CERN announces LHC to run in 2012

January 31, 2011 | 11:09 am

CERN issued the following press release on January 31.

The Large Hadron Collider will restart in February. After a short technical stop at the end of the year, it will continue running through 2012.

CERN today announced that the LHC will run through to the end of 2012 with a short technical stop at the end of 2011. The beam energy for 2011 will be 3.5 TeV. This decision, taken by CERN management following the annual planning workshop held in Chamonix last week and a report delivered today by the laboratory’s machine advisory committee, gives the LHC’s experiments a good chance of finding new physics in the next two years, before the LHC goes into a long shutdown to prepare for higher energy running starting 2014.

“If LHC continues to improve in 2011 as it did in 2010, we’ve got a very exciting year ahead of us,” said CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology, Steve Myers. “The signs are that we should be able to increase the data collection rate by at least a factor of three over the course of this year.”

The LHC was previously scheduled to run to the end 2011 before going into a long technical stop necessary to prepare it for running at its full design energy of 7 TeV per beam. However, the machine’s excellent performance in its first full year of operation forced a rethink. Expected performance improvements in 2011 should increase the rate that the experiments can collect data by at least a factor of three compared to 2010. That would lead to enough data being collected this year to bring tantalising hints of new physics, if there is new physics currently within reach of the LHC operating at its current energy. However, to turn those hints into a discovery would require more data than can be delivered in one year, hence the decision to postpone the long shutdown. If there is no new physics in the energy range currently being explored by the LHC, running through 2012 will give the LHC experiments the data needed to fully explore this energy range before moving up to higher energy.

“With the LHC running so well in 2010, and further improvements in performance expected, there’s a real chance that exciting new physics may be within our sights by the end of the year,” Said CERN’s Research Director, Sergio Bertolucci. “For example, if nature is kind to us and the lightest supersymmetric particle, or the Higgs boson, is within reach of the LHC’s current energy, the data we expect to collect by the end of 2012 will put them within our grasp.”

The schedule announced today foresees beams back in the LHC next month, and running through to mid December. There will then be a short technical stop over the year before resuming in early 2012.

Press Release

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High school student contributes to Tevatron’s DZero experiment

January 28, 2011 | 11:09 am

This story first appeared in Fermilab Today on January 28, 2011.

While perhaps fatal to felines, curiosity is a motivating force for one local high school student. Seventeen-year-old Ike Swetlitz spent his summer at Fermilab on the hunt for the Higgs boson with DZero physicists.

High school student Ike Swetlitz examines the DZero detector. Photo: Marc Swetlitz

On his quest for answers about the fundamental nature of matter and the universe, Swetlitz contacted Fermilab and arranged to spend his summer holiday working side by side with DZero experiment collaborators.

Swetlitz worked on one problem in particular over the summer. The DZero team tasked him with dissecting a few troublesome particle collision events to discover what the data was really reporting.

He published his work as an internal document that was used and praised by members of the DZero collaboration. He also submitted his work to the Intel Science Talent Search and qualified as a semifinalist, taking home $1,000 dollars for himself, and another $1,000 for Naperville Central High School.

“The collisions I was looking at hit some triggers that made them seem like Higgs boson events. My project was to look at that data and verify them as Higgs events, or find out what errors were happening so we could improve the program,” Swetlitz said.

With the help of his advisors, Swetlitz learned which variables pushed the DZero computers to falsely record the events as Higgs-like, allowing the collaboration to look for better ways to examine data and exclude similar events in the future.

“He’s not afraid to ask questions,” said Brendan Casey, who worked with Swetlitz at DZero. “Ike always wants to go one step further, and he’ll keep asking questions until he really understands the answers.”

Bjoern Penning, Swetlitz’s primary supervisor over the summer, was amazed how fast Swetlitz became an asset to the laboratory.

“Within a few days he was using our software and extending it to his purposes. The document he produced made a real contribution to the collaboration,” Penning said.

As he applies to colleges, Swetlitz plans to go wherever his curiosity takes him. He is considering a dual major in physics and philosophy.

“I’m not only curious about physics and what the universe is fundamentally made of. I also want to look at the existential questions related to why we are here,” Swetlitz said.

– Cynthia Horwitz

Symmetry Intern

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BaBar’s Big Move

January 25, 2011 | 2:24 pm

A 33-ton portion of the DIRC—the Detection of Internally Reflected Cherenkov light detector from the BaBar experiment—was recently moved from Building 620 to temporarily storage in Building 720 on SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory grounds.

