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)

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.

Read More.

(via christinetheastrophysicist)

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.

Read More.

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?

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

skeptv:

Sixty Symbols - Working at CERN

What’s it like working at CERN and the Large Hadron Collider - and how do you get a job there? Questions many of you wanted asked during our LHC visit!

More from our LHC visit: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7DEC46BD7058D7BB

This video features David Barney and Steven Goldfarb, from CMS and ATLAS respectively.

CERN: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/

by Sixty Symbols.
Visit our website at http://www.sixtysymbols.com/
We’re on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/sixtysymbols
And Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/periodicvideos
This project for The University of Nottingham
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/physics/index.aspx
Sixty Symbols videos by Brady Haran

Higgs Boson Particle May Spell Doom For the Universe

A subatomic particle discovered last year that may be the long-sought Higgs boson might doom our universe to an unfortunate end, researchers say.

The mass of the particle, which was uncovered at the world’s largest particle accelerator — the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva — is a key ingredient in a calculation that portends the future of space and time.

“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 Monday (Feb. 18) here 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 one of the LHC’s experiments.

The Higgs boson particle is a manifestation of an energy field pervading the universe called the Higgs field, which is thought to explain why particles have mass. After searching for decades for proof that this field and particle existed, physicists at the LHC announced in July 2012 that they’d discovered a new particle whose properties strongly suggest it is the Higgs boson.

To confirm the particle’s identity for sure, more data are needed. But many scientists say they’re betting it’s the Higgs.

“This discovery to me was personally astounding,” said I. Joseph Kroll, a University of Pennsylvania physicist who also works at the LHC. “To me, the Higgs was sort of, it might be there, it might not. The fact that it’s there is really a tremendous accomplishment.”

And finding the Higgs, if it’s truly been found, not only confirms the theory about how particles get mass, but it allows scientists to make new calculations that weren’t possible before the particle’s properties were known.

For example, the mass of the new particle is about 126 billion electron volts, or about 126 times the mass of the proton. If that particle really is the Higgs, its mass turns out to be just about what’s needed to make the universe fundamentally unstable, in a way that would cause it to end catastrophically in the far future.

That’s because the Higgs field is thought to be everywhere, so it affects the vacuum of empty space-time in the universe.

“The mass of the Higgs is related to how stable the vacuum is,” explained Christopher Hill, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. “It’s right along the critical line. That could either be a cosmic coincidence, or it could be that there’s some physics that’s causing that. That’s something new, which we didn’t know before.”

Strikingly, if the Higgs mass were just a few percent different, the universe wouldn’t be doomed, the scientists said.

But even if the universe is in for an unfortunate end, there is at least one reason for consolation.

“You won’t actually see it, because it will come at you at the speed of light,” Lykken said. “So in that sense don’t worry.”

astrodidact:

(CNN) — A $10 billion machine that smashes particles together is shutting down this weekend, taking a staycation in its 17-mile tunnel near the French-Swiss border while receiving maintenance and upgrades. The Large Hadron Collider, one of the world’s largest science experiments, will resume operations in 2014 or 2015 at unprecedented energies.

Do you care?

Judging from the many comments that we get at CNN.com about what people perceive as a “waste” of money for scientific exploration, you might not. That may be because what happens at the LHC seems far removed from everyday life, and even farther from the study of stars.

“Everybody is, in some sense, an amateur astronomer. We all look up at the stars and wonder how the universe works,” says Joel Primack, professor of physics and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “People are not amateur particle physicists.”

Our window into outer space is visible and dazzling. We can see spaceships and telescopes launch into the sky, and we can see the images they send back.

Inner space, the fundamental building-blocks of everything on a ridiculously small scale, isn’t visible. A lot of our understanding is based on theory and probability. Even the greatest achievement at the LHC isn’t certain; we can only say that a particle was found resembling a theorized entity called the Higgs boson.

But exploring the very small and the very big and distant are both important for understanding the world in which we live, scientists say, and are necessary for completing the same puzzle.

“The basic story is really that understanding particles and interactions helps us understand the evolution and structure of the whole universe, and hopefully will give us technologies that will allow us to explore it more efficiently and solve energy problems and so forth,” said Joe Incandela, spokesperson for the LHC’s Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, a large particle detector.

What the universe is made of

Over the last few decades, scientists have come to the conclusion that the universe’s composition is only about 5% atoms — in other words, the stuff that we see and know around us. That means the rest is stuff we can’t see. About 71% is something called “dark energy,” and another 24% is “dark matter.”

Research is ongoing to figure out precisely what these “dark” components are, because they do not interact with ordinary matter and have never been directly detected.

But the large-scale structure of the universe depends on dark matter. “Without the dark matter, all the stars would fly away,” said Adam Riess, physicist at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Dark energy is thought to be responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe, and Riess’s Nobel-prize winning work supports this theory.

In principle, these phenomena are everywhere — but how can we find them?

What particle physicists are really looking for

All that space in between star clusters is not empty at all. Particle physicists are hoping to get a better understanding of space time, the fabric of the universe.

There are particles hiding behind this fabric that we don’t normally see, but with enough energy you can draw them into existence, Incandela said. Scientists expect several as-yet-unseen particles to be there because they help fill gaps in the Standard Model of particle physics. The LHC uses high-energy particle collisions to try to find them.

Incandela likens this to being in a boat with fish underneath, which are nibbling at the surface. It takes a lot of energy to pull one out. The Higgs boson, being so hard to pin down, would be like a whale, Incandela said.

