AMS-02 antimatter detector lifting off in 3, 2…

April 29, 2011 | 11:00 am

AMS-02 detector Image courtesy of CERN.

Edit: The shuttle launch has been postponed until May 16 due to heater issues. For the latest news follow @AMS_02.

In about four hours, the Endeavour space shuttle is scheduled to launch from the Kennedy Space Center on its final mission, carrying with it what will be the largest physics experiment to blast into space.

Watch the event live via a CERN webcast or follow the detector on Twitter.

The Endeavour will deliver to the International Space Station the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer experiment. AMS-02 will bring scientists a new understanding of the makeup of the universe by collecting information from subatomic particles accelerated to energies far beyond those attainable by a man-made particle accelerator.

Astrophysicists postulate that the explosions of stars and other dramatic events in space release high-energy cosmic rays, which can travel for hundreds of millions of light years before reaching Earth. Once the rays collide with Earth’s atmosphere, they can be absorbed or break into showers of particles. Physicists are sending AMS-02 into space in order to catch cosmic rays before that happens.

AMS-02 will search for the unexpected, but scientists have a few items on their wish-lists for the detector, including primordial antimatter and dark matter particles.

Primordial antimatter is antimatter created during the big bang. Scientists think the big bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter. When matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate into particles of light. But the universe as we know it is made almost entirely of matter. If AMS-02 detected antimatter particles in cosmic rays, it could mean that primordial antimatter still exists in abundance; we just haven’t found it yet.

Dark matter is matter that exerts a gravitational pull but does not absorb or emit light. The behavior of galaxies and the way we see them lead scientists to believe that almost a quarter of the universe is made up of dark matter. However, they have yet to detect dark matter particles. Some theories state that dark matter could be made up of particles called neutralinos. If these particles exist, they could collide with one another and produce excesses of charged or neutral particles the AMS-02 could detect.

AMS-02 will collect between 2,000 and 2,500 events per second and is scheduled to remain in orbit at the space station for at least a decade.

Artist's impression of AMS-02 on the International Space Station Image courtesy of CERN.

About three and a half days after today’s lift-off, the shuttle will reach the same orbital configuration as the International Space Station about 200 miles above the Earth. Once it has docked there, astronauts will remove the detector from the shuttle cargo area and attach it to the space station in an extraterrestrial hand-off using two giant robotic arms – one attached to the Endeavour and the other attached to the ISS. Less than an hour after they secure AMS and hook it up to the space station’s electrical supply, the detector will be able to start sending data back to Earth.

For more information about following the launch, see the press release. For more photos and videos, see the AMS-02 website.

Kathryn Grim

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Boosting luminosity: how to get the most bang for your proton in the LHC

April 28, 2011 | 12:55 pm

Just after midnight on April 22, the LHC set a new world record for instantaneous luminosity at a hadron collider. The peak can be seen at the far right of the luminosity plot. (Image courtesy of CERN.)

The Large Hadron Collider hit two major milestones last week, first passing its own integrated luminosity record of 49 inverse picobarns, and then breaking the Tevatron’s peak luminosity record with 4.67 × 10³² cm^-2 s^-1.

In particle physics, luminosity measures how many protons pass through a given area in a certain amount of time. Squeezing more protons into increasingly smaller spaces boosts the luminosity, which gives protons a better chance of colliding. Adding up the luminosity over a long period of time – say, a year – provides the integrated luminosity, which is related to the total number of collisions seen by the detectors.

Last year’s integrated luminosity of 49 inverse picobarns corresponds to several thousand billion collisions at the LHC. The record peak luminosity means more collisions and, in turn, a much higher integrated luminosity. Scientists aim to collect anywhere between 1000 and 3000 inverse picobarns by the end of 2011.

As data pours in, LHC experimentalists will comb through trillions of collisions in search of exotic particles and new physics. Such a large data set is necessary for researchers to spot these rare events, so LHC accelerator scientists will use several tactics this year to deliver as many collisions as possible.

Packing in the protons

One way to get more collisions is to increase the number of proton bunches in each particle beam. Think of two marbles rolling toward each other from opposite ends of a hallway. There is a small chance that they will collide in the middle. But rolling 10 marbles from each end would increase that chance.

Likewise, circulating more proton bunches at once means the two beams will cross paths more often, upping the odds of a collision. Last year, scientists ran the LHC with 368 proton bunches per beam. This year, they aim to increase the record to more than 900 bunches during a single physics run.

