Favored Higgs hiding spot remains after most complete search yet

November 18, 2011 | 5:30 am

The Standard Model Higgs boson is excluded at a 95 percent confidence level everywhere the thick black line drops below the red line. Image: ATLAS and CMS experiments

The CMS and ATLAS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider have backed the Standard Model Higgs boson, if it exists, into a corner with their first combined Higgs search result.

The study, made public today, eliminates several hints the individual experiments saw in previous analyses but leaves in play the favored mass range for the Higgs boson, between 114 and 141 GeV. ATLAS and CMS ruled out at a 95 percent confidence level a Higgs boson with a mass between 141 and 476 GeV.

The new result combines eight studies of predicted decays of the Higgs boson using data the experiments collected up to July. Physicists expected to be able to rule out an even wider mass range, between 125 and 500 GeV, based on the amount of data used and the sensitivities of the different search modes. But small excesses that could be the result of statistical fluctuations or could indicate the presence of a hidden particle reduced the range of masses that could be excluded.

“I think it could be an interesting message the data is telling us,” said physicist Eilam Gross of the Weizmann Institute of Science, who shares leadership of the ATLAS experiment’s Higgs group. “Any discovery starts with the inability to exclude.”

Several related measurements indirectly suggest a Standard Model Higgs boson exists at the lower end of the mass range.

Almost a year of work, more than 50 meetings and plenty of diplomacy went into calculating the LHC experiments’ first combination of Higgs search results. Experts from both collaborations worked together for more than seven months to devise the combination procedure and for about one month to come up with the combined result. Then the two collaborations, each a few thousand members strong, took about a month to review and approve it.

“This is really a landmark achievement,” said CMS physicist Vivek Sharma of the University of California, San Diego, co-leader of the Higgs combination group. “Combining LHC Higgs search results is not a straightforward process. There’s a lot going on under the hood.”

Since July, the two experiments have accumulated two to four times as much data. By the end of 2012, they hope to at least double that.

The end of the Standard Model Higgs search is in sight, said ATLAS physicist Bill Murray of the U.K. Science and Technology Facilities Council, co-leader of the Higgs combination group. “This year’s data will probably give us the answer, but next year we will be able to announce it firmly,” he said.

So far, the ATLAS and CMS experiments have not yet decided to produce a second Higgs combination based on results from the full 2011 dataset. The two experiments are still in competition; they might wait to see what they can accomplish on their own before working together again.

“This was a chance to go through the process when the results were uncontroversial,” Sharma said. “Now we’re in discovery mode. The next time won’t be so calm.”

Kathryn Grim

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Faster-than-light neutrino measurement withstands new test

November 17, 2011 | 7:29 pm

"Scientists modified the beam of neutrinos traveling through the Earth from CERN to INFN. Image: Jean-Luc Caron

The OPERA experiment’s surprising superluminal neutrino result is holding fast after a new measurement designed to eliminate a possible source of systematic error from their previous tests.

OPERA scientists reported the new results in a press release and a paper released on the arXiv today.

“The positive outcome of the test makes us more confident in the result,” said Fernando Ferroni, president of the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics. But “a final word can only be said by analogous measurements performed elsewhere in the world.”

Accordingly, OPERA and other experiments, including Fermilab’s MINOS and KEK laboratory’s T2K, will continue collecting data in the coming year.

OPERA scientists first presented their neutrino measurement on Sept. 23. The experiment measures the velocity of particles as they arrive at detectors at Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy from 730 kilometers away at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. September’s baffling results showed the neutrinos arriving in Italy 60 nanoseconds before light, a feat that seemed to break the laws of physics. Theorists have not been able to explain how the result could be true, but experimentalists have not been able to explain how it could be false.

For the new measurement, CERN operators spaced particle bunches in the neutrino beam farther apart by as much as 524 nanoseconds and sent them to Italy in short, three nanosecond pulses. This allowed OPERA physicists to trace neutrinos measured at the final destination back to the exact pulse from which they came. Last time the neutrino bunches were so close together that physicists had to rely on statistics to determine which one corresponded to each observed neutrino. The new arrangement got rid of at least this source of potential fuzziness.

