News
February 17, 2009
Fermilab Might Find Higgs Boson
Poster: Aron Schatz
Posted on February 17, 2009 at 10:25:37 AM
The elusive theoretical particle may be the prize of America's Fermilab instead of European's CERN. A good old-fashioned race is on to find the particle. Or not, if it doesn't exist.
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The particle, whose existence has been predicted by theoreticians, would help to explain why matter has mass. Finding the Higgs is a major goal of Cern's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). But the US Fermilab says the odds of its Tevatron accelerator detecting the famed particle first are now 50-50 at worst, and up to 96% at best. Both machines hope to see evidence of the Higgs by colliding sub-atomic matter at very high speeds. If it exists, the Higgs should emerge from the debris. The LHC has been out of action since last September when an accident damaged some of the magnets that make up its giant colliding ring. Project leader Lyn Evans conceded the enforced downtime might cost the European lab one of the biggest prizes in physics. Cern and Fermilab officials squared up at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Chicago.
September 10, 2008
LHC Operational
Poster: Aron Schatz
Posted on September 10, 2008 at 3:37:01 PM
The first major particle acceleration test was done at the LHC. No collisions were done yet and probably will be some time before the big one happens. All you doomsday people can rejoice that you can still cling on to your hope of world destruction when micro (no... pico) blackholes are produced that will decay too quickly to do anything.
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The beams have not yet been run continuously. So far, they have been stopped, or "dumped", after just a handful of circuits. By Wednesday evening, engineers hope to inject clockwise and anti-clockwise protons again, but this time they will "close the orbit", letting the beams run continuously for a few seconds each. Cern has not yet announced when it plans to carry out the first collisions, but the BBC understands that low-energy collisions could happen in the next few days.
August 26, 2008
LHC Full Documentation Released
Poster: Aron Schatz
Posted on August 26, 2008 at 2:17:45 PM
The Large Hadron Collider has tons of documentation on experimentation and building specs. This flows from the idea of the scientific community that information sharing is key for progress to be made. Now you know I'm going to make a snide remark about how the media companies are stifling innovation, didn't you? I guess I'm done with that remark.
The LHC is planned to make black holes that will SUCK UP THE EARTH!!! No, just kidding. In reality, the LHC will make miniature black holes that will decay very fast and give us a better understanding of the universe. Progress like this can happen only when large undertakings are complete.
The LHC is planned to make black holes that will SUCK UP THE EARTH!!! No, just kidding. In reality, the LHC will make miniature black holes that will decay very fast and give us a better understanding of the universe. Progress like this can happen only when large undertakings are complete.
November 16, 2006
Sending Signal Back In Time
Poster: Aron Schatz
Posted on November 16, 2006 at 2:25:42 PM
For a signal to time travel, it needs to travel faster than the speed of light. Now there is an experiment to try this out.
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Because these two photons are entangled, the act of detecting the second as either a wave or a particle should simultaneously force the other photon to also change into either a wave or a particle. But that would have to happen to the first photon before it hits its detector -- which it will hit 50 microseconds before the second photon is detected. That is what quantum mechanics predicts should happen. And if it does, signaling would have gone backward in time relative to the first photon.
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