Now imagine taking those marbles from the hallway and sending them on a collision course through a paper towel tube. The chance of two marbles colliding would rise significantly. For this reason, scientists use focusing magnets to squeeze the proton bunches down in size as they cross paths inside the detectors.

Another trick for getting more proton collisions is packing the bunches closer together. In 2010, proton bunches in the LHC were spaced 150 nanoseconds apart. Now, the proton bunches race around the 17-mile tunnel at 50-nanosecond spacing, or just 50 feet apart.

Ramping up

One final effort to increase the number of collisions scientists can get out of the LHC is to speed up the overall process of injecting protons.

Accelerator scientists watched eagerly as the first proton bunch made its way from the SPS to the LHC in 2008. This is just one of many critical steps toward colliding high-energy protons. (Image courtesy CERN.)

“The less time we spend getting the beam ready, the more time we spend doing collisions,” said beam operations leader Mike Lamont.

More collisions mean more chances to look for the unknown. “And that’s the real reason we’re here – for the Higgs, for supersymmetry,” Lamont said.

Protons go through multiple stages of acceleration before they are used in collisions, starting with a low-energy kick-start from a linear accelerator. They gain speed in the booster ring and make their way to the proton synchrotron, where they are separated into multiple bunches and accelerated to 26 giga-electron volts. Finally, they reach the super proton synchrotron, or SPS, where they are accelerated to 450 GeV and stored before being injected into the LHC.

“Injection is one of the most critical phases,” said Giulia Papotti, and engineer-in-charge at the LHC control center. While the process up to this point is well controlled and takes only a matter of seconds, moving the proton bunches from the SPS to the Large Hadron Collider can be tricky. The bunch characteristics have to be exact, from their length and width to the spacing between them; otherwise the beam gets dumped and the process starts over from the beginning.

Improved software controls will play a large part in enhancing the injection process. Checks on bunch length and variations from bunch to bunch will determine if the beam quality is good enough for the LHC. If not, the bunches can be dumped at the SPS without compromising the LHC beam quality or forcing the entire injection process to restart. Also, if there is a problem in one of the rings, the beam operators can continue to fill the other ring while the issue is sorted out.

Slow and steady wins the race

Finally, there are quality control checks at the LHC after each injection that will help to train the machines and keep the beam consistent throughout the run.

“We just have to keep working and listen to the machine,” Papotti said. “Experience will tell us what we have to do.”

Years of experience and building up a thorough understanding of their machine helped Tevatron scientists achieve record luminosities, which were far above the particle collider’s design capabilities. Ronald Moore, the Tevatron department head at Fermilab, says they employed many of the same tactics, including increasing the number of bunches and squeezing the beams into smaller spaces. As technology improved, the Tevatron scientists were better able to monitor and correct variations in the beam, which led to hardware upgrades and more automated processes.

“Consistency has been key,” Moore said. “Using the same beam configurations from one store to the next allowed us to tune the machine to a known state and keep it there. But perhaps the most important part has been the people. Everyone wanted to see the machine perform better and better.”

In the coming years, the LHC accelerator team will work to inject as many as 2808 bunches spaced 25 nanoseconds apart, and to complete this task in about 20 minutes. The ensuing luminosities will likely produce physics results that will hold a few records of their own.

Lauren Rugani

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The AMS detector heads for the International Space Station

April 27, 2011 | 11:50 am

The following press release was issued today by CERN.

The AMS particle detector on the space Shuttle Endeavour. Credit: Michele Famigliett

Geneva 27 April 2011. The AMS particle detector will take off on 29 April 2011 at 21.47 CEST onboard the very last mission of the space Shuttle Endeavour. AMS, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, will then be installed on the International Space Station from where it will explore the Universe for a period of over 10 years. AMS will address some of the most exciting mysteries of modern physics, looking for antimatter and dark matter in space, phenomena that have remained elusive up to now.

In laboratories like CERN, physicists observe matter and antimatter behaving in an almost identical way. Each matter particle has an equivalent antiparticle, very similar but with opposite charge. When particles of matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate. Matter and antimatter would have been created in equal amounts at the Big Bang, yet today we live in a Universe apparently made entirely of matter. Does nature have a preference for matter over antimatter? One of the main challenges of AMS will be to address this question by searching for single nuclei of antimatter that would signal the existence of large amounts of antimatter elsewhere in the Universe. To achieve this, AMS will track cosmic rays from outer space with unprecedented sensitivity.

