The mechanical technicians in the Tevatron's mechanical support group aren't doctors. But they play some at work, caring for the Tevatron. "You're working long hours and the list of things to do is endless," said Sali Sylejmani, an employee in the mechanical support group. "It is like starting a surgery, you open the system and it needs to be closed up."
Despite lots of empirical evidence to the contrary, I tend to think of proton-proton interactions as the collision of single partons (quarks and/or gluons, one from each incoming proton) giving rise to all sorts of rich phenomena. A recent paper by Berger, Jackson and Shaughnessy reminded me that this way of thinking is too [...]
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Did you realize that Fermilab is one of only seven Department of Energy National Environmental Research Parks in the United States? These parks, or NERPs, began in the early 1970s at outdoor laboratories where research on major US ecosystems could be carried out at a large scale. The first NERP was dedicated at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina in 1972.
Ever thought that a physics class would teach you how to make your own comet with dry ice, water, and just a bit of sand? Or that math could be a gateway to the magic world of computing science behind software applications like Google? For the 250 girls who attended the first European Expanding Your Horizons (EYH) conference last month in Geneva, Switzerland, these and many more exciting workshops were on the menu.
A picture might be worth more than a thousand words if it’s an almost-full-scale representation of ATLAS, the biggest of the LHC detectors. The 46-meter-long, 25-meter-high detector is now sealed in its underground cavern, where not even scientists will be allowed when the LHC is running. But on the surface, viewable by all visitors to ATLAS, travelling artist Josef Kristofoletti is painting an enormous mural that will represent the detector almost in 3D.
A longstanding relationship between Armenia's Yerevan Physics Institute and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is still bearing fruit. It started more than 40 years ago with the labs' founding directors.
Women and men from all over the world converged on Jefferson Lab November 16 for the Women in Science and Engineering Workshop. Attendees from a broad array of careers participated, from physicists and engineers to computer scientists and administrators. In all, more than 120 people came together to talk about the challenges faced by women in the science and engineering disciplines.
The ALICE Collaboration published the very first physics paper on collisions at the LHC. You can see the paper on the archive (arXiv:0911.5430), and soon in the European Physics Journal.
I love to read papers reporting good, basic measurements that I don’t really understand – they give me the opportunity to go learn something new! [...]
From data preservation to recycling old physics machines, the adventures of a breakthrough space telescope, Nerdcore rap, physics opera, astronomical toilet paper, and more.
Fermilab created a season's greetings card using particle physics flair and a US milestone. Send the card to your fellow fans of physics.
Today the second public status report on the LHC was held. The presentations from the various experiments are on this public web page, and a recording of the session will be available from the CERN Document Server.
The LHC has delivered a useful data sample for pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 900 GeV [...]
In the analysis of new data, scientists from the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment have detected two events that have characteristics consistent with the particles that physicists believe make up dark matter. However, there is a chance that both events could be the signatures of background particles–other particles with interactions that mimic the signals of dark matter candidates.
CERN is closing and turning off the heat for two weeks starting this Saturday. This is the typical annual closing – mostly done to save money. In France/Switzerland, electricity costs about three times as much in winter months compared to other months. Also, from what I hear, labor laws here might also make it hard [...]
Hi everyone. With lots of exciting successes with the LHC startup, I thought it would be good to teach everyone a bit about Feynman diagrams. These are the funny squiggly lines that one will often see on particle physicists’ chalkboards (or whiteboards if they do experimental physics…) that describe what’s going on when particles interact. [...]
I’ve been reading a lot of the comments to the blogs and realized that it’s a little unclear what physicists mean when we say we’ll find the Higgs. All the bloggers have posted pretty event display plots which are a visual representation of what we get in the detector. You can see lines of tracks [...]
These past few weeks have gone by in a blur. The LHC provided us with the first collisions, then it became the highest energy accelerator, and for a few minutes last night, the LHC became highest energy collider.
Crazy.
It’s been busier than usual at CERN, with people in a rush to examine the first collision data [...]
