Tag Archives: Large Hadron Collider

A Cyclotron’s Long Journey Home

By Guest PostMarch 2, 2013Scienceamerican science, atom smashers, atomic energy commission, aundra richards, berkeley hills, berkeley lab, brass cyclotron, circular particle accelerator, cyclotrons, david shirley, diameter, electron volts, ernest o lawrence, hall of science, hydrogen atoms, invention, kinetic energy, lab history, Large Hadron Collider, light, london science museum, merry go round, modern particle physics, natalie roe, nobel prize, nuclei, pamela patterson, paul alivisatos, protons, secret, Smithsonian, speed, the royal society, uk museum, university of california, Washington, yale university

One of the world’s first working circular particle accelerators returns to Berkeley Lab—75 years later.

Seventy-five years after one of the world’s first working cyclotrons was handed to the London Science Museum, it has returned to its birthplace in the Berkeley hills, where the man who invented it, Ernest O. Lawrence, helped launch the field of modern particle physics as well as the national laboratory that would bear his name, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

On Jan. 9, 1932 the brass cyclotron—which measures 26 inches from end to end and whose accelerating chamber measures just 11 inches in diameter—was successfully used to boost protons to energies of 1.22 million electron volts. Its return to Berkeley Lab caps a decades-long saga in which various parties endeavored to secure the cyclotron’s return from London, but the persistence of Pamela Patterson, who chronicles Berkeley Lab’s history as managing editor of its website, finally paid off. (more…)

Higgs Boson Discussion Launches UChicago Discovery Series

By Guest PostFebruary 20, 2013Education, Science17 miles, accelerator, aircraft, argonne physicist, atlas, calibrate, cern physics laboratory, circumference, critical mass, david logan center, detector, donald levy, elementary particles, fermi, gigantic machines, higgs boson, high energy physics, internet, Large Hadron Collider, lch, lightening arresters, louis block professor, marcela carena, mark oreglia, mass, national accelerator laboratory, particle, particle beams, patricia mcbride, physics, protocol for communicating, sterilize milk cartons, switzerland, theoretical physicists, time, tom lecompte, toroidal lhc apparatus, uchicago discovery series, universe, university of chicago, virtual audience, young kee kim

The long-sought Higgs boson—the particle that endows all elementary particles in the universe with mass—was elusive no longer when scientists at the CERN physics laboratory in Switzerland, discovered it last summer.

The July 4, 2012 announcement of the discovery appealed to both the general public and the media: Fifty-five media organizations and more than one billion television viewers made it an event that couldn’t be missed. Time even dubbed the Higgs boson “Particle of the Year.” (more…)

Greg Landsberg: Seeking the Higgs boson

By Guest PostJune 29, 2012Scienceamerican group, brown, CERN, cms, compact muon solenoid, data, david cutts, david orenstein, electromagnetic interaction, electroweak force, electroweak symmetry breaking, fermilab, gerald guralnik, greg landsberg, higgs, higgs boson, higgs field, higgs mechanism, higgs signal, high precision, lack of sleep, Large Hadron Collider, meenakshi narain, megapixel camera, particle, phenomenon, photon, professor of physics, skype, standard model, statistical significance, switzerland, ultich heintz, universe, z bosons

Greg Landsberg, professor of physics at Brown, is the physics coordinator for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) at CERN in Switzerland, part of a Brown team that includes professors David Cutts, Ultich Heintz, and Meenakshi Narain. The giant instrument’s primary mission is finding the Higgs boson, a particle whose existence would confirm the best guess physicists have made about why things have mass.

On July 4, Landsberg and his colleagues will reveal the latest results of their search. Anything could happen when Greg Landsberg and, including an announcement that the Higgs has been found or that it has been ruled out, sending theorists back to the whiteboard. Landsberg spoke by Skype with science news officer David Orenstein on June 26 as CERN physicists were preparing for their press conference. (more…)

What’s Happening with the Higgs Boson

By Guest PostJune 28, 2012Scienceantibottom quark, atlas, beate heinemann, CERN, cms, dark matter, data reduction, electron volts, electrons, extra dimension, fermions, gamma rays, geneva, higgs, higgs boson, higgs field, ian hinchliffe, inner detector, Large Hadron Collider, lhc, miniature black holes, murdock gil gilchriese, nuclear research, particles of matter, photon channel, photons, prediction, quarks, Space, specific masses, standard model, supersymmetry, switzerland, tau particles, w bosons

Berkeley Lab scientists, major contributors to the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, explain what the excitement is about

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, will hold a seminar early in the morning on July 4 to announce the latest results from ATLAS and CMS, two major experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that are searching for the Higgs boson. Both experimental teams are working down to the wire to finish analyzing their data, and to determine exactly what can be said about what they’ve found.