“The cosmos is the ultimate laboratory,” said Nobel laureate and AMS Spokesperson Samuel Ting. “From its vantage point in space, AMS will explore such issues as Antimatter, Dark Matter and the origin of Cosmic Rays. However, its most exciting objective is to probe the unknown because whenever new levels of sensitivities are reached in exploring an unchartered realm, exciting and unimagined discoveries may be expected.”

In the same way that telescopes catch the light from the stars to better understand the Universe, AMS is a particle detector that will track incoming charged particles such as protons, electrons and atomic nuclei that constantly bombard our planet. By studying the flux of these cosmic rays with very high precision, AMS will have the sensitivity to identify a single antinucleus among a billion other particles.

“This is a very exciting moment for basic science,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “We expect interesting complementarities between AMS and the LHC. They look at similar questions from different angles, giving us parallel ways of addressing some of the Universe’s mysteries.”

AMS may also bring an important contribution to the search for the mysterious dark matter that would account for about 25% of the total mass-energy balance of the Universe. In particular, if dark matter is composed of supersymmetric particles, AMS could detect it indirectly by recording an anomaly in the flux of cosmic rays.

“Never in the history of science have we been so aware of our ignorance,” said AMS Deputy Spokesperson Roberto Battiston. “Today we know that we do not know anything about what makes up 95% of our Universe.”

AMS is a CERN recognized experiment and as such has benefited from CERN’s expertise in integrating large projects, from CERN’s vacuum and magnet groups and from test beam facilities for calibrating the detectors. In addition, the Payload Operation Centre (POC) of AMS will open in June 2011 at CERN, very near to the place where the AMS detector was assembled in clean room facilities. From the POC, physicists will be able to run the AMS detector as well as receive and analyse data arriving from the International Space Station.

AMS is the result of a large international collaboration with a major European participation. It is led by Nobel laureate Samuel Ting and involves about 600 researchers from CERN Member States (Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland) as well as from China, Korea, Mexico, Taiwan, and the United-States.

Follow the launch of AMS live:

The launch of AMS can be followed live via webcast at: http://webcast.cern.ch
Questions can be asked during the webcast by sending them to @cern on twitter

The live will also be broadcasted through EBU Eurovision services.
A VNR preview will be broadcasted on 28 April 2011, 10:00 – 10:15 GMT.
More information on http://www.eurovision.net/

Videos are available at: http://bit.ly/cernamsfootage
Videos are subject to the CDS conditions of use: http://bit.ly/CDSconditionsofuse

For updates about of AMS, follow @astroparticle and @ams_02

Information about AMS can be found at www.ams02.org

Elizabeth Clements

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LHC sets new world record

April 22, 2011 | 10:48 am

The following press release was issued today by CERN.

Around midnight this night CERN’s Large Hadron Collider set a new world record for beam intensity at a hadron collider when it collided beams with a luminosity of 4.67 × 10³²cm^-2s^-1. This exceeds the previous world record of 4.024 × 10³²cm^-2s^-1, which was set by the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s Tevatron collider in 2010, and marks an important milestone in LHC commissioning.

“Beam intensity is key to the success of the LHC, so this is a very important step,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “Higher intensity means more data, and more data means greater discovery potential.”

Luminosity gives a measure of how many collisions are happening in a particle accelerator: the higher the luminosity, the more particles are likely to collide. When looking for rare processes, this is important. Higgs particles, for example, will be produced very rarely if they exist at all, so for a conclusive discovery or refutation of their existence, a large amount of data is required.

The current LHC run is scheduled to continue to the end of 2012. That will give the experiments time to collect enough data to fully explore the energy range accessible with 3.5 TeV per beam collisions for new physics before preparing the LHC for higher energy running. By the end of the current running period, for example, we should know whether the Higgs boson exists or not.

“There’s a great deal of excitement at CERN today,” said CERN’s Director for Research and Scientific Computing, Sergio Bertolucci, “and a tangible feeling that we’re on the threshold of new discovery.”

After two weeks of preparing the LHC for this new level of beam intensity, the machine is now moving in to a phase of continuous physics running scheduled to last until the end of the year. There will then be a short technical stop, before physics running resumes for 2012.