Earlier this month, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory moved a portion of the BaBar detector across their site. Its next stop could be Italy.

The job of the DIRC detector was to keep the kaons and the pions straight. It identified these products of B meson decay by analyzing that eerie blue light called Cherenkov radiation, emitted in this case by the charged products zooming through specially-fabricated blocks of quartz. The bars acted like giant optical fibers that trapped the blue light inside, bouncing it from wall to wall toward the array of 10752 photomultiplier tubes waiting to catch it.

Whether the DIRC will perform that duty once again is not known. It’s available should SuperB, the Italian B meson detection project, decide to use it but the Italians have also expressed interest in parts from PEP-II, the accelerator for the BaBar experiment.

Regardless of its final destination, DIRC had to go.

“We’ve had to move the DIRC— and many other components—out of 620 to give us the space we need to dismantle the main steel support structure,” said Stuart Metcalfe, BaBar Engineering Manager. “The next detector to be evicted will be the Barrel Calorimeter.”

It was a move short in distance but long in planning and preparation. In fact, the move was scheduled for December of last year but the movers met with uncooperative weather, said Metcalfe. “We had to wait for a lot of planets to align,” he said. “Today was the day.”

- Lori Ann White

Symmetry Intern

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The physics of Scotch tape

January 18, 2011 | 8:35 am

Scotch tape won’t fix a broken bone, but it might be able to tell you that the bone is broken. Tim Koeth, featured in the August 2010 edition of symmetry, is working to figure out how this humble office supply creates X-rays as it unrolls and what you could do with them.

Koeth, a physicist at University of Maryland, is following up on work by UCLA physicist Seth Putterman, who found in 2008 that Scotch tape emits X-rays as it is unspooled inside a vacuum.

Tim Koeth (left) and Pat O'Shea conducting their tape experiment at the University of Maryland. (Photo courtesy of Tim Koeth).

In Putterman’s experiment, the X-ray intensity was strong enough to allow the UCLA researchers to X-ray a finger. If the mechanism could be determined, this discovery could lead to a cheap, portable X-ray machine that could run without electricity – an invaluable tool for field workers in remote areas or military physicians and emergency responders.

Koeth was fascinated.  “I just had to try it for myself,” he said.

So he and his department head, physicist Patrick O’Shea, cobbled together a tape experiment of their own. In a corner of the lab near where they work on UMD’s Electron Ring, they built a vacuum chamber to house a roll of tape, a phosphorescent material that glows when electrons hit it, and an X-ray detector, all with bits and pieces they found lying around the lab.

Koeth placed this key between the tape and a phosphor screen to create a shadow. Image courtesy of Tim Koeth.

“Those are the best kind of experiments,” O’Shea said.

Koeth was curious about the X-rays’ source. While heavy metals such as tungsten often emit X-rays when hit by fast moving electrons, he was surprised that something as simple as tape’s adhesive could produce them. The answer, he thought, might have to do with some sticky physics in which the ripping of the tape creates a strong electric field.

To illustrate this, Koeth suggests a simple experiment: Sprinkle glitter on your desk; unspool a roll of Scotch tape over it; and watch as an electrical field is formed and sucks up the sparkles. But don’t worry; you’re not creating X-rays on your desk. Electrons need to be accelerated to least 10 keV to produce penetrating X-rays, and air molecules slow them down long before they reach this energy.

In a vacuum, however, the electrons don’t stop until they slam into a solid surface and emit a burst of X-rays, a phenomenon called bremsstrahlung, or “breaking radiation” in German. When the researchers unspooled the tape inside the vacuum chamber, the green glow from the phosphorescent material told them that a large number of electrons were hitting it.

The key placed below the tape but above the phospor screen blocked the electrons and cast a shadow. Image courtesy of Tim Koeth.

To study whether these electrons were strong enough to create X-rays, the researchers added a screen with a negative voltage of 10 keV. The electrons accelerated by the tape’s unspooling were able to fight their way through the screen to the phosphorescent material.

Koeth and O’Shea have no shortage of ideas for future projects: determining whether they could increase the accelerating voltage of the field, studying the properties of the tape’s adhesive, taking some real X-ray images, and integrating the components of the experiment into a usable machine.

If the vacuum component could be made portable, a self-contained X-ray machine would be an example of what O’Shea calls “culturally-competent engineering,” creating technological solutions without the use of fancy materials for use in remote parts of the world. Yet he and Koeth find the physics of tape just as fascinating as their potential applications.

