CERN

[HenryTo]

Scientists use Large Hadron Collider to create the world's first mini Big Bang:

http://www.news.com.au/technology/scientists-use-large-hadron-collider-to-create-the-worlds-first-mini-big-bang/story-e6frfro0-1225950191319

[HenryTo]

CERN restarts, and hits a new milestone.

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=24406

[rffrydr]

...And Hawking will loose his bet.
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Today is the Tomorrow you worried about Yesterday!

[HenryTo]

More evidence of the existence of the Higgs Boson. Believes it could be definitive by the end of this year.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57392219-76/higgs-boson-you-can-run-but-you-cant-hide/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

[HenryTo]

Quick explanation of the Higgs Boson and its "applications."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/04/higgs-boson-questions_n_1184594.html

[HenryTo]

Whether the Higgs Boson and Higgs Field exist will be known by next year.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16116230

[HenryTo]

Faster-than-light neutrinos experiment redone and upheld.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/11/neutrinos-screw-einstein/

[HenryTo]

I would get a new Android phone just so I can use this app:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2047336/The-Higgs-boson-Theres-app--scientists-phone-users-direct-3D-feed-events-inside-LHC.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

[rffrydr]

Is this another example of europe shaking our faith? --Or, the beginning of a new faith in Europe?
_________________
Today is the Tomorrow you worried about Yesterday!

[HenryTo]

The speed of light may not be the absolute speed limit of the universe anymore.
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Strange Particles May Travel Faster than Light, Breaking Laws of Physics

Nothing goes faster than the speed of light. At least, we didn't think so.
New results from the CERN laboratory in Switzerland seem to break this cardinal rule of physics, calling into question one of the most trusted laws discovered by Albert Einstein.

Physicists have found that tiny particles called neutrinos are making a 454-mile (730-kilometer) underground trip faster than they should — more quickly, in fact, than light could do. If the results are confirmed, they could throw much of modern physics into upheaval.

"The consequences would be absolutely revolutionary and very profound," said physicist Robert Plunkett of the Fermilab laboratory in Batavia, Ill., who was not involved in the new study. "That's why such a claim should be treated very carefully and validated as many ways as you can."

Rewriting the rules

The results come from the OPERA experiment, which sends sprays of neutrinos from CERN in Geneva to the INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy. Neutrinos don't interact with normal atoms, so they simply pass through the Earth as if it were a vacuum.

After analyzing the results from 15,000 particles, it seems the neutrinos are crossing the distance at a velocity 20 parts per million faster than the speed of light. By making use of advanced GPS systems and atomic clocks, the researchers were able to determine this speed to an accuracy of less than 10 nanoseconds (.00000001 seconds).

"According to relativity, it takes an infinite amount of energy to make anything go faster than light," Plunkett told LiveScience. "If these things are going faster than light, then these rules would have to be rewritten."
Previous studies have found that certain materials can travel faster than light through a medium. For example, certain particles are able to move more swiftly than light when travelling through water or oil. However, nothing should be able to move faster than light through a vacuum.

"It's really thought to be an absolute speed limit," said Michael Peskin, a theoretical physicist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif. "Quantum field theory, the mathematical theory on which basically all results in particle physics are based, has the property that signals cannot travel faster than the speed of light through a vacuum. It’s really an absolute prohibition."

Backbone of physics

This cosmic speed limit, 299,792,458 meters per second (about 700 million miles an hour), forms the backbone of Einstein's seminal Theory of Special Relativity, published in 1905. To rewrite this law would have broad-ranging implications, including even the possibility of time travel.

And the findings aren't just in conflict with existing theory, but other measurements as well. For example, a famous study from the Kamiokande II experiment in Japan of the supernova SN1987A, which lies about 168,000 light years from Earthin the Large Magellanic Cloud, found that light and neutrinos that departed this exploded star arrived at Earth within hours of each other. This measurement was used to prove that neutrinos travel within 1 part in 100,000,000 of the optical speed of light.

Yet the new OPERA discovery suggests that neutrinos actually surpass the speed of light by 60 nanoseconds over 730 kilometers, which corresponds to 2 parts in 100,000, "which exceeds the SN1987A limit by a factor of more than 2,000!" astronomer Derek Fox of Pennsylvania State University wrote in an email. "So the observation is in dramatic conflict with the SN1987A result (which is not in doubt)."

But this doesn't mean that the OPERA results are wrong, Fox said. He suggested some theoretical solution, perhaps even involving string theory, could reconcile the two measurements.

Inviting skepticism

Realizing full well how scandalous the results will be if they are borne out, the scientists behind OPERA, led by Antonio Ereditato of the University of Bern, have decided to make their data public, in hopes of inviting scrutiny that could make sense of such radical findings. The scientists also intend to gather more data and further analyze their measurements in order to establish them more fully, or refute them. Their results will be published Friday (Sept. 23) on the physics preprint site ArXiv.

