in volume, Proba-V is hosting five additional technology experiments along with its main vegetation-monitoring payload. These include two radiation instruments to sample the charged particles the minisatellite will encounter across its orbit.

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thenewenlightenmentage:

The beginning of the universe, for beginners - Tom Whyntie

How did the universe begin — and how is it expanding? CERN physicist Tom Whyntie shows how cosmologists and particle physicists explore these questions by replicating the heat, energy, and activity of the first few seconds of our universe, from right after the Big Bang.

Lesson by Tom Whyntie, animation by Hornet Inc.

tedx:

Today, TEDxCERN and TED-Ed have unveiled the first of 5 animated lessons specially developed by CERN scientists for TEDxCERN and brought to life by the talented animators at TED-Ed: “The beginning of the universe, for beginners.”

The lesson, which you can watch above(!) and at

the-science-llama:

Which house do you belong to?

Building the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer: 16 Years in 3 Minutes

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on board the International Space Station released its first results today (read about them here) after having been in space since 2011. But this particle physics experiment was years in the making. In just 3 minutes, you can watch 16 years of building, preparing, launching and activating this detector.

Curious? Watch another video from NASA that provides an overview of the AMS.

tedx:

The TEDxCERN 2013 venue: the Globe of Science and Innovation

You may have heard of CERN — the European Organization for Nuclear Research — or as it’s more commonly known, the home of The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. 

CERN and its LHC are famous for their role in the recent discovery of what very likely is the Higgs boson, a particle crucial to the standard model of physics, but — now — CERN will be the home to another exciting first: their first TEDx event.

On May 3, 2013, Europe’s massive particle physics laboratory will bring together thinkers of all kinds to examine our universe and provide some insight into why the study of it matters.

“Science is everywhere,” says TEDxCERN’s organizers. “Our lives as individuals and our survival as a society depend on its its thoughtful development. In order to move into a more robust future we need to inspire even more young people to become part of a new generation of scientists; we need to celebrate and encourage scientific thinking, and to above all convey that science matters to everyone.

“Going beyond particle physics, TEDxCERN will provide a stage for the expression of science in multiple dimensions and disciplines, unveiling a world in which physics intersects with other multi-dimensional disciplines and thought.”

Thirteen speakers will grace the TEDxCERN stage, including 
George Church, who helped initiate the Human Genome Project;
the “father of grid computing” Ian Foster; 18-year-old grand prize winner of the 2012 Google Science Fair, Brittany Wenger; renowned philosopher John Searle; TEDster and molecule-3D-printing-master Lee Cronin; Planck Collaboration team member and winner of the 2012 RAS Fowler Prize, Hiranya Peiris; and Zehra Sayers, chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee for SESAME (Synchrotron light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East).

The TEDxCERN will take place in Switzerland at CERN — in the laboratory’s beautiful Globe of Science and Innovation (pictured above). The event will also be webcast live at several different venues across the globe, including a special TEDxAthens event.

For information on how to host your own TEDxCERN livestreaming event, visit the Simulcast page on TEDxCERN’s website.

For updates on TEDxCERN, you can follow them on Facebook or Twitter.

(Globe photo by Flickr user davidpc_)

rhamphotheca:

Higgs Boson Positively Identified! (Probably)

by Adrian Cho

Eight months ago, physicists working with the world’s biggest atom smasher—Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—created a sensation when they reported that they had discovered a particle that appeared to be the long-sought Higgs boson, the last missing piece in their standard model of particles and forces. Today, those researchers reported that the particle does indeed have the basic predicted properties of the standard model Higgs boson, clinching the identification.

“It sure does look like the standard model Higgs boson, you bet,” says Sally Dawson, a theorist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, who was not involved with the measurements.

It’s a big step, at least semantically. Ever since the new particle was reported last July, officials at the home of the LHC—the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland—have taken great care to describe the new thing as a “Higgs-like particle.” Now, a CERN press release calls the particle “a Higgs boson.” “That’s a big deal for the community,” Dawson says.