Although this narrower, sparser beam led to more accurate definitions of the particles’ velocities, it also meant that physicists had fewer events to observe overall. In fact, OPERA measured only 20 events this way – one reason the collaboration will need more measurements before concluding anything with certainty.

Amy Dusto

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Pivotal pivoter test paves way for 15,000-ton plastic behemoth

November 17, 2011 | 8:53 am

It could be the largest structure ever to be built from plastic. Its footprint of 1,052 square meters will cover an area about the size of a quarter of a football field. Its height will rise past the top of a five-story apartment building. And with 368,640 tubes of white PVC, the structure will have about as many components as some of the largest LEGO structures built in the world.

The NOvA detector will comprise 368,640 PVC tubes that will be filled with mineral oil. A company in Wisconsin extrudes the tubes, which look like extra-long downspouts, in panels of 16. Credit: Rich Talaga, Argonne

But this huge structure, to be constructed in Ash River, Minn., won’t serve as a plastic replica. It will be the skeleton of a fully functional particle detector. Wired with fiber optic cables and filled with 500 truckloads of mineral oil, the 15,000-ton NOvA detector will enable scientists to discover how the masses of the three types of neutrinos—the lightest, tiniest particles known to mankind—stack up.

Last week, the preparations for the assembly of this white PVC behemoth passed a pivotal test. In an assembly building at Fermilab, 40 miles west of Chicago, scientists, engineers and technicians from Fermilab, Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Minnesota successfully operated for the first time the NOvA pivoter, the hydraulic system developed by Fermilab to move and rotate huge, 200-ton plastic blocks for the assembly of the NOvA detector. (See this 3-minute video with a time lapse of the pivoter test and a fly-through animation of the NOvA detector hall.)

“This is a big deal,” said Fermilab physicist Pat Lukens, who manages the assembly of the detector. “Now the focus will shift to Ash River. We will assemble 500 truckloads of plastic modules.”

But this is no ordinary plastic. Argonne’s Rich Talaga and other NOvA collaborators spent many years finding the right ingredients to produce the strongest and most reflective PVC for the 16-meter-long tubes that hold and support the weight of the mineral oil.

Using a machine developed and tested at Argonne National Laboratory, technicians apply special no-drip glue to a NOvA panel to create blocks that are 16 meters by 16 meters square and weigh 200 tons. Credit: Rich Talaga, Argonne

“Ordinary plastic tends to deform under pressure,” said Talaga, who worked closely with Fermilab’s Anna Pla-Dalmau. “Think of a plastic coat hanger. It changes shape when you put a sweater on it. We had to find a plastic that has to be strong for 20 years and doesn’t get weaker and rupture.”

For Extrutech Plastics in Manitowoc, Wisc., a company that makes PVC wall and ceiling panels and other plastic products, the purchase order for the NOvA tubes was the largest ever. The company has begun the production of the PVC panels, which look like 16 extra-long downspouts with a four-by-six-centimeter cross section attached side-by-side. The panels, which must meet the tight specifications for the thickness and uniformity of the NOvA plastic, are shipped to a warehouse rented by the University of Minnesota. There, students and technicians outfit each tube with a fiber optic cable that will capture the faint light that a neutrino creates when it breaks up an atom in the mineral oil. Avalanche photodiodes attached to each fiber will record and amplify the signal, which is then digitized and transmitted to the central data acquisition system.

To make sure that no light gets lost, Talaga and his group used a special PVC formulation that includes large amounts of titanium-dioxide to create a strong plastic that is white and highly reflective.

“The oil doesn’t absorb much light,” said Talaga. “The light created by a neutrino interaction is either absorbed by the walls of the tubes or by the fiber optic cable inside each tube. By making the walls highly reflective, the light bounces back eight, nine or ten times without significant absorption and you see a stronger signal in the fiber.”

Engineers at Fermilab designed and tested a hydraulic system that will move and rotate the huge, 200-ton plastic blocks for the assembly of the NOvA detector. Credit: Reidar Hahn, Fermilab

To transform the roughly 24,000 plastic panels into one giant particle detector, technicians will place 24 panels next to each other to make a layer of tubes, 16 meters by 16 meters square. After an application of special no-drip glue, the next layer will be placed on top, with the tubes lying perpendicularly to the layer below. Gluing and lifting of the 1,000-pound panels will be done with machines developed and tested at Argonne, where the first set of machines was used to build the test block used on the pivoter at Fermilab.

