The Physics Inventory – November 20, 2009

November 20, 2009 | 7:28 pm

LHC circulated the first beams of 2009 as the first major step in the restart process. Physicists meeting in Evian revealed that through a quirk of statistics and luck, the Tevatron’s new limits on finding the Higgs just got a little weaker. Other physicists joined in a jamboree. Quarks’ motions within protons and neutrons depend on what other protons and neutrons are nearby. Talk of future muon colliders ramped up.

DJ Spooky released his compositions from Antarctica, which “reflect the geometric precision of ice.” Expertlabs.org launched as a way “to help policy-makers in our government take advantage of the expertise of their fellow citizens.” The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s attempts to attract engineers by getting them dates has led to “eight or nine weddings.”

Representatives of US academic research bodies joined forces to track stimulus spending on research. Japanese science research bracing for a possible major funding blow.

The Sun might not be a “Goldilocks” star after all. Punching holes in a thin sheet of gold can actually prevent light from passing through. Invisibility is not all it looks like. The first programmable quantum processor was created using two beryllium ions.

Watch closely this weekend for LHC start-up activities and possible surprises!

Note: This is the first of a regular series capturing some of the physics highlights of the past week.

David Harris

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LHC circulates first beams of 2009

November 20, 2009 | 4:57 pm

CERN just issued a press release announcing the first circulating beams of 2009 in the Large Hadron Collider. US institutions involved in the LHC also issued a press release. At 10 o’clock this evening, CERN local time, the first beams circulated for several minutes in the clockwise direction. The LHC operations team is now working to circulate a beam in the counter-clockwise direction.

Follow rapid updates at these sources.

Text of CERN press release:

The LHC is back

Geneva, 20 November 2009. Particle beams are once again circulating in the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This news comes after the machine was handed over for operation on Wednesday morning. A clockwise circulating beam was established at ten o’clock this evening. This is an important milestone on the road towards first physics at the LHC, expected in 2010.

“It’s great to see beam circulating in the LHC again,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “We’ve still got some way to go before physics can begin, but with this milestone we’re well on the way.”

The LHC circulated its first beams on 10 September 2008, but suffered a serious malfunction nine days later. A failure in an electrical connection led to serious damage, and CERN has spent over a year repairing and consolidating the machine to ensure that such an incident cannot happen again.

“The LHC is a far better understood machine than it was a year ago,” said CERN’s Director for Accelerators, Steve Myers. “We’ve learned from our experience, and engineered the technology that allows us to move on. That’s how progress is made.”

Recommissioning the LHC began in the summer, and successive milestones have regularly been passed since then. The LHC reached its operating temperature of 1.9 Kelvin, or about -271 Celsius, on 8 October. Particles were injected on 23 October, but not circulated. A beam was steered through three octants of the machine on 7 November, and circulating beams have now been re-established. The next important milestone will be low-energy collisions, expected in about a week from now. These will give the experimental collaborations their first collision data, enabling important calibration work to be carried out. This is significant, since up to now, all the data they have recorded comes from cosmic rays. Ramping the beams to high energy will follow in preparation for collisions at 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam) next year.

Particle physics is a global endeavour, and CERN has received support from around the world in getting the LHC up and running again.

“It’s been a herculean effort to get to where we are today,” said Myers. “I’d like to thank all those who have taken part, from CERN and from our partner institutions around the world.”

A press conference will be held at CERN, at the Globe of Science and Innovation, at 2pm on Monday 23 November, and webcast at: http://webcast.cern.ch/. Submit your questions to @CERN via Twitter. We cannot guarantee that all questions will be answered.

Follow LHC progress on twitter at www.twitter.com/cern

For photos, video and latest information see: http://press.web.cern.ch/press/lhc-first-physics/

Contact: http://press.web.cern.ch/press/ContactUs.html

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world’s leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. India, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.

Text of the US release:

SOURCE: Berkeley Lab, Brookhaven Lab, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

November 20, 2009

Beams are Back in the Large Hadron Collider

Batavia, IL, Berkeley, CA and Upton, NY – Particle beams are once again zooming around the world’s most powerful particle accelerator—the Large Hadron Collider—located at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.  On November 20 at 4:00 p.m.  EST, a clockwise circulating beam was established in the LHC’s 17-mile ring.

After more than one year of repairs, the LHC is now back on track to create high-energy particle collisions that may yield extraordinary insights into the nature of the physical universe.

“The LHC is a machine unprecedented in size, in complexity, and in the scope of the international collaboration that has built it over the last 15 years,” said Dennis Kovar, U.S. Department of Energy Associate Director of Science for High Energy Physics. “I congratulate the scientists and engineers that have worked to get the LHC back up and running, and look forward to the discoveries to come.”