I have been in the ATLAS control room on shift each of the last three weeks. Each shift was more boring than the last. The first collisions were on a Monday. I had shift that Tuesday. Tonight we actually had a first while I was here. We just had the “first time with two beams [...]
Hi, Seth here. Amidst the fun of moving and looking for apartments, I’ve also been working more than full time looking at our first collisions and preparing for more. In this entry, I’d like to share with you the very first plot I tried to make from actual collision data.
Before I continue, though, [...]
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment on the French-Swiss border has set a new world record for
El proceso de puesta en marcha del Gran Colisionador de Hadrones o LHC, una vez superada la grave av
1TeV beam @ the LHC, officially the highest energy beam in the world. 1TeV beam @ LHC
: skip to main skip to sidebar The Science of Conundrums THE IMPACT OF MEGASCIENCE Saturday , November 28, 2009 Colliders Are Forever M's OFFICE LONDON What do you know about CIRC in Geneva , Commander Bond Not much sir . Centre International pour la Récherche Circulaire . About says it all . They've built the world's largest Dyson Ball Vac according to CIRC PR , but physicists are a canny bunch . Half the time they don't know what they're talking about . It might look like a giant Dyson Ball Vac but it might not work like . one Good . That confirms our intelligence . Might not be a Vac at all . Find out for us in case it's anti-British . This is the beast , a hundred meters underground . unrolling a giant schematic 27 km around . A great deal of . suction 10 Billion to date , . sir Not a total waste we're finding . Picking up dust as far as London . But where are they going to put it all eventually when they shut it down for cleaning Not our problem fortunately . Touch and go on other fronts . Accidents , some new theories on what might happen at the Doomsday Machine . But they say they've got more baffling concerns . Seems they've found a physicist in the blower , but he's not
Geneva, 20 November 2009. Particle beams are once again circulating in the worlds most powerful part
A first public seminar at CERN – standing room only – was held today (Thanksgiving Day, 26-Nov-2009). The slides from the talks are available here: INDICO web page.
Steve Myers (CERN) kicked off the meeting with a pithy contrast of photos of a severely damaged set of magnets with a beautiful machine monitor trace showing [...]
Inside CMS, people are busy learning what they can from the handful of collision events recorded yesterday. Our magnet was not on at the time because it would have interfered with the beams, at this early stage, so we cannot understand anything about charged track momenta. But those straight-line tracks still provide a [...]
Well, a very gentle sort of wham. Yesterday the Large Hadron Collider at CERN had its first collisions of protons! It is a warm start, making sure everything is working before ramping up the energies to regimes where we hope to see new physics, but it is a very exciting milestone nonetheless*. Recall that a few days back they hit the landmark of getting the machine to circulate beams again for the first time. (If you've forgotten what all of this is for, please search the blog for "LHC" and/or look in the related posts list at the bottom of this one.) Above right is a visual reconstruction of some of the collision data seen at the ALICE detector, and you can see more of this sort of data at CERN's website (from where I got this graphic).
From the press release: [...]
CMS and the other LHC experiments have seen the first LHC collisions ever!
You can clearly see a slew of green tracks coming from the interaction point. They are all straight because the magnetic field is off today. (It will be turned on later – remember that the experimental solenoids affect the beam [...]
If you want to turn on a light, or start your car, you rarely pause to think about possible damage that might result. But when beam is coursing through the CMS muon end caps, we think about it very carefully. In fact, we discuss in all seriousness when to turn on the [...]
Yesterday we enjoyed our second set of beam splash events, generated with beam one in contrast to earlier splash events generated with beam two.
Today we are thrilled to see beautiful beam halo events in CMS, like this one:
You can clearly see a trajectory (in red) extending across the CMS detector based on short track segments [...]
Hooray! The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe has switched back on after being offline for a y
Excitement returns to CMS this month, as the LHC begins to circulate beam. There are many good sources of information, for example, the online commentary by Darin Acosta, among others.
My team from Northwestern University is busy providing prompt feedback on the response of the cathode strip chambers (CSCs) from the CMS experiment. On [...]