The Argonne group just finished the installation of the first gluing machine at Ash River. The full-size pivoter, six times as wide as the one tested at Fermilab, is under construction and will be ready for operation early next year. Bill Miller, of the University of Minnesota, who participated in the pivoter test at Fermilab, will lead the assembly of the detector in Ash River. He will supervise local staff, hired by the University of Minnesota for the task.

“We plan to assemble the first block in Ash River this spring,” said Lukens, who’s overseen the development of the NOvA assembly plans for three years. “It will take 18 months to assemble the entire detector.”

Scientists from 28 institutions are working on the NOvA experiment. When operational, the experiment will examine the world’s highest-intensity, longest-distance neutrino beam, generated at the Fermilab. Accelerators will produce a beam of muon neutrinos that will travel straight through the earth to the NOvA detector in northern Minnesota. During their split-second trip to Ash River, some of these neutrinos will turn into electron neutrinos and tau neutrinos. By measuring the composition of the neutrino beam with a small, 222-ton detector at Fermilab and a large detector in Ash River, scientists expect to discover the neutrino mass hierarchy, determining whether there are two light neutrinos and one heavy one, or two heavy ones and a light one.

For photos of the construction of the NOvA detector building in Ash River, see the photo gallery in the October 2011 issue of symmetry magazine.

Kurt Riesselmann

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The making and tending of heavy ion beams for the LHC

November 15, 2011 | 1:41 pm

Heavy-ion expert Detlef Kuchler holds a container of lead. Image: CERN

This week the Large Hadron Collider began heavy ion physics, the process of colliding lead ions to learn about conditions in the primordial universe.

The accelerator is expected to perform five to 10 times better than it did in its first run of these collisions last November. Although the heavy ion program will last only from now until CERN’s annual winter shutdown just after the first week of December, operators started preparations months in advance. Here symmetry breaking examines what it really takes to put lead beams in the LHC.

The source

Making heavy ions is more complicated than preparing the protons used in regular LHC collisions, which come from hydrogen gas. Since hydrogen atoms have only one proton and one electron each, applying a voltage to them is sufficient to rip off their electrons, leaving a load of beam-ready, positively charged protons. But the source for heavy ions, enriched lead, starts with 82 electrons. Physicists do not have miracle flypaper to grab that many subatomic particles at once, so the process takes a few steps.

Meet Detlef Kuchler, a heavy-ion expert who tends the lead source, the first part of the heavy-ion acceleration process, by hand. He helped develop the method of extracting lead ions decades ago and can explain from memory its hundreds of associated, unlabeled diagrams. Although several people work on the source, a flowchart of what to do when things go wrong at this stage dead-ends everywhere with, “Call the expert.” It may as well say, “Call Detlef.” He spends a lot of nights and weekends at CERN during heavy ion season.

Kuchler prepares the oven. Image: Amy Dusto

The oven

The first thing Kuchler does when it’s time to make heavy ions is prepare the oven, a palm-sized cylinder on a long pole that evaporates metallic lead. The whole thing fits into another machine that begins a chain of hand-offs from the source to the LHC. The lead must heat slowly in the oven or fragments spill out. Kuchler refills the oven once every two weeks.

The lab’s 10-gram stock of enriched lead costs $12,000. But so little is used at a time — about 500 milligrams per oven fill — that the bill equates to roughly $2 per hour. Not bad, in the scheme of accelerator operating costs.

Kuchler carefully unscrews the oven, takes it apart, cleans its seals with ethanol, measures and fills it with lead, puts it back together, enters the correct settings and turns it on. When symmetry visited, he searched with gloved hands for a leak around water tubes used for cooling and requested new O-rings to fix a vacuum connection somewhere. He usually finishes all the physical tweaks in less than half an hour.

“I know every screw of this machine,” he said. “It’s fun.”