One pitfall of this analogy is that you can easily identify real fish, but it’s a lot harder to classify particles that slip in and out of existence in less than a second.

The particle that has made headlines recently is the Higgs boson, aka “God particle” — a term a lot of scientists hate. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman wrote a book with “God Particle” in the title, but reportedly said he’d actually wanted to call it the “Goddamn Particle.”

This particle is a component of something called the Higgs field. Brian Greene, theoretical physicist at Columbia University and “NOVA” host, describes it this way:

“You can think of it as a kind of molasses-like bath that’s invisible, but yet we’re all immersed within it,” he said. “And as particles like electrons try to move through the molasses-like bath, they experience a resistance. And that resistance is what we, in our big everyday world, think of as the mass of the electron.”

Without this “substance,” made up of Higgs particles, the electron would have no mass, and we would not be here at all. It’s not a perfect metaphor, though; we don’t feel particularly sticky.

The collision energy at the LHC went up to 8 TeV (trillion electron volts) in 2012, a record for the amount of energy in particle collisions. After downtime of about two years, it will come back online with 13 TeV.

“It really feels like we’re on the verge of a breakthrough.”
Joel Primack, physicist at UCSC

With higher energies, it may be possible to detect the signature of dark matter, learn more precise properties of the particle that looks like the Higgs, find evidence of extra dimensions and perhaps find out whether gravity itself has a particle.

“If you want to understand the big, you have to understand the small,” Primack said.

Dark matter and energy

Primack proposed an idea for dark matter in 1982 that is still a leading contender: The notion that supersymmetry is responsible for dark matter.

That means that for every particle we know, even the Higgs, there is a partner particle with similar interactions but that is more massive. All these partner particles are unstable except for the lightest one, which can’t decay into anything else. Dark matter would be this lightest particle, called a weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP.

There are several underground experiments worldwide that are aiming to detect these dark matter “WIMPs,” such as the LUX Dark Matter experiment in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where liquid xenon is stored a mile underground.

Similar experiments include the Xenon 100 experiment at the Gran Sasso Mountain in central Italy. Scientists will go even deeper at the PandaX experiment at the China Jin-Ping Underground Laboratory, located under 1.5 miles of rock.

The principle behind these experiments is that particles hitting the xenon cause the nucleus of the atom to give off a little bit of light. By examining the resulting charge and light produced in this collision, scientists can determine whether dark matter was involved. At least, in theory — so far, no dark matter has been detected that way.

These experiments are happening at the same time that the LHC is colliding particles, and may find evidence of dark matter that way.

“It really feels like we’re on the verge of a breakthrough,” Primack said.

Meanwhile, in space, scientists are looking for the signatures of dark matter and dark energy. Riess and colleagues used the Hubble Space Telescope to measure supernovae that are very far away, showing that dark energy must be responsible for how the universe appears to expand faster and faster. This won them the Nobel Prize in 2011.

The James Webb Telescope, costing about $8 billion, will succeed Hubble. The planned telescope will have a 21-foot diameter mirror, six times as big as Hubble’s. Among other things, this telescope is also looking for evidence of dark matter and dark energy.

“There’s a huge synergy there, in astronomers trying to find the influence of dark matter by mapping stars and galaxies and large structures in the universe, and particle physicists trying to discover the source of that influence of dark matter through subatomic particles here on Earth,” said Jason Kalirai, deputy project scientist for the telescope at the Space Telescope Science Institute.

What technology may come

The question remains: What is this all good for?

There’s the pure satisfaction of having greater knowledge of the universe in which we live.

“It’s just one of the things that distinguishes humanity, that we can actually answer questions that are deep and fundamental, make predictions and do science, and that it actually works,” said Lisa Randall, professor of physics at Harvard and author of “Knocking on Heaven’s Door.”

Consider also that all the technology you know can be traced to pure research, initially perceived as esoteric. Electric lights — and, indeed all of electricity — came from fundamental research in the 19th century.

Computers and transistors arose from the understanding of quantum mechanics in the 1920s and 1930s, Incandela said.

Certainly, Einstein didn’t know that his relativity theories would become pertinent to your smartphone’s GPS. The atomic clocks on satellites must be corrected because, in accordance to Einstein’s predictions, moving objects in space are on a different “time” relative to an observer on Earth.

“Technology usually lags pure science by a large amount of time, and I would say, probably now there’s a good chance we’re further ahead of technology than ever before,” Incandela said.

Even the World Wide Web arose out of a proposal from Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, who was a physicist at CERN in the 1980s. Essentially, the reason we have the Internet that we all know and love is that Berners-Lee wanted to enable better communication among physicists there.

It’s likely, Primack said, that useful things will also come from the searches for dark matter and dark energy, and for other particles that the LHC is hunting. No one knows what the uses will be yet — but then again, no one predicted that the World Wide Web would arise at a particle physics lab, either. CERN is, in fact, the same laboratory that houses the LHC.

Nothing is certain, of course, it is at least possible that doing this pure science could help bring into reality the sorts of technologies that right now seem like science fiction.

“If we’re really going to explore the universe, in terms of actually moving through the universe and having the ability to do space exploration that’s what you see in the movies, so to speak, the ‘Star Trek’ type things, in principle, we’re going to need to understand and have the ability to harness the potential of nature at a level that we don’t have now,” Incandela said.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/16/tech/innovation/science-exploration/index.html?hpt=hp_c1