I’m not the only person to find it endlessly amusing that Jürgen Habermas, octogenarian theorist of communicative rationality, has taken to Twitter. (The account seems to be legit, but it’s hard to be sure.) This is so over-determined that just last year Lauren Fisher gave a presentation entitled “If Habermas could Twitter.” [...]
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On the day of Obama's first State of the Union address, after a first year in office that saw spectacular squandering of political capital by him and the Democrats, I found in my mailbox the Feb. 1st New Yorker with a brilliant cover that says it all. It is called "First Anniversary", and is by Barry Blitt. Click for larger view:
-cvj
Fermilab has taken a major step toward laying the technical groundwork for Project X by creating a new test beam for superconducting radiofrequency cavities and components.
Earlier this month, the High Intensity Neutrino Source (HINS) collaboration successfully accelerated a proton beam to 2.5 MeV in a radiofrequency quadrupole accelerator, or RFQ, for the first time at [...]
The possibility that dark matter could be made of strongly interacting particles has been ruled out by neutrino observations at the IceCube detector, according to physicists Ivone Albuquerque of Fermilab and Universidade de São Paulo and Carlos Pérez de los Heros of Uppsala University.
The increasing momentum behind the proposed Project X experiment has swept Steve Holmes into a new position at the laboratory and put in motion the search for a new associate director.
Scientists in the PHENIX collaboration at Brookhaven National Laboratory have enlisted the expertise of a group of technicians at Fermilab’s SiDet facility in upgrading their particle detector, originally constructed in 2000.
It’s an exciting time for your humble LHC blogger. She may just have a thesis topic… So what does that mean? (I often times wonder that myself).
With the recent success and in anticipation of high energy collisions (and therefore data), it’s time to figure out what can be found and what can’t given the projected [...]
US researchers recently proved their ability to process and test world-class superconducting radiofrequency, SRF, cavities. In preparing two dressed, high-gradient nine-cell ILC-type cavities for use in the S1-global effort, a prototype at KEK of the International Linear Collider main linac, researchers had to climb multiple technical hurdles.
What is the main thing that a graduate students in particle physics spends most of their time doing?
Here are the most common activities:
A) Working with pen & paper, staring at equations, using computers to help solve/simplify those equations
B) Building/fixing hardware, Running wires, Connecting cables, Soldering connections
C) Writing computer code, Debugging code written by others, Documenting [...]
One of the most amazing characteristics of science is reproducibility, i.e., experimental results can be reproduced by independent tests. So, the first thing to check in any physics experiment is to see if you can reproduce what older, well tested, experiments have found running in similar conditions. CMS did this very quickly last November when [...]
As the 7.0-magnitude earthquake in Haiti on Tuesday shook whole blocks of Port-au-Prince into dust, physicists hundreds of miles away in Illinois knew something terrible was occurring, based on the movements of massive magnets in the Tevatron Collider.
My foray into particle physics began with a summer at the linear accelerator at Stanford in California. It’s the longest accelerator in the world, which makes it easy to find on google maps. (I also must say that during my time there, the weather there was consistently perfect.)
One of the first signs you see when [...]
Work toward the world’s most intense long-distance neutrino beam received key government approval last week, invigorating US and global collaborators.
The Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment passed the first Department of Energy approval stage Friday, Jan. 8, when it received Critical Decision-0. This designation cements the DOE’s support for the need and physics goals of the experiment. [...]
Joe Incandela of the University of California, Santa Barbara has begun his term as one of two deputy spokespeople for CMS at the Large Hadron Collider. “To be deputy spokespersons at this time is a great privilege because we are in front row seats at a historical event. I’m very honored to be in this position,” explains Incandela.
This pas week the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern University hosted the Heilborn Symposium. Our guests were James York, Jacques Laskar and Murray Gell-Mann, and the program focussed on complexity in nature. The Heilborn Series is meant to enhance the intellectual experience of students and faculty, and as part of the [...]
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 [...]
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! [...]
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 [...]