Operators test beams of lead ions in this linear accelerator. Image: CERN

The beam

After lead evaporates in the oven, it moves into a chamber of plasma heated by microwaves. The lead gas loses some electrons when it hits the plasma. In 30 milliseconds, the ions inside have each lost varying amounts of the negatively charged particles, but the majority have lost 29, making their charge 29+. As they leave the chamber, the 29+ ions are separated from the rest and collected into a beam.

A newborn beam of lead ions spends its first hours in testing. Here, the human-machine interactions become less TLC and more CPU. Kuchler adjusts computer settings to send a bit of beam a few meters into a small, straight section of accelerator, where it hits a diagnostic device called a Faraday cup. Kuchler sees how he did from what the cup tells him, makes adjustments accordingly, heats a little more lead in the oven and repeats. Eventually, when the beam looks good enough, he retracts the Faraday cup from the path so that the beam may continue its tour of CERN’s accelerator complex on the way to the LHC.

Electronics that control every aspect of source machine settings sit in shelves all around the oven and the accelerator. “During the day I keep an eye on [the machine],” Kuchler said. He can easily pop down from his office any time. During the weeks of heavy-ion physics, he elects not to take any personal holidays so that even when he’s not at work, he’ll always be nearby. He and dozens of other experts work day and night and remain on-call after hours in case anything goes wrong.

The heavy-ion beams make their presence known through synchrotron light, which shows up as subtly shimmering spots on the screen. Image: CERN

The chain

In August, eight weeks after Kuchler began working on the source, he began letting the beam through to the Low Energy Ion Ring, where other people took over its testing and fine-tuning.

On the way to the ion ring, the beam passes briefly through an area where it encounters a number of 300-nanometer-wide stripping foils. These take off more electrons, increasing the ions’ charges to 54+. Next, at the LEIR, a process called beam cooling begins to reshape and intensify the beam, which the machine accelerates.

The newly narrowed beam travels from there to another accelerator, the Proton Synchroton, behind a wall in the same building. This accelerator takes the beam up to a higher energy and sends it through another stripping foil. Ions leave here at the charge with which they will collide: 82+.

The last checkpoint before the LHC is the second biggest accelerator at CERN: the Super Proton Synchroton. This machine further accelerates the ions. The Proton Synchrotron accelerator started sending beam to the SPS in September. Over the course of eight weeks, a team of physicists spent hours refining the machine’s settings in order to optimize the beam and prepare it for its final destination: the LHC.

The LHC

Operators declared "stable beams" today, which means the LHC is ready for heavy ion physics. Image: CERN

During the few days of tightly-scheduled heavy-ion commissioning, many additional experts join the usual operators at the LHC controls. They help troubleshoot to make sure the beams reach the precise conditions needed for physics. Lead beams here accelerate to 1.38 TeV per single proton or neutron inside the ion.

Three minutes after midnight on Sunday, Nov. 6, LHC accelerator physicist John Jowett captured an image of one moment in the process that always thrills him. When the lead beams in the LHC reach about twice their injection energy, they begin emitting enough radiation, called synchrotron light, to be seen by a special telescope and camera system in the accelerator.

“We see a shimmering spot on a screen,” Jowett said. “It’s as close as we get to seeing the beams of lead nuclei with our own eyes.”

At the end of that week, on Saturday, Nov. 12, at 6:41 a.m., operators declared “stable beams,” the machine term that indicates the LHC is ready for physics.

Amy Dusto

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Fermilab’s Physics for Everyone lecture series resumes Nov. 16

November 15, 2011 | 12:28 pm

Fermilab Today published this story on Nov. 15, 2011. To watch past lectures, visit the Physics for Everyone website. 

Fermilab’s Tevatron program has shut down, but the laboratory’s other programs are going strong. Learn more about Fermilab’s future programs through the monthly Physics for Everyone lectures beginning again on Wednesday, Nov. 16.

This is the continuation of the series that began last year but took a hiatus over the summer. “Physics for Everyone” is a non-technical lecture series about Fermilab science and culture. From 12:30-1:30 p.m. on one Wednesday each month, Fermilab scientists and staff give a one-hour, straight-forward, plain English lecture on one of a wide variety of topics, including the history of the laboratory, how particle physics benefits society and even the laboratory’s involvement in cancer therapy.