To make the positive identification, researchers relied not on dental records, but on observations of how the Higgs boson decays into combinations of other, more familiar particles. Key characteristics of the Higgs include its spin and its parity, a symmetry property. They can be determined by looking at correlations in the particle directions when, for example, a Higgs boson decays into two particles called Z bosons, each of which then decays into two particles called muons…

(read more: Science NOW)             (images: CERN/ATLAS Project)

Who Killed America’s Biggest Gadget?
The hunt for the Higgs boson, god particle or goddamn particle, the one that gives things mass, came closer to an end on July 4. Physicists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Europe, the world’s largest particle accelerator, found evidence of the particle and its energy field. But the LHC didn’t do it alone. The search has been a massive, costly and unprecedented international effort that began thousands of miles away, at another atom smasher beneath the Illinois prairie.

mothernaturenetwork:

5 elusive particles beyond Higgs

From gravitons to winos, here are five bizarre things that may exist beyond the Higgs.

the-science-llama:

Particle Collisions Could Create Twin Black Holes at Large Hadron Collider

Back in 2008, physicists repeatedly assured us that a black hole produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was not going to swallow Earth. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t hoping to make one. Collisions between high energy particles, like the LHC’s protons, could theoretically squeeze enough mass and energy into a small enough space to create a tiny black hole—and making one might be a bit easier than physicists believed. It takes 2.4 times less energy than previously thought to create a black hole from a particle collision, according to a new paper in Physical Review Letters. That’s because when two particles smash into each other, their gravitational pull traps energy at two points on either side of the crash site. If enough energy gets concentrated at those points, it collapses into twin black holes that quickly gobble each other up and merge into one, as seen in the simulation above. Even with the new energy estimates, the chances of making a black hole in a particle accelerator are still vanishingly small. But because spotting one at the relatively low energy of the LHC would be solid experimental evidence for extra dimensions, physicists are keeping their fingers crossed.

Via sciencemag.org

astrodidact:

Confirmed! Newfound Particle Is the Higgs

A newfound particle discovered at the world’s largest atom smasher last year is, indeed, the Higgs boson, the particle thought to give other matter its mass, scientists reported today (March 14) at the annual Rencontres de Moriond conference in Italy.

Physicists announced on July 4, 2012, that, with more than 99 percent certainty, they had found a new elementary particle weighing about 126 times the mass of the proton that was likely the long-sought Higgs boson. The Higgs is sometimes referred to as the “God particle,” to the chagrin of many scientists, who prefer its official name.

But the two experiments, CMS and ATLAS, hadn’t collected enough data to say the particle was, for sure, the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered piece of the puzzle predicted by the Standard Model, the reigning theory of particle physics.

Now, after collecting two and a half times more data inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — where protons zip at near light-speed around the 17-mile-long (27 kilometer) underground ring beneath Switzerland and France — physicists say the particle is the Higgs. [In Photos: Searching for the Higgs Boson]

“The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is,” said CMS spokesperson Joe Incandela in a statement.

Dave Charlton, ATLAS spokesperson agreed, the new results “point to the new particle having the spin-parity of a Higgs boson as in the Standard Model,” referring to a quantum property of elementary particles.

To confirm the particle as the Higgs boson, physicists needed to collect tons of data that would reveal its quantum properties as well as how it interacted with other particles. For instance, a Higgs particle should have no spin and its parity, or the measure of how its mirror image behaves, should be positive, both of which were supported by data from the ATLAS and CMS experiments.

Even so, the scientists are not sure whether this Higgs boson is the one predicted by the Standard Model or perhaps the lightest of several bosons predicted to exist by other theories.

Seeing how this particle decays into other particles could let physicists know whether this Higgs is the “plain vanilla” Standard Model Higgs. Detecting a Higgs boson is rare, with just one observed for every 1 trillion proton-proton collisions. As such, the LHC physicists say they need much more data to understand all of the ways in which the Higgs decays.

From what is known about the particle now, physicists have said the Higgs boson may spell the universe’s doom in the very far future. That’s because the mass of the Higgs boson is a critical part of a calculation that portends the future of space and time. Its mass of 126 times the mass of the proton is just about what would be needed to create a fundamentally unstable universe that would lead to a cataclysm billions of years from now.

“This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there’ll be a catastrophe,” Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., said last month at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“It may be the universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at some point billions of years from now it’s all going to get wiped out,” added Lykken, a collaborator on the CMS experiment.

http://www.space.com/20226-newfound-particle-is-higgs.html