American scientists have played an important role in the construction of the LHC.  About 150 scientists, engineers and technicians from three DOE national laboratories—Brookhaven Lab, Fermilab and Berkeley Lab—built critical accelerator components.  They are joined by colleagues from DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of Texas at Austin in ongoing LHC accelerator R&D. The work has been supported by the DOE Office of Science.

Circulating beams are a major milestone on the way to the ultimate goal: data from high-energy particle collisions in each of the LHC’s four major particle detectors. Over the next few months, scientists will create collisions between two beams of protons. These very first LHC collisions will take place at the relatively low energy of 900 GeV. They will then raise the beam energy, aiming for collisions at the world-record energy of 7 TeV in early 2010. With these high-energy collisions, the hunt for discoveries at the LHC will begin.

“It’s great to see beam circulating in the LHC again,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “We’ve still got some way to go  before physics can begin, but with this milestone we’re well on the way.”

In all, an estimated 10,000 people from 60 countries have helped design and build the LHC accelerator and its four massive particle detectors, including more than 1,700 scientists, engineers, students and technicians from 97 U.S. universities and laboratories in 32 states and Puerto Rico supported by the DOE Office of Science and the National Science Foundation.

# # #

Media contacts:

Brookhaven National Laboratory: Kendra Snyder, ksnyder@bnl.gov, 631-344-8191

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory: Elizabeth Clements, lizzie@fnal.gov, 630-399-1777

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: Paul Preuss, paul_preuss@lbl.gov, 510-486-6249

CERN: James Gillies, james.gillies@cern.ch, +41 22 767 4101

Notes for editors:

Photos and video from today’s events are available at:

http://press.web.cern.ch/press/lhc-first-physics/

Information about the US participation in the LHC is available at http://www.uslhc.us. Follow US LHC on Twitter at twitter.com/uslhc.

Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research for DOE’s Office of Science and is managed by the University of California. Visit our News center at http://newscenter.lbl.gov.

Brookhaven National Laboratory is operated and managed for DOE’s Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates and Battelle. Visit Brookhaven Lab’s electronic newsroom for links, news archives, graphics, and more:http://www.bnl.gov/newsroom.

Fermilab is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science national laboratory, operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance, LLC. The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science is the nation’s single-largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences. Visit Fermilab’s website at http://www.fnal.gov.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world’s leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. India, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.

Katie Yurkewicz

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We found the Higgs; it was in Greenwich Village

November 20, 2009 | 12:51 pm

Who is the Higgs? While Baumgartner managed to capture a photograph of the elusive particle, its identity remains a mystery.

Aspiring physicist Heidi Baumgartner is certainly destined for physics fame after successfully finding the Higgs boson on October 31, 2009. While the rest of the scientific community toils away building multi-billion dollar machines like the Large Hadron Collider to search for the much coveted Higgs in the wreckage of particle collisions, Baumgartner says she found it quite by accident in New York City’s Greenwich Village.

Baumgartner has also earned physics notoriety for her efforts to create anti-matter while still in high school. Her discovery of the Higgs came amid the chaos of New York City’s Greenwich Village Halloween parade.

Baumgartner says the Higgs was “robed in garb of scintillating red confetti and topped with a yellow construction hat,” and was the size of a human being, all of which are contrary to prevailing theories about the physical properties of the Higgs.

Yet, despite capturing a photograph of the elusive particle, the Higgs managed to slip away before Baumgartner could catch it’s real name. She and the symmetry staff hope that with the publication of this article, the real Higgs will come forward and reveal its true identity. If any of our readers know who the Higgs actually is, or saw it in any other locations, please let us know.

Calla Cofield

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What a muon collider could look like

November 19, 2009 | 11:53 am

Following up on our story about a meeting to discuss ideas for a muon collider program in the United States (also covered by Nature, subscription required), here is a schematic image of what the accelerator complex could look like.

A chain of accelerators and other devices is necessary to produce and accelerate muons before scientists can make muons collide. (Courtesy: Fermilab)

David Harris

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Muon collider workshop accelerates experiment R&D

November 18, 2009 | 12:15 pm

This article first appeared in Fermilab Today on November 17, 2009.

Fermilab theorist Joe Lykken gives an overview of a the physics potential for a muon collider at the Muon Collider Workshop, Nov. 10-12 at Fermilab.

Fermilab took the next step in ensuring that the high-energy physics community has choices for the path to discovery beyond the energy range of the Large Hadron Collider.

The laboratory hosted a three-day workshop last week as a precursor to a new national muon collider R&D program.

Results from the LHC will help to determine which of the proposed machines—the International Linear Collider or either the muon collider or Compact Linear Collider—is the preferred choice for the world’s next energy-frontier collider.

“There is no question there will be interesting physics even in the era of 20 years running of the LHC,” said workshop co-chair Fermilab theorist Estia Eichten.