One of the best hopes to verify or disprove the findings comes from Fermilab's MINOS experiment, which also sends neutrinos flying underground over a similar distance to end up at the Soudan mine in Minnesota. In 2007, MINOS researchers found a trend in their data that suggested neutrinos might be arriving early, as they do in the new CERN data. However, the experiment at the time did not have enough precision to rule out the possibility that the results were a statistical fluke.

"There was something that could have been a fluctuation in the direction of things arriving early, but it didn't have enough significance for us to make such a claim," said Plunkett, who is a co-spokesperson for MINOS.

"Obviously, the hunt is on and we'll be upgrading that previous measurement and also implementing something we already had in the works, which is a plan to make improvements so we can reduce our errors. One of our next objectives is going to be trying to verify or disprove this result as hard as we can."

CERN plans to discuss the findings Friday during a public seminar that will be broadcast at http://webcast.cern.ch.

[HenryTo]

The search for the Higgs Boson goes mainstream:

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/197005/20110812/cern-large-hadron-collider-god-particle-higgs-boson-volunteer-lhc-home-proton-collison-grid-cloud-co.htm

[HenryTo]

CERN director goes on record stating that the existence of the Higgs Boson would be settled by the end of 2012:

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2011/0726/God-particle-the-Higgs-boson-could-be-found-in-2012

[HenryTo]

FYI

Ephemeral Antimatter Trapped for Amazingly Long 16 Minutes

Antimatter, an elusive type of matter that's rare in the universe, has now been trapped for more than 16 minutes — an eternity in particle physics.

In fact, scientists who've been trapping antihydrogen atoms at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva say isolating the exotic particles has become so routine that they expect to soon begin experiments on this rare substance.

Antimatter is like a mirror image of matter. For every matter particle (a hydrogen atom, for example), a matching antimatter particle is thought to exist (in this case, an antihydrogen atom) with the same mass, but the opposite charge.

"We've trapped antihydrogen atoms for as long as 1,000 seconds, which is forever" in the world of high-energy particle physics, said Joel Fajans, a University of California, Berkeley professor of physics who is a faculty scientist at California's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a member of the ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus) experiment at CERN.

Trapping antimatter is difficult, because when it comes into contact with matter, the two annihilate each other. So a container for antimatter can't be made of regular matter, but is usually formed with magnetic fields.

In the ALPHA project, the researchers captured antihydrogen by mixing antiprotons with positrons — antielectrons — in a vacuum chamber, where they combine into antihydrogen atoms.

The whole process occurred within a magnetic "bottle" that takes advantage of the magnetic properties of the antiatoms to keep them contained. An actual bottle, made of ordinary matter, would not be able to hold antimatter because when the two types of matter meet they annihilate.

After the researchers had trapped antimatter in the magnetic bottle, they could then detect the trapped antiatoms by turning off the magnetic field and allowing the particles to annihiliate with normal matter, which creates a flash of light.

The team has now managed to capture 112 antiatoms in this new trap for times ranging from one-fifth of a second to 1,000 seconds, or 16 minutes and 40 seconds. (To date, since the beginning of the project, Fajans and his colleagues have trapped 309 antihydrogen atoms in various traps.)

And the researchers plan to improve on that, with the "hope that by 2012 we will have a new trap with laser access to allow spectroscopic experiments on the antiatoms," Fajans said in a statement. Those experiments would give researchers more information on the antimatter's properties.

In that way, it could help to answer a question that has long plagued physicists: Why is there only ordinary matter in our universe? Scientists think antimatter and matter should have been produced in equal amounts during the Big Bang that created the universe 13.6 billion years ago.

Today, however, there is no evidence of antimatter galaxies or clouds, and antimatter is seen rarely and for only short periods, for example, during some types of radioactive decay before it annihilates in a collision with normal matter.

The researchers detail their work on the antimatter trap in a new paper published online June 5 in the journal Nature Physics.

[HenryTo]

CERN ready to tackle the Higgs again in 2011:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/audio/2010/dec/27/science-weekly-podcast-christmas-cern-large-hadron-collider

[HenryTo]

Provides more evidence that String Theory is THE unifying theory (by process of elimination), as opposed to the theory that the universe is made up of microscopic black holes:

http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-large-hadron-collider-signatures-microscopic.html

[HenryTo]

CERN Physicists Create Antimatter:

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/CERN-Physicists-Create-Antimatter-and-Could-Build-a-Bomb-in-a-Billion-Years-71269.html?wlc=1290143968&wlc=1290246496