“Even though friction is an everyday force, many of its details are not well understood. We like to explore things that aren’t well understood,” O’Shea said. “If we increase our knowledge of the universe, we often find useful applications. When Faraday began his experiments on electricity, he wasn’t sure what the practical application might be, however, he and others have quite a few since.”

– Sara Reardon

Symmetry Intern

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Update about Tevatron shutdown and future plans for Fermilab

January 11, 2011 | 11:49 am

Today’s issue of Fermilab Today includes more details from Director Pier Oddone about the decision to shut down the Tevatron in 2011 and a description of future plans for the laboratory.

Yesterday we received the news that we will not receive funding for the proposed Tevatron extension and consequently the Tevatron will close at the end of FY2011 as was previously planned.

Yesterday, Jan. 10, Fermilab Director Pier Oddone announced that the Tevatron will shut down as planned in the end of September 2011.

The present budgetary climate did not permit the DOE to secure the additional funds needed to run the Tevatron for three more years as recommended by the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel. Both Tevatron collaborations did a splendid job articulating the physics case and all the relevant issues to both

our Physics Advisory Committee and the national advisory committees, which led to the recommendation to extend the Tevatron. We plan to extract every bit of physics we can from this final Tevatron running period. The Tevatron has already exceeded all expectations, and given the large datasets we will continue to find new results and discoveries in the Tevatron data for years to come. The life of this legendary machine has been marked by historic discoveries made possible by its innovative accelerator and detector technologies. The experience gained during its operation has also immensely helped the development of the LHC accelerator and detectors. Fermilab is and will remain a very strong part of the LHC program and will continue to pursue physics at the high-energy frontier together with our collaborators at CERN.

As you can imagine I have answered many questions from the press over the last 24 hours. They are interested in the future of Fermilab, what may happen with jobs on our site and whether or not there will be any layoffs. There are about 100 jobs connected with the operations and maintenance of the colliding beam program. At this point the situation is very fluid because we do not have all the information we need to make decisions. In particular:

a) We do not know the budget for FY11 since we are in a Continuing Resolution and Congress has not acted on any of the appropriations bills.

b) We do not know the President’s budget request for the following year, FY12. We will know this only in mid February.

When the Tevatron concludes operations, we plan to move as many employees as possible to jobs on several new experiments and projects, many of which are already well underway and in need of extra help. Of course, this depends on the budget for FY11 and FY12 and on how fast the new projects ramp up. It will be a complex transition for the laboratory, and soon we will set up a Q&A website to answer questions about the issues that this transition entails.

The Office of Science and Fermilab are committed to maintaining our laboratory as a world leader for particle physics research. We have the Office of Science’s strong support to develop into the foremost laboratory at the Intensity Frontier with new neutrino experiments NOvA, MicroBooNE and the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE); the muon-to-electron conversion experiment (Mu2e); and ongoing experiments MINOS, MINERvA and MiniBooNE. Underlying our Intensity Frontier program we have the Office of Science’s support for the development of Project X. In addition we have leading programs at the Cosmic Frontier with the Dark Energy Survey, the dark-matter experiments CDMS and COUPP, and Pierre Auger. While we would have liked to run the Tevatron for three more years, our life going forward is full of promising projects and great opportunities for major discoveries.

- Pier Oddone

Elizabeth Clements

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New year, new laboratory blogs on Quantum Diaries

January 10, 2011 | 4:39 pm

Living in an era when the latest discoveries in physics regularly make headlines, it can be easy to miss the individual contributions from the scientists and institutions around the globe making these advances possible. Highlighting these contributions, along with the quirky world from physicists working behind the scenes, has been the focus of Quantum Diaries since it launched in 2005.

Quantum Diaries is sure to continue in that role, but today relaunches with four physics laboratories in its ranks: Brookhaven, CERN, Fermilab and TRIUMF. Each of the laboratories will be posting regular updates to Quantum Diaries.

All of the labs have already gotten started. In its first post, Brookhaven Laboratory provides a thorough description of its current physics work. CERN, aware of the challenges of fitting complex scientific explanations into 140-character tweets, hopes this new forum will give the laboratory a place to expand on the news of the day coming from the LHC and other experiments. Fermilab details a number of expectations for 2011, including updates on the Higgs search, more data from its neutrino experiments, the launch and construction of several experiments, and the decision that the Tevatron will shut down in September. Finally, Canadian physics laboratory TRIUMF explores the difficulty of summing the full range of its work, from manufacturing isotopes to treating eye cancer, in a single catchy name.

