* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

RE: Large Hadron Collider

Blobrana · L

Much ado about Nothing - exploring the vacuum with the LHC

Empty space is anything but. Remove everything you can from an area of space and it will still bustle with activity. A veritable abundance of particles and all-pervasive fields fill space with energy. Empty space even weighs something. Indeed, studying 'nothing' can tell us almost everything about the universe we live in.
The 54 km of LHC beam pipes are pumped down to one of the best vacuums humankind can produce. Air pressure is higher on the moon than inside the LHC. This engineering feat is worthy of articles in itself, but the kind of vacuum we ask you to imagine here is something altogether different. It is quite simply the emptiest the laws of Nature allow.
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Blobrana · L

A New System With 1-Nanosecond Accuracy To Be Integrated into the Large Hadron Collider

University of Granada researchers, in collaboration with the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), are working on the development of an extremely precise communications and synchronisation system that has an accuracy of one nanosecond. Researchers plan to integrate this system into CERN's accelerators, more specifically, into the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator.
The new system will be used to control experiments with particles. Researchers plan to use this technology to confirm neutrino speed in an experiment to be conducted in May.
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Blobrana · L

LHC is back with big energy boost

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is operating again after its winter break.
Early on Thursday, opposing stable beams of protons were smashed into each other at four observation positions.
The total collision energy in these bunches of sub-atomic particles was eight trillion electron volts - a world record.
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LHC Report: First collisions soon

On the evening of Friday 16 March beams were accelerated in the LHC at 4 TeV for the first time: a new world record! According to the schedule for the machine restart it will take another three weeks before the stable beams mode - the requirement for the detectors to start taking data - is achieved.
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Blobrana · L

Physicists at Cern are powering up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) again, ready for a final push to confirm the discovery of the Higgs boson - the final piece of the jigsaw known as the Standard Model of Particle Physics.
So what then? Such a fuss has been made about finally nailing down the Higgs you could be forgiven for thinking that - once the champagne had been quaffed and the Nobel Prizes handed out - we could all pack up and go home.
Not a bit of it. Only two of the four main experimental detectors straddling the 27km ring of the LHC are even looking for the Higgs and both are interested in much, much more.
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Blobrana · L

LHCb finds a few very special events out of 10 billions

The team sifted through about 10 billion events looking for a particle called a Bs meson - a particle made of a b quark and antiquark s - that would have decayed into two muons.
The Bs meson is a very heavy particle, making it unstable and prone to decay into smaller, more stable particles. It can "break apart" in many different ways called decay channels. These are just like the many ways a machine can give change. Some decay channels occur more often, others only rarely. Of all the possible options, how often a particle will decay into a particular decay channel is called the branching ratio.
The Standard Model predicts that about three Bs mesons should disintegrate into two muons out of a billion decaying Bs mesons, that is, the branching ratio is 3 x 10^-9.
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Blobrana · L

LHC energy boost will aid hunt for Higgs boson

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will increase the energies of the bunches of subatomic particles called protons that it smashes together.
The boost should improve the collider's chances of discovering "new physics" and definitively confirming or denying the existence of Higgs boson particle.
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Blobrana · L

CERN has announced (13 February 2012) that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will run with a beam energy of 4 TeV this year. This is 0.5 TeV higher than in 2010 and 2011.
The LHC's excellent performance in 2010 and 2011 has brought tantalising hints of new physics, with scientists on two of the LHC's four experiments now focussed on a window of just 16GeV in which the Higgs boson can exist.
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Blobrana · L

BBC News - Higgs boson 'glimpsed' at Large Hadron Collider

'God Particle' Detected?: Higgs Boson Experiment Bearing Fruit