Press Release

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Dark Energy Camera ready for shipping to Chile

April 16, 2011 | 10:41 am

This story first appeared in DOE Pulse on April 4.

A replica ring of the top-end of the Blanco telescope allowed technicians at Fermilab to test the installation of a 570-megapixel camera and check how camera parts would function as the telescope rotates. This testing significantly reduces the amount of telescope down time that will be required during the assembly in Chile.

Building and installing one of the world’s largest digital cameras to solve the mystery of dark energy requires the collaboration of scientists and industry from across the globe. The Dark Energy Survey’s combination of survey area and depth will far surpass the scope of previous projects and provide researchers for the first time with four search techniques in one powerful instrument. More than 120 scientists are collaborating to determine the true nature of dark energy, the mysterious force that accelerates the expansion of the universe. Taking images of galaxies from the time the universe was only a few billion years old, the DES will trace the history of the expanding universe roughly three-quarters of the way back to the time of the Big Bang.

But first researchers needed to build the 570-megapixel camera at DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and make sure it works. Nearly all of the camera’s parts made their way to Fermilab for assembly and testing during the last 12 months. The components were assembled and operated on a full-size replica of the front end of the 4-meter Blanco telescope in Chile, built by Fermilab and Argonne National Laboratory.  Testing finished successfully in February. During the next few months, physicists will be putting the finishing touches on pieces of the camera and shipping them to the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile where they will receive another round of tests before installation.

The high-tech supply chain tapped the expertise at four DOE Office of Science national laboratories and more than two dozen institutions and universities in the United States and abroad.  More than 120 companies in the United States contributed know-how and parts. Fermilab took the lead in the assembly and testing of the camera and building a cryogenics system several times larger than those used in previous ground-based sky surveys, while Berkeley and Argonne national laboratories played key roles in the camera development.

Berkeley Lab developed the Charge Coupled Devices used in the camera and did some of the processing of the silicon for the CCDs before sending the pieces to Fermilab for packaging of CCD chips. The unique design of these CCDs will give the camera unprecedented sensitivity for red and near-infrared wavelengths, allowing it to record more light for a given exposure time. The camera contains 62 CCDs for observing with 8 million pixels each, plus 12 CCDs with 4 million pixels each for guiding and focusing.

Argonne National Laboratory helped construct the calibration camera to conduct a mini-sky survey last year from a telescope adjacent to the Blanco telescope. This scaled-down version of the dark energy camera allowed for testing of the experiment hardware, software and observing strategies as well as created a baseline of celestial objects for Dark Energy Survey. Argonne also constructed several smaller components for the full-size camera and some large mechanical systems, including the heavy apparatus that installs and removes a 1-ton mirror from the front of the camera.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory took the lead in constructing a separate, small telescope with an infrared camera that will sit on a mountain near the Blanco telescope in a separate enclosure. This telescope will monitor cloud coverage so that the Dark Energy Camera can adapt its survey modes to various atmospheric conditions.

The DES collaboration expects to take its first astronomical images with the installed Dark Energy Camera before the end of 2011.

Tona Kunz

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The future of the Web: from physics to fundamental right

April 14, 2011 | 9:58 am

Countless scientific tools have made their way from the lab bench to everyday life. But perhaps none have been more pervasive than the World Wide Web. Developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989 as a way to manage project information at the laboratory, the Web has since infiltrated the globe and affected the way we communicate, educate, entertain, inform and govern.

Twenty years after the technology became a publicly available service, the future of the Web remains a widely debated topic. This past Wednesday, Berners-Lee and former United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown discussed their views on the subject at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. They focused specifically on making the Web available to the communities and demographics around the world that remain unconnected.

Tim Berners-Lee (left) and Gordon Brown discuss the future of the Web in front of an audience at the University of Geneva. Photo by Felipe Fink Grael.

“Access to the Web should absolutely be a fundamental right,” Berners-Lee said. Following the civil rights movements for women, African Americans and the LGBT community, “the right to connectivity is the timely thing to fight for,” he said. “But even if we get those rights on paper and there is still no access, we lose.”

A large effort by the World Wide Web Foundation, led by Berners-Lee, aims to provide Web access to sub-Saharan Africa. Although many places lack proper infrastructure and the cost of broadband is prohibitively high, many Africans have access to mobile phones. Brown pointed out that Web access through mobile phones could enable better education, foster communication between doctors and HIV patients, or provide market information to farmers about the price of crops.

