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Tag archives: Higgs boson
Lectures with Peter Higgs, award-winning photographs, multidimentional shapes and more
By Tushna Commissariat
Each week, all of us here at Physics World comb the Internet for all things physics – we look at national and local newspapers, university news outlets, a variety of magazines, science websites and blogs, and, of course, all the latest scientific papers. We then pool our research and pick the cream of our crop to report on. But we can’t always cover all the interesting bits of physics news that we have chanced upon and a lot of good stuff is left behind in a red folder. So, starting from today, at the end of each week we’ve decided to point all of you, our eager readers, to the stories that have caught our fancy but not made it to the site yet and leave you with some extra weekend reading from The Red Folder.
Explaining CERN, the Higgs and the LHC
By Matin Durrani
How well would you do if someone asked you to explain the Higgs boson or the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN?
If you’re a physicist, you’ll probably find it hard enough. But if you’ve never done any physics in your life, things must surely be trickier still, more so if a film crew from Physics World has shoved a camera up your nose.
These two short videos show the results of a straw poll of randomly selected visitors at last summer’s Bristol International Balloon Fiesta when we asked them to describe the Higgs boson and the LHC.
The reason we were at the fiesta is that we were making a separate film about a project by Bristol University physicist Dave Cussans where school students were measuring cosmic rays during a hot-air balloon flight – it being the centenary of Victor Hess’s discovery of these rays in a balloon flight in central Europe.
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New portrait of Peter Higgs unveiled
(Photo courtesy: Antonia Reeve)
By Tushna Commissariat
The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) has just unveiled a portrait of famed physicist Peter Higgs, at the Society’s Fellows’ Summer Reception last week. The painting, which will hang on the walls of the Kelvin Room within the RSE’s premises in Edinburgh, was commissioned to one of Scotland’s leading artists, Victoria Crowe, “to honour the man whose outstanding research was instrumental in [the Higgs boson’s] discovery”. The professor seems distinctly unperturbed by the high-energy proton–proton collision taking place in the top right corner of the painting. I shall leave you to find and discern the other interesting imagery in the painting for yourselves – click on the thumbnail to view a larger picture of the portrait.
CMS in all its glory
Admiring CMS.
By Hamish Johnston at CERN
Today I had the immense good fortune of seeing the insides of the CMS detector at CERN.
The huge detector was pulled open and I could see all the various layers that are used to track the vast numbers of particles that are produced when protons collide at the Large Hadron Collider.
Unlike earlier photos of the detector that were taken when it was being built, the beamline is still intact as it passes through the CMS – a plain black conduit suspended many metres above the floor. You can see the beamline poking out from the centre of the detector in the photo on the right.
Imperial College’s Jim Virdee was our tour guide, and he told us how several military technologies from the former Soviet Union have been put to good use in the detector. These include brass shell casings that were melted down to make components for the detector.
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Spot-on the Standard Model
By Hamish Johnston
“Beyond any reasonable doubt, it is a Higgs boson, and here we examine the extent to which its couplings resemble those of the single Higgs boson of the Standard Model.”
That’s taken from the abstract of a new paper by John Ellis and Tevong You of King’s College London. Ellis, of course, has been associated with CERN for decades and if he says it’s a Higgs that’s good enough for me!
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It’s official, it’s a Higgs
By Hamish Johnston
It seems like only yesterday that the particle-physics blogosphere was on fire with rumours, speculation and even a bit of real information about the hunt for Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
How things have changed since a Higgs-like particle was identified in July last year. Since then, further analysis has revealed that the particle is even more Higgs-like – and today CERN has officially said that the particle is “a Higgs boson”.
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What exactly will be upgraded at the LHC?
Lots of work to be done on the LHC (Courtesy: CERN)
By Hamish Johnston
It’s been quite a rollercoaster ride for physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. When the collider was first switched on in 2008 it suffered a major explosion when a superconducting connector failed – and was shut down for over a year for repairs. Then in 2010 the LHC began taking data and the excitement about the imminent discovery of the Higgs boson grew and grew – and then on 4 July last year, CERN physicists announced the discovery of a Higgs-like particle.
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Hunting the Higgs
By Michael Banks in Boston
“It looks like a Standard Model Higgs,” remarks Christopher Hill from Ohio State University. “Everything we have measured has strengthened that position.”
Last year, researchers working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN reported they had found a Higgs-like particle with an energy of around 126 GeV.
Yet while the Higgs looks like that predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics, further measurements were needed before researchers could be sure.
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Billy Bragg knows nothing
By Matin Durrani
When I was a PhD student at Cambridge in the early 1990s, I remember going to a concert by singer-songwriter Billy Bragg at the Cambridge Corn Exchange. Riding high at the time on a string of classic songs such as “She’s Got a New Spell”, “Shirley” and “Great Leap Forward”, Bragg had an ear for a great tune and was a great lyricist to boot – who can forget the classic line “How can you lie there and think of England if you don’t even know who’s in the team?”.
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Quantum landscaping
Artist’s impression of a map of the Quantum Universe (Graphic courtesy of “ILC — form one visual communication”)
By Tushna Commissariat
Here’s a bit of Friday physics fun… I came across this rather interesting image that shows an artist’s impression of a map entitled “The Quantum Universe”. It includes six landmasses all floating in the Big Bang Ocean; including Dark Matter Landmass, Sypersymmetry Reef, Higgs Island and the Land of Ultimate Unification as well as others.
So go ahead and tell us which island you would like to settle down on. Be sure to look carefully at gems like Newton’s Lawn and Mount Einstein before you make your mind up!
To see a larger hi-res image follow this link.
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