This set of lectures features Fermilab’s future experiments and projects. The first lecture in the set will take place this Wednesday. Deputy Director Young-Kee Kim will give a talk titled “The New Frontier on the Great Plains: Fermilab and the future of particle physics.” The talk will include time for questions and answers. It will be video recorded and archived at a later date.

Other upcoming lectures in this set include:

• Dec. 7, 2011 – “Project X: A powerful accelerator for particle physics” by Stuart Henderson
• Jan. 11, 2012 – “Discovery science with muons: Fermilab’s Mu2e experiment” by Doug Glenzinski
• Feb. 8, 2012 – “Looking for gold: LBNE in the Homestake Mine” by Brian Rebel

Information on upcoming lectures and video of previous lectures is available on the series website. This lecture series is organized by Fermilab’s Diversity Council Subcommittee for Non-Scientific and Non-Technical Employees.

Rhianna Wisniewski

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LHCb uses charm to find asymmetry

November 14, 2011 | 1:25 pm

Photo from 2004 showing the two almost 30-ton magnets in the LHCb detector, which was under construction at the time. Image: CERN

According to theory, matter and antimatter should have been created in equal parts during the big bang. But somehow, the balance of the two skewed in the universe’s first moments. Now, matter dominates nature.

Scientists from the LHCb collaboration at CERN recently saw curious possible evidence of this asymmetry: The difference between the decay rates of certain particles in their detector, D and anti-D charm mesons, was higher than expected.

This anomaly is evidence of charge-parity violation, a more precise descriptor of nature’s preference for matter. Other LHC experiments have seen such symmetry breaking, but this is a first sighting in these charm particles.

“CP violation is expected to be very small in charm physics,” LHCb member Bolek Pietrzyk said. “This is a really surprising result.”

The preliminary findings, which the collaboration presented Monday night in Paris, have a significance measured at 3.5 sigmas. Statistically speaking, this indicates an interesting observation. But scientists will need more certainty before they can declare a discovery.

In this study, the group used data they collected in the first half of 2011. LHCb’s next steps will be to look at the rest of the 2011 data and see whether they can make sense of the observations within the Standard Model theory, or if they’ll need a new explanation.

View the presentation about the LHCb result

Read the CERN Bulletin article

Amy Dusto

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Neutrinos make a splash in the SciBath detector at Fermilab

November 9, 2011 | 8:19 am

Fermilab Today published this story on Nov. 4, 2011.

The latest underground dweller in the MINOS tunnel is SciBath, a neutron and neutrino detector designed and built by an Indiana University team. Scientists are using the detector cube, which is about the size of a mini fridge, to track neutrons and neutrinos more effectively and economically.

The internal components of SciBath, a neutron and neutrino detector, include liquid scintillator and wavelength-shifting fibers. Photo courtesy of Rex Tayloe, Indiana.

Originally a prototype for a 10-ton version called FINeSSE, SciBath has taken center stage for the project. It’s mounted to a cart that has been craned into the MINOS tunnel, 100 meters underground.

“SciBath is the first experiment to combine liquid scintillator and wavelength-shifting fibers in an open volume to get tracking precision,” said Rex Tayloe, associate professor in neutrino and nuclear physics. “We’ve put two ideas together into one to get an improved detector to track charged particles.”

When a neutron created in Fermilab’s NuMi neutrino beam reaches the SciBath cube, it hits 70 kilograms of liquid scintillator. If the neutron strikes a charged particle like a proton, the scintillator transforms the energy into light that can be detected by the highly sensitive wavelength-shifting fibers. The fibers, 768 in all, capture blue light emitted from the interaction and shift it to a green wavelength that can be read by the phototubes. Specially designed readout boards record the information. Analysis software will then reconstruct the neutrino track within an innovative 3D grid.

“The purpose of SciBath is threefold,” said graduate student Lance Garrison. He is one member of the SciBath research team, which also includes postdoc Robert Cooper and graduate students Lori Rebenitsch and Tyler Thornton.

For one, the detector will demonstrate 3D reconstructions of neutrino events through a similar process as the neutron interactions.

The experiment will also detect background signals from cosmic