“We do not yet know what will be shown on July 4th,” says Ian Hinchliffe, a theoretical physicist in the Physics Division at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), who heads the Lab’s participation in the ATLAS experiment. “I have seen many conjectures on the blogs about what will be shown: these are idle speculation. Things are moving very fast this week, and it’s an exciting time at CERN. Many years of hard work are coming to fruition.” (more…)

Homing in on Higgs: Michigan Researchers Predict Summer Discovery

By Guest PostJune 4, 2012Scienceaaron armbruster, algorithms, atlas, atoms, bing zhou, CERN, Chicago, electromagnetic radiation, electrons, fermilab, forces, function, geneva, gordon kane, higgs, higgs boson, higgs field particles, homer neal, jianming qian, junjie zhu, Large Hadron Collider, laws, laws of nature, lhc, missing piece, Nature, neutrons, newton, particle physics, physics theory, protons, quarks, rudolf thun, standard model, stephen hawking, summer, switzerland, tevatron particle accelerator, university of michigan, vacuum like state

ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Whether the Higgs boson exists could be settled by the end of summer, say University of Michigan physicists involved in the search for the missing piece of particle physics’ Standard Model.

“We’re zooming in,” said Jianming Qian, physics professor in the College of Literature, Science & the Arts. “We are increasing the data set and improving our search algorithms. With certain luck, we may be able to discover it this summer, but it depends on nature.”

Qian is one of the 28 U-M researchers involved in experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland. He’ll spend most of his time through August in Geneva, where more than 1,000 scientists from around the world have been looking for Higgs since the collider turned on about four years ago. (more…)

When Matter Melts

By Guest PostJune 27, 2011Scienceantiproton collisions, balance of matter and antimatter, bedangadas mohanty, berkeley lab, CERN, color force, critical point, distribution of ordinary matter, elemental constituents of matter, geneva, gluons, hadronic matter, hans georg ritter, heavy ions, India, kolkata, Large Hadron Collider, lattice theory, massive gold nuclei, neutrons, nu xu, phase diagrams, protons, qcd, quantum chromodynamics, quark gluon plasma, relativistic heavy ion collider, rhic, sourendu gupta, tata institute of fundamental research, universe, variable energy cyclotron centre, xiaofeng luo

*By comparing theory with data from STAR, Berkeley Lab scientists and their colleagues map phase changes in the quark-gluon plasma*

In its infancy, when the universe was a few millionths of a second old, the elemental constituents of matter moved freely in a hot, dense soup of quarks and gluons. As the universe expanded, this quark–gluon plasma quickly cooled, and protons and neutrons and other forms of normal matter “froze out”: the quarks became bound together by the exchange of gluons, the carriers of the color force.

“The theory that describes the color force is called quantum chromodynamics, or QCD,” says Nu Xu of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), the spokesperson for the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. “QCD has been extremely successful at explaining interactions of quarks and gluons at short distances, such as high-energy proton and antiproton collisions at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. But in bulk collections of matter – including the quark-gluon plasma – at longer distances or smaller momentum transfer, an approach called lattice gauge theory has to be used.” (more…)

IBM Honors the 25th Anniversary of High-Temperature Superconductivity

By Guest PostApril 18, 2011Technologyalex muller, CERN, dutch physicist, electrotechnology, georg bednorz, heike kamerlingh onnes, ibm scientists, Large Hadron Collider, magnetic resonance imaging scanners, meissner effect, microelectronics, mri, nobel prize, oxide material, physics, superconductivity, superconductor

*IBM scientists, J. Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Muller, discovered the first successful high-temperature superconductor using a breakthrough ceramic material*

ZURICH – 18 Apr 2011: Twenty-five years ago IBM scientists, J. Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Muller altered the landscape of physics when they observed superconductivity in an oxide material at a temperature 50 percent higher(1), (-238 deg C, -397 deg F) than what was previously known. This discovery opened an entirely new chapter in the field of physics and earned them the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1987.

Their now seminal paper titled, “Possible High Tc Superconductivity in the Ba – La – Cu – O System”(2) was received by the peer-reviewed journal Zeitschrift fur Physik B on 17 April 1986. (more…)

Go Ask ALICE: Learning About the Big Bang

By Guest PostDecember 15, 20101 commentSciencea lead ion collider experiment, alice, bang, big, big bang, CERN, european organization for nuclear research, galaxies, geneva, john harris, Large Hadron Collider, lhc, particle accelerator, particles, planets, soup, stars, switzerland, universe, yale

Nearly 14 billion years ago, the universe began with a bang — a big one.

Scientists believe that the universe and everything within it began as an extremely hot, dense “soup” that eventually gave rise to galaxies, stars, planets and life and that continues to expand to this day.

Now scientists around the world are pushing back the frontiers of our understanding about the moment the universe was born using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a giant particle accelerator at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) near Geneva, Switzerland. (more…)