* Astronomy

On 3rd October, the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid consortium announce the readiness of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), an e-infrastructure conceived and designed to support the data challenge, and with it the research of more than 9000 physicists around the globe.

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As the first particles began circulating in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this week, a group of hackers calling themselves the "Greek Security Team" penetrated computer systems inside CERN's Geneva, Switzerland, facility, where the world's biggest particle accelerator is housed.

The website - cmsmon.cern.ch - can no longer be accessed by the public as a result of the attack.

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Scientists from Durham University are to examine the very beginnings of our Universe by making use of the world's biggest experiment.
Experts from the University are part of a worldwide team of scientists and engineers eagerly awaiting tomorrow's (Wednesday September 10) switch-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The LHC is a gigantic particle accelerator built about 100m underground at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) on the Swiss/French border at Geneva.
Tomorrow will see the first attempt to circulate a particle beam around the entire 27km of the LHC.
Scientists will eventually fire two particle beams in opposite directions around the circular construction before crashing them into each other at almost the speed of light - recreating in a very small region the conditions immediately after the Big Bang.

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-- Edited by Blobrana at 10:58, 2008-09-09

Scientists from the Universities of Liverpool and Glasgow have completed work on the inner heart of an experiment which seeks to find out what has happened to all the antimatter created at the start of the Universe. Matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts in the Big Bang but somehow the antimatter disappeared resulting in the Universe, and everything in it, including ourselves, being made of the remaining matter.
The final modules of the VErtex LOcator (VELO), a precision silicon detector, have been delivered to CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva. Once assembled VELO will be installed into the LHCb detector, one of four experiments, which make up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator, which is due to be switched on in November this year.
LHCb is designed to investigate the subtle differences between matter and antimatter in particles containing b (beauty) quarks. The VELO is an essential part of the experiment which will provide the unprecedented precision necessary to isolate them. The LHC, located in a 27km underground tunnel which straddles France and Switzerland, will help answer some of the fundamental questions about the origins of our Universe and is set to change the future path of particle physics research.
Within the LHC, two beams of protons will be accelerated to close to the speed of light and then collided in one of the four experiments, which will each measure the outfall of particles.
The VELO is unique in its design with the whole device (about a metre long) consisting of 42 silicon "modules", spread along both sides of the proton beam (21 each side). The VELO actually sits inside a vacuum vessel - with a thin sheet of aluminium, know as RF foil, separating it from the primary vacuum inhabited by the proton beams. The two halves of modules are mechanically moved in to within 7mm of the beam during data-taking, and out to a safe distance afterwards.

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