The workshop, which drew about 80 participants from outside Fermilab, consolidates and builds on a decade of research with the goal of producing a white paper in 18 months and an end-to-end feasibility study within five years.

“We are within reach of finding out whether a muon collider is an option,” said Steve Geer of Fermilab’s Accelerator R&D Department and newly appointed interim co-director of the national Muon Accelerator Program.

Workshop attendees are off to a quick start. Prior to the meeting they produced detector simulations of backgrounds. During the workshop they moved forward with planning for Project X, a possible high-energy proton source for the muon collider; worked with members of the fourth detector, a previous design option for the ILC; and proposed horizontal collaborative efforts with the ILC and CLIC.

Collaborators plan to explore further synergies with the ILC, CLIC, and the LHC upgrade plans for lepton collider R&D, particularly for physics benchmarks and detector components.

Fermilab Deputy Director Young-Kee Kim praised the work done so far and asked for more international collaboration beyond the current US, European, and Asian participation on this “exciting, challenging journey.”

Tona Kunz

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Not available at Hallmark: Nobel thanks

November 17, 2009 | 2:21 pm

The letter begins with a list of possible recipients: Dear cousin, professor, best friend, colleague, sir or madam, old flame, occupant, or member of the Swedish Academy.

When physicist Leon Lederman won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1988, he found himself responsible for writing thank-you notes to a couple of hundred well-wishers. In his typical cheeky fashion, Lederman composed a form letter to cover his bases.

“I had to send it to about four old flames,” Lederman said. “They all responded with sarcasm: Yeah yeah, thank you very much.”

Lederman sent the same response to everyone who congratulated him, be they friend, former professor, student, someone he couldn’t possibly remember, or someone he had never met.

“I didn’t actually send it to the Swedish Academy,” he said.

Lederman was serving as director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., when he received the famous 6 a.m. phone call from Sweden. At the time, he jokingly told his wife, “It’s probably the Nobel Prize Committee.”

Once he discovered who was on the other line, the party began. “By 8 a.m. my house was filled with people with champagne bottles and Pepsi cola.”

Lederman said he had heard rumors that the Academy might ring some day. But almost three decades had passed since he took part in discovering the muon neutrino at an experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, NY.

“I was a little surprised it was for neutrinos,” said Lederman, who also worked with a team at Brookhaven that discovered the long-lived neutral K-meson; participated in an experiment that showed interactions involving the weak force can violate symmetry; and led the team at Fermilab that discovered the bottom quark.

“So I’m still waiting,” he joked.

If Sweden ever phones again, acquaintances sending cards, flowers or candy will be sure to hear from this best friend, old teacher, cousin, colleague, recipient, and old flame, Leon M. Lederman.

Kathryn Grim

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Protons and plants, bottom quarks and butterflies

November 13, 2009 | 5:51 am

WICN Public Radio ran a story about how science and nature don’t have to be strange bedfellows and, in Illinois, protons and prairies actually work together.

Fermilab in Illinois is America’s premier research facility for studying high energy physics and contains North America’s largest proton accelerator. Why would a cutting edge particle physics institution also have a staff ecologist? The reason is that besides everything else that goes on at Fermilab, since it was constructed it also has meticulously restored the long-grass prairie on its grounds and keeps track of the animals, birds, butterflies and plants that now inhabit the facilities grounds.

Listen to the interview

Tona Kunz

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Are accelerators key to American prosperity?

November 11, 2009 | 5:31 am

Lori Khatchadourian (University of Michigan) and Adam Smith (The University of Chicago) switch sample mounts at the ChemMatCARS 15-ID-D beamline to analyze excavation relics from 1300 B.C. Credit: Argonne National Laboratory

Some of the top minds in the nation say accelerators offer one of the best chances to strengthen the American economy and  improve your quality of life.

A series of lectures taped at the Accelerators for America’s Future workshop, and now available online from Fermilab, offer insight into how high-tech particle beams have been used for everything from strengthening plastic to treating cancer. The lectures also examine the challenges for identifying, developing and deploying future accelerators to meet the nation’s needs in basic science, medicine, energy and the environment, national security, and industry.

About 400 leaders in industry, academia, and from national laboratories gathered at the workshop in Washington, DC, last month.

symmetry reported on the highlights of the workshop, including the keynote talk by Norman Augustine, the retired chairman CEO of Lockheed Martin Corp. and chairman of the committee that produced the report Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future for the National Academy of Sciences.

With industry cutting back on basic research and universities facing draconian budget cuts, he said, it’s more important than ever for the government to fund university research and maintain federal laboratories that can deal with large-scale problems, perform high-risk research, build large facilities, plan for the long term and foster research that cuts across disciplines.