“There is an enormous opportunity for the poorest continent in the world to move quite quickly if it can harness this new technology to its benefit,” Brown said.

But the rural poor aren’t the only population without access. The urban poor, the elderly and the disabled are other groups that stand to benefit from being connected. In a world where everyday tasks such as applying for a job or renewing a driver’s license are relegated to the Web, “denial of access is denial to economic opportunity,” Brown said.

Berners-Lee added that although access should be guaranteed to 100 percent of humanity, the Web shouldn’t be forced upon those that choose not to use it.

Another major theme during the discussion was the role of the Web in government. Berners-Lee has long been an advocate of open government data, and has pushed both the UK and the US governments to make public information available on the Web.

“Data is valuable,” Berners-Lee said. “You can take all kinds of information and put it on a map.” Plotting bicycle accidents, for example, could lead to better traffic safety laws. Private citizens with access to data can generate new ideas and create businesses from them. “Putting data on the Web can have big returns for any country,” Berners-Lee said.

Conversely, the Web can be used by citizens to spread messages and facilitate widespread organization, as was the case in the recent political movements in Egypt and Tunisia.

“The Web is enabling people to do things in a far faster way and in a bigger way,” Brown said. “It’s putting people and their governments on the same page.”

Despite the evolution of the Web in social, economic and political spheres, many questions remain: How do we control authenticity on the Web? Who gets to decide what information is good and bad? How can we prevent abuse of the Web, either by governments using it to exercise power over their citizens or by individuals with malicious intentions?

Berners-Lee challenged the audience – university students and fellow “coding geeks” in particular – to think creatively and get started on finding the solutions.

Lauren Rugani

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Fermilab’s Project X could offer potential energy applications

April 12, 2011 | 11:13 am

This story first appeared in Fermilab Today on April 12.

According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, U.S. nuclear power plants have produced roughly 70,000 tons of radioactive waste over the last four decades. By 2025, scientists expect the amount of waste to be roughly 100,000 tons. The nuclear industry faces an ever-increasing waste problem, and Fermilab’s proposed Project X is developing the technologies that may contribute to a solution.

View this animation to see how Fermilab's Project X would be integrated into the laboratory's accelerator complex.

Last week at AccApp’11, an accelerator applications conference hosted by the American Nuclear Society and the International Atomic Energy Agency, Fermilab’s David Johnson explained how Project X could demonstrate the technologies required for accelerator-driven nuclear waste treatments.

“Fermilab has proposed the construction of a high-power proton linac for support of our high-energy physics program, and we are exploring the possibility to expand the application of the project to nuclear physics and energy applications,” Johnson said.

Project X is a proposed high-intensity proton accelerator complex that would support experiments in neutrino and rare processes physics. By using highly efficient superconducting radio frequency cavities, the technology of choice for next-generation accelerators, Project X would create a continuous-wave beam of protons. While the Project X mission is focused on particle physics, the beam that will be produced has uses that go beyond particle physics. The continuous-wave beam—as opposed to a pulsed one—makes it possible for Project X to also support experiments validating assumptions that underlie accelerator-driven waste treatment concepts. It would also demonstrate the associated accelerator and target technologies, Johnson said.

By hitting a lead-bismuth target with protons, a high-power, continuous-wave linac would create fast, or highly energetic neutrons. These fast neutrons would burn up the dangerous radioactive elements in nuclear waste, significantly reducing its half-life. In order to meet the requirements for treating nuclear waste on the industrial scale, the accelerator must operate reliably with virtually no downtime. Johnson explained that by advancing technologies and producing stable accelerator operations, Project X could serve as a proof of concept for the application.

“We would like to get the nuclear community excited about this potential facility,” Johnson said. “We welcome any and all participation.”

Elizabeth Clements

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Fermilab’s data peak that causes excitement

April 7, 2011 | 9:50 am

Editor’s note: The physics world was buzzing yesterday, April 6, about the rumor of a discovery at Fermilab’s Tevatron that, according to physicists, could transform all of high energy physics. Fermilab Today published the following summary of the result today.

The di-jet invariant mass distribution for candidate events selected in an analysis of W+2 jet events. The black points represent the data. The red line plots the expected Standard Model background shape based on Monte Carlo modeling. The red shading shows the systematic and statistical uncertainty on this background shape. The blue histogram is the Gaussian fit to the unexpected peak centered at 144 GeV/c2.

