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Tag archives: LHC
Hope for ‘new physics’ as Large Hadron Collider begins 13 TeV run
Celebration at CERN: physicists in the LHC control room applaud the first stable collisions. (Courtesy: M Brice/CERN)
By Hamish Johnston
Earlier today the first data of the 13 TeV run of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN were collected by all four of the Geneva-based collider’s main experiments. I was up early this morning (8.00 a.m. Geneva time) and followed all the action live via a webcast from CERN. After losing the beams at about 8.40 a.m. because of a faulty beam monitor, collisions in the CMS, ALICE, ATLAS and LHCb experiments were being reported at 10.40 a.m.
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Physics at 13 TeV should begin today at the Large Hadron Collider
In the fishbowl: the world is watching as the LHC begins its 13 TeV run. (Courtesy: CERN)
By Hamish Johnston
Earlier this morning physicists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider began their scientific programme at 13 TeV. Unfortunately, they lost the beam after about 30 minutes and it will probably be another hour or so before things are up and running again.
You can follow all the excitement via a live webcast.
Good luck to all at the LHC and fingers crossed for finding evidence for physics beyond the Standard Model.
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All hail the Standard Model, once again
By Hamish Johnston
I am a condensed-matter physicist by training and sometimes I struggle to get excited by the latest breakthrough in particle physics – usually because most don’t seem much like breakthroughs to me. The latest hot paper from physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is a perfect example of what I am talking about.
Writing in Nature this week, physicists working on the CMS and LHCb experiments at CERN announced the discovery of a rare decay of the strange B-meson, as well as further information regarding an even rarer decay of the B0-meson. In both cases the decays produce two oppositely charged muons. An animation of how the strange B-meson decay is detected by the CMS appears in the video above.
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Protons return to the Large Hadron Collider
Up and running: The first proton beams have been injected into the LHC in preparation for its second run. (Courtesy: Maximilien Brice/CERN)
By Hamish Johnston
The first proton beams of the second run of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) were circulated earlier today. Travelling in opposite directions around the collider at CERN in Geneva, each beam was injected at 450 GeV. If all goes well over the next few days, the energy of each beam will be increased to the operating energy of 6.5 TeV.
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Isaac Newton’s Good Friday, art meets physics and our favourite April Fool gags
Suiting up for the Moon – an artwork aptly titled “Mooooonwalk”. (Courtesy: APOD/ Robert Nemiroff/Michigan Technological University)
By Hamish Johnston and Tushna Commissariat
As it’s Good Friday today, it can only mean that this week’s Red Folder will include a selection of the best physics-related April Fool jokes from earlier this week. Fermilab’s daily e-bulletin Fermilab Today had an entire joke edition up in the morning – their lead story was probably our favourite as the lab announced its new breakfast cereal dubbed “Neutrin-Os”, but their new day spa sounds pretty good too. CERN went for the funny if slightly obvious Star Wars joke, confirming the existence of the Force, but a slightly more subtle joke came earlier in the week from CERN Bulletin, which ran a story about CERN’s computer-security department handing out prizes for best password – we are still not quite sure if they were joking or not! Astronomy Picture of the Day had a truly fantastic image (see above) of a Lunar Grazing Module described as a “multipurpose celestial bovine containment system”.
Electrical fault delays LHC start-up
Back down the tunnel: technicians will soon be repairing an electrical fault somewhere along the LHC. (Courtesy: CERN/Maximilien Brice)
By Hamish Johnston
Today I was planning to write a cheerful blog celebrating the first circulating proton beams in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), but sadly the particle gods are not smiling down on CERN this week. Accelerator physicists in Geneva have identified an electrical fault in one of the collider’s magnet circuits and plans to restart the giant machine this week have been put on hold – possibly for several weeks.
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Last views of a huge particle detector before the Large Hadron Collider comes to life
My photo opportunity: this could be the last we will see of the CMS for three years.
By Tushna Commissariat at CERN
Regular readers of Physics World will know that I am currently visiting the CERN particle physics lab in Geneva, ahead of the restart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the coming weeks. My first stop yesterday afternoon was a press conference in which CERN’s director-general Rolf Heuer and other leading physicists briefed us about “Run 2” and what researchers are hoping to discover. You can read about what they had to say here: “Large Hadron Collider fires up in a bid to overturn the Standard Model“.
I managed to squeeze in a quick last-minute visit to the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector before it is sealed up tight for the next three years. My host was CMS communications officer Achintya Rao, who took me and a few others deep underground into the bowels of the CMS – and what a sight it was!
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The LEGO Large Hadron Collider
LEGO Large Hadron Collider.
By Michael Banks
Avid readers of this blog may remember the 560-piece LEGO model of CERN’s ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which was built by particle physicist Sascha Mehlhase of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.
Not to be outdone, LEGO fan Jason Allemann then created a LEGO-inspired particle accelerator – dubbed the LEGO Brick Collider – that was submitted to the LEGO Ideas site, which lets fans share blueprints of their own models.
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The physics of pop music, a stroll around the LHC, 3D illuminations in Bath and more
Pop physics: some of the subgenres used in a study of pop music. (Courtesy: Gamaliel Percino, Peter Klimek and Stefan Thurner/PLOS ONE 10.1371/journal.pone.0115255)
By Hamish Johnston
The take-home message from this week’s Red Folder is that “Scientists just discovered why all pop music sounds exactly the same”, at least according to an article on Music.Mic. The report describes a paper published in PLOS ONE by Stefan Thurner – a physicist at the Santa Fe Institute – and colleagues at the Medical University of Vienna.
The researchers used the online music database Discogs to sort the material on 500,000 albums into 15 musical genres and 374 subgenres. You can see examples of some of the subgenres in the above image. They discovered that as a genre of music becomes more popular, it becomes less complex as all its constituent artists and songs start sounding the same. Music.Mic’s Tom Barnes explains in his article how this ties in with various trends in the music industry, where he says “uniformity sells”.
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Become a CERN physicist in your bedroom
By James Dacey
Particle collision within the ATLAS detector. (Courtesy: CERN/Higgs Hunters)
Who discovered the Higgs boson? Was it Peter Higgs and a combination of other great minds? The experimentalists at CERN who analysed reams of data? The magnificent machinery of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) itself? By the time that the next great breakthrough in particle physics comes along, the debate about who makes the discovery could become even more complex. That’s because a new citizen-science project is encouraging anyone with an Internet connection to search for new curiosities in the Higgs data.
“Higgs Hunters” launched this week and invites the public to sift through collision images from the LHC’s ATLAS detector. The task at hand is to look for the paths of charged particles that seem to appear out of thin air in what are known as off-centre vertices. As explained on the Higgs Hunters website, “some scientists think the Higgs could break apart into exotic particles entirely new to science”. On the Higgs Hunters website, citizen scientists help to count the number of particle tracks and can notify the science team if they spot anything out of the ordinary.
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