“If science is the keystone to the quality of life in the future, that’s a message we need to convey,” Augustine said. “I think it’s important to point out how broadly that impact is felt. People take for granted their iPods, their GPS, their laptops. Most don’t realize that it was people years ago, working in the field of quantum mechanics, that made all this possible.”

You can  read the full story here.

Tona Kunz

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Starting up the world’s largest particle accelerator

November 10, 2009 | 11:16 am

The LHC Tunnel in October 2009.

Over the next few weeks, scientists will use the Large Hadron Collider to accelerate subatomic particles to nearly the speed of light and collide them at unprecedented energies. The LHC is seventeen miles around, more than 300 feet underground, and contains more than 9000 magnets.  Making particles collide in this massive machine is no easy feat–dozens of scientists and engineers must ensure that every piece of equipment in the LHC operates in perfect harmony.

“Checking the accelerator is an unforgiving process,” explains Jim Strait of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. “You have to get all of the equipment and instrumentation to work together, all at the same time, before you can introduce a beam.”

Read on for an overview of the LHC’s start-up checklist, which takes months to complete and tests every system in the accelerator.

Check the LHC’s hardware. At the heart of the LHC are its superconducting magnets, which guide the particle beams around the ring and must be cooled to 1.9 K (-271.3 °C), just above absolute zero. The first systems tested are those that keep the magnets ultra-cold: the cryogenics system, which uses liquid helium to cool the accelerator; and the quench protection system, which prevents magnets from overheating. The hardware commissioning team next conducts magnet, helium, vacuum, and electrical tests on each of the LHC’s eight sectors.

Cool down the superconducting magnets. The process of cooling the LHC to 1.9 K takes about ten weeks for each LHC sector. When all sectors have been cooled, the LHC is the coldest place on the planet.

Power test the accelerator. The last task for the hardware commissioning team is checking the electrical circuitry in each sector. When the LHC is running at design energy, 11,700 amps of current will flow through each of the LHC’s 1232 main dipole magnets.

Make sure the whole machine works as one. Machine checkout, which tests the relationship between systems and sectors as a whole, takes about six weeks. During this period, the operations team uses specialized computer programs to examine the sequencing of all systems in a given sector. The final test is a dry run, when beam is simulated through the entire accelerator.

Check the beam removal system. A beam dump test ensures that the beam can be safely removed from the accelerator. When triggered, the system extracts the beam and sends it into a large graphite block where its energy is safely absorbed and distributed.

“The energy of one sector is equivalent to the energy of a fully loaded Boeing passenger jet,” notes Knud Dahlerup-Peterson, leader of the quench protection team.  Like quench protection, a functioning beam dump system protects the machine from itself.

Inject beams one at a time. Beam injection tests begin by accelerating a particle bunch in the PS and SPS, two smaller accelerators that ramp up a beam’s energy in preparation for the LHC. When the beam bunch has reached the appropriate energy, it is injected into the LHC.

The beam is then threaded through one sector at a time, limited by a temporary stop point so that accelerator and beam can be monitored in stages. Once all sectors have been tested and the beam has made a full turn around the LHC ring, it circulates a second time in case any obstruction went undetected. Injection tests are run for each of the LHC’s two beam pipes separately. These tests help determine how high the energy of the beams should be to maximize scientific potential while respecting the accelerator’s condition.

“The bottom line is protecting the machine,” explains Mike Lamont, leader of machine operations. “We have to be very, very careful.”

Guide the beams into collision. Once both beams are circulating, their energy is ramped up in stages. In an elaborate choreography, bunches are guided to take the correct size, energy, and distribution to collide at the interaction points in the center of each of the LHC’s four main experiments.

“Each LHC beam consists of bunches of 100,000 million protons. This could be compared to a cigarette in length, with a width corresponding to a human hair,” says Simon Mathieu White, one of the scientists who steers beams into collision. Almost 3000 of these tiny bunches make up an LHC beam, and ensuring that beams collide requires careful adjustments to and monitoring of the LHC’s 9593 magnets.

Starting up the LHC requires the orchestration of thousands of instruments to create hundreds of millions of collisions per second. With each collision, the LHC experiments have a chance to solve some of the mysteries of the universe.

by Daisy Yuhas

Symmetry Intern

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Bread-bombing bird interrupts LHC cooling

November 6, 2009 | 2:05 pm

Yep, it’s true:  A bird dropped a baguette on some outdoor electrical equipment at the Large Hadron Collider on Tuesday, interrupting the cooling system that chills two sectors of the collider.  CERN issued a statement today saying that the incident was similar to a power outage:  failsafe systems came on, the cause was identified, and the two sectors are now back to normal operating temperatures.

According to the statement,  the bird escaped unharmed but lost its bread.

Update, Nov. 9: See “LHC rebounds from baguette attack; sends beam around half the ring“

Glennda Chui

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