Wednesday afternoon, the CDF collaboration announced that it has evidence of a peak in a specific sample of its data. The peak is an excess of particle collision events that produce a W boson accompanied by two hadronic jets. This peak showed up in a mass region where we did not expect one. The peak was observed in the 140 GeV/c² mass range, as shown in the plot above. It is the kind of peak in a plot that, if confirmed, scientists associate with the existence of a particle. The significance of this excess was determined to be 3.2 sigma, after accounting for the effect of systematic uncertainties. This means that there is less than a 1 in 1375 chance that the effect is mimicked by a statistical fluctuation. Particle physicists consider a result at 5.0 sigma to be a discovery.

The excess might be explained by the production of a new, unknown particle that is not predicted by the Standard Model, the current standard theory of the fundamental laws of physics. The features of this excess exclude the possibility that this peak might be due to a Standard Model Higgs boson or a supersymmetric particle. Instead, we might see a completely new type of force or interaction. A few models proposed and developed in recent years postulate the existence of new fundamental interactions beyond those known today, which would create an excess similar to the one seen in the CDF data. That’s why everybody at CDF is excited about this result.

The alternative explanation for this excess would be that we need to reconsider the theory that is used to predict the background spectrum, which is based on standard particle physics processes. That possibility, albeit less glamorous, would still have important implications. Those calculations use theoretical tools that are generally regarded as reliable and well understood, and form the basis of many other predictions in particle physics. Questioning these tools would require us to challenge our understanding of the fundamental forces of nature, the foundation of particle physics.

The current analysis is based on 4.3 inverse femtobarns of data. The CDF collaboration will repeat the analysis with at least twice as much data to see whether the bump gets more or less pronounced. Other experiments, including DZero and the LHC experiments, will look for a particle of about 140 GeV/c² in their data as well. Their results will either refute or confirm our result. Our result has been submitted to Physical Review Letters. You can read the paper and watch the lecture online.

It remains to be seen whether this measurement is an important indication of long-awaited new physics beyond the Standard Model.

– Edited by Rob Roser and Giovanni Punzi

Elizabeth Clements

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Next-generation particle accelerator starts up at Daresbury Laboratory

April 6, 2011 | 5:57 am

Today more than 30,000 particle accelerators are at work in hospitals, factories, shipping ports and laboratories around the world. Historically, breakthroughs in accelerator science come from basic science, leading to applications for diagnosing and treating disease, cleaning up polluted air and water and greener industrial processes. Next-generation technology like the EMMA accelerator will help pave the path for even more applications. STFC issued this press release about EMMA on April 1:

A brand new technology that promises a range of applications from treating cancer to powering safer nuclear reactors has reached another world first in its development. This milestone was confirmed yesterday, 31 March 2011, at the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC) Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire. Scientists from across the world are celebrating the successful start up of the pioneering EMMA accelerator which is set to impact fundamental science and change the way such particle accelerators across the world are designed and built in the future.

EMMA is a proof of principle prototype for a brand new type of particle accelerator, designed by an international team of scientists, including a number of the UK’s top universities and institutes. A major part of the BASROC CONFORM project, EMMA is funded by the Research Councils UK (RCUK) Basic Technology programme. A supporting statement and quotes from the CONFORM project and its members is available at https://www.conform.ac.uk/news/EMMAacceleration.pdf.

Particle accelerators already have a wide range of uses in many areas of science, but their potential is limited by their size, complexity and cost. EMMA will provide the technology to overcome these issues and take these applications to a new level. A compact 20 million electron volt prototype, EMMA not only uses technology that is simpler and less expensive than equivalent accelerators in existence, it also promises applications from treating cancer to powering safer nuclear reactors that produce less hazardous waste.

EMMA has now achieved its most significant milestone yet. For the first time, an electron beam was steered around the circumference of EMMA’s ring and then successfully accelerated to 18 MeV. This momentous milestone, and a world first, not only confirms that the design of the most technically demanding aspects of EMMA is sound, it also demonstrates the feasibility of EMMA’s technology, which now paves the way for the construction of a whole new generation of more powerful, yet more compact and economical accelerators.

The University of Huddersfield’s Professor Roger Barlow, leader of the CONFORM project said: “This is an outstanding milestone for EMMA, as well as for everyone involved in the CONFORM project, and is one that will define the way forward for this kind of particle accelerator across the world. The achievement is a direct consequence not only of the enlightened funding of the Basic Technology programme, but also of the investment that STFC has made in establishing the two Institutes for Accelerator Research – Cockcroft and John Adams.”