As these laboratories continue to contribute to the site, Quantum Diaries welcomes commenting, feedback and constructive discussions on each post. Check back for frequent updates from the new laboratory members, as well as continued updates from the regular Quantum Diaries bloggers.

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Tevatron to shut down at end of FY2011

January 10, 2011 | 2:59 pm

Fermilab Today published the following message from Director Pier Oddone in a special edition today:

To the Fermilab community

Today we received the news that we will not receive funding for the proposed Tevatron extension and consequently the Tevatron will close at the end of FY2011 as was previously planned. The present budgetary climate did not permit DOE to secure the additional funds needed to run the Tevatron for three more years as recommended by the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel.

We plan to run the Tevatron this year and extract all the physics results we can. The Tevatron has exceeded all expectations. The life of this legendary machine has been marked by historic discoveries made possible by its innovative accelerator and detector technologies. The experience developed during its operation has also immensely helped the development of the LHC accelerator and detectors. Fermilab is and will remain a very strong part of the LHC program and will continue to pursue physics at the high-energy frontier together with our collaborators at CERN.

The Office of Science is committed to maintain our laboratory as a world leader for particle physics research. We have its strong support to develop into the foremost laboratory at the Intensity Frontier with new neutrino experiments NOvA, MicroBooNE and the Long Base Line Neutrino Experiment (LBNE); the muon-to-electron conversion experiment (Mu2e); and ongoing experiments MINOS, MINERvA and MiniBooNE. Underlying our Intensity Frontier program we have the Office of Science’s support for the development of Project X. In addition we have leading programs at the Cosmic Frontier with the Dark Energy Survey, the dark-matter experiments CDMS and COUPP, and Pierre Auger. While we would have liked to run the Tevatron for three more years, our life going forward is full of promising projects and great opportunities for major discoveries.

– Fermilab Director Pier Oddone

Elizabeth Clements

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Fermi space telescope sees surprising flares in Crab Nebula

January 7, 2011 | 4:36 pm

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory issued the following press release on Jan. 7: 

Menlo Park, Calif.—The Crab Nebula, one of our best-known and most stable neighbors in the winter sky, is shocking scientists with its propensity for fireworks—gamma-ray flares set off by the most energetic particles ever traced to a specific astronomical object. The discovery, reported today by scientists working with two orbiting telescopes, is leading researchers to rethink their ideas of how cosmic particles are accelerated.

“We were dumbfounded,” said Roger Blandford, who directs the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, jointly located at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University. “It’s an emblematic object,” he said. The Crab Nebula, also known as M1, was the first astronomical object catalogued in 1771 by Charles Messier. “It’s a big deal historically,” Blandford continued, “and we’re making an amazing discovery about it.”

Blandford was part of a KIPAC team led by scientists Rolf Buehler and Stefan Funk that used observations from the Large Area Telescope, one of two primary instruments aboard NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, to confirm one flare and discover another. Their report was posted online today in Science Express alongside a report from the Italian orbiting telescope Astro-rivelatore Gamma a Immagini LEggero, or AGILE, which also detected gamma-ray flares in the Crab Nebula.

The Crab Nebula, and the rapidly spinning neutron star that powers it, are the remnants of a supernova explosion documented by Chinese and Middle Eastern astronomers in 1054. After shedding much of its outer gases and dust, the dying star collapsed into a pulsar, a super-dense, rapidly spinning ball of neutrons. The Crab Nebula’s pulsar emits a pulse of radiation every 33 milliseconds, like clockwork.

Though it’s only 10 miles across, the amount of energy the pulsar releases is enormous, lighting up the Crab Nebula until it shines 75,000 times more brightly than the sun. Most of this energy is contained in a particle wind of energetic electrons and positrons traveling close to the speed of light. These electrons and positrons interact with magnetic fields and low-energy photons to produce the famous glowing tendrils of dust and gas Messier mistook for a comet over 200 years ago.

The particles are even forceful enough to produce the gamma rays the LAT normally observes during its regular surveys of the sky. But those particles did not cause the dramatic flares.

Each of the two flares the LAT observed lasted a few days before the Crab Nebula’s gamma-ray output returned to more normal levels. According to Funk, the short duration of the flares points to synchrotron radiation, or radiation emitted by electrons accelerating in the magnetic field of the nebula, as the cause. And not just any accelerated electrons: the flares were caused by super-charged electrons of up to 10¹⁵ electron volts, or 10 quadrillion electron volts, approximately 1,000 times more energetic than the protons accelerated by the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, the world’s most powerful man-made particle accelerator, and more than 15 orders of magnitude greater than photons of visible light.

“The strength of the gamma-ray flares shows us they were emitted by the highest-energy particles we can associate with any discrete astrophysical object,” Funk said.

Not only are the electrons surprisingly energetic, added Buehler, but, “the fact that the intensity is varying so rapidly means the acceleration has to happen extremely fast.” This challenges current theories about the way cosmic particles are accelerated. These theories cannot easily account for the extreme energies of the electrons or the speed with which they’re accelerated.

The discovery of the Crab Nebula’s gamma-ray flares raises one obvious question: how can the nebula do that? Obvious question, but no obvious answers. The KIPAC scientists all agree they need a closer look at higher resolutions and in a variety of wavelengths before they can make any definitive statements. The next time the Crab Nebula flares, the Fermi LAT team will not be the only team gathering data. They’ll need all the help they can get to decipher the mysteries of the Crab Nebula

“We thought we knew the essential ingredients of the Crab Nebula,” Funk said, “but that’s no longer true. It’s still surprising us.”

Press Release

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Playing by ear in the laboratory

January 4, 2011 | 2:29 pm

Richard Dobson sat at his computer in England, listening to a New Age cascade of electronic sounds. He had received the files from Argonne physicist Lily Asquith, with whom he was playing a particle-physics inspired version of Name That Tune. Two files were the calculated sound of Higgs particles, two were quark jets, and two were random sounds. Dobson’s job was to tell Asquith which were which.

“It was a tantalizing exercise,” said Dobson, a musician and programmer with the Composer’s Desktop Project. “The patterns were so interesting; they showed that you could actually hear information and make observations.”

Asquith and Dobson are two of the developers behind LHCsound, a collaboration of physicists and musicians who translate data from the Large Hadron Collider into musical notes through a process called sonification. Their hope is that physicists could use sonified data to supplement traditional visual and numerical data from the machine, possibly picking up events with their ears that their eyes would miss.

The music-matching experiments are helping them develop a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI, pronounced “gooey”) for their sonification process. The program will allow any experimenter, from a high school student to an LHC lead investigator, to input his own data and create a musical masterpiece.

Although LHCsound started in January 2010, the idea of turning data into audible sound is not new. Dobson gives the example of a Geiger counter, which emits a distinctive blip while detecting radiation, as another audible indicator of changing data.

“The human ear is good at detecting subtle changes in sound,” he said. “It’s a survival instinct: a new sound turns up, our attention is drawn to it.”

The GUI is an extension of the original project where sounds are linked to variables in the data such as type of particle, velocity or energy. Users will be able to upload their data as a list of numbers and make music by adjusting parameters such as instrument, tempo and pitch. For instance, a user might choose to map a violin with a particle’s energy, creating an arpeggio as the energy rises and falls throughout the event.

“What physicists are doing is like a treasure hunt or a detective story, and this could help them skim their data,” Dobson said. “The mere idea that you can listen to collisions could be another tool in their armory.”

Any experiment with a column of changing numbers can be sonified, even something as simple as a wooden car’s acceleration as it rolls down a ramp. The LHCsound crew received a grant from the Science and Technology Facilities Council to develop and present a workshop at middle schools in the U.K. so that students can sonify their own physics projects. Asquith said she would love to bring the outreach component to the U.S. as well.

“The teachers we’ve talked to have wonderful ideas for projects in their physics classrooms,” Asquith said. “The main benefit is that the kids are so excited about it.”
To develop sonification as a useable technology, Asquith said she needs more physicists involved in the project. “So far I’m the only one,” she said. “We need to find a proof-of-principle that we could use our ears to distinguish types of events. It’s potentially a large research project.”

In the meantime, the ideas from musicians, artists, educators and others keep coming as fast as particle collisions in the LHC.

“We’re getting more people interested all the time,” Asquith said. “I’ve permanently got a list of people who want me to do some work for them.”

Among the proposed projects: a dance choreographed to the sounds, a composition that could be performed on an actual instrument, and a real-time sonic display for ATLAS that would play the events as they happen in the collider.

“It all has the potential to become very exciting,” Asquith said.

– Sara Reardon

Symmetry Intern

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