EMMA’s concept is based on a ring of magnets which use their combined magnetic field simultaneously to steer and focus the electron beam around the machine. The strength of the magnetic field increases as the beam spirals outwards while it is accelerated around the ring. Due to the strength of the magnetic focussing, the displacement of the beam as it accelerates and spirals around the ring is much smaller than in any equivalent accelerator. As a result, EMMA’s ring of magnets is much more compact and the beam is better controlled. EMMA’s next steps will be to move towards full acceleration from 10 to 20 MeV and commence the detailed characterisation of the EMMA accelerator and its novel acceleration scheme.

EMMA is the result of a truly multidisciplinary team from several world leading establishments which make up the CONFORM project. These include the Universities of Manchester, Oxford, Surrey, Imperial, Brunel and Huddersfield, the Cockcroft and John Adams Institutes, STFC and a number of international partners and UK industry. It was then design engineered and constructed by STFC’s scientists at its Daresbury Laboratory.

Susan Smith, Director of ASTeC at STFC’s Daresbury Laboratory said: “This is a great achievement, and is testament to the skill and dedication of the engineering and technical staff at Daresbury Laboratory, as well as to all the national and international partners and collaborators. This milestone marks the beginning of a detailed experimental programme that will provide all the information required for the design and construction of all future accelerators of this type.”

Carol Johnstone, of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the USA, and one of the international team, said: “I have just announced the success of EMMA at Fermilab. I am so impressed and proud to collaborate with the UK team.”

View the press release

Elizabeth Clements

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MEG experiment may give boost to supersymmetry

April 4, 2011 | 5:58 am

The MEG experiment saw the possible decay of muons into electrons and gamma rays in candidate events such as this one. Image courtesy of University of Tokyo.

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider came up empty-handed in their first searches for evidence of the theory of supersymmetry. But preliminary results from MEG, an experiment initiated by the University of Tokyo, have given SUSY fans a glimmer of hope.

The MEG experiment, located at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, does not search for supersymmetric particles directly. Instead, it searches for a process never observed before in nature and perhaps best explained by the theory of supersymmetry.

In supersymmetry, every fundamental particle in the Standard Model of physics has a heavier superpartner. Up until now, no man-made particle accelerator has succeeded in creating one of these theoretical particles, as the task would require huge amounts of energy. However, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider hope that, if supersymmetry exists, they will be able to produce hefty superparticles with their powerful machine.

Scientists at the MEG experiment want to catch nature in the act of doing something the Standard Model forbids. They are looking for muons decaying into their much lighter cousins, electrons, with excess energy flowing out as gamma rays. Theorists think that, if superparticles exist, they may make muon-to-electron conversion possible.

In their first run, MEG scientists found some candidate events but not enough to be sure of what they were seeing. This summer, the MEG experiment will announce new results using twice as much data.

“If there’s a signal, it should be evident,” said Toshinori Mori, spokesperson for the MEG experiment.

Muons and electrons are grouped together in the Standard Model, along with heavier particles called taus. Scientists expect particles in this group, known as charged leptons, to be able to transform into one another because they see something similar happening in a much lighter clan of particles — neutrinos.

Neutrinos come in three types, each associated with one of the charged leptons: the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino and the tau neutrino. Scientists have already observed neutrinos changing from one type to another, a process the Standard Model cannot explain. If charged leptons transform, too, all particles might communicate with one another in a way that scientists have not seen thus far. Theorists say this would be possible in the framework of supersymmetry.

“Of course we can cook up lots of crazy models to explain this process,” said theorist Takeo Moroi of the University of Tokyo. “But from a theorist’s point of view, this is very interesting because it’s predicted by an existing model with its own motivations.”

The results of the MEG experiment will interest not only SUSY-watchers but also scientists on Fermilab’s planned Mu2e experiment, which could start construction in 2013.

If muons change into electrons, the process could occur in many different ways. MEG is looking for one of them. Mu2e would look for all of them. If MEG observes muon-to-electron conversion, Mu2e is sure to see it as well. But Mu2e scientists need not despair if the MEG experiment’s signal evaporates in its new data; it will still be possible for them to find muon-to-electron conversion occurring in another way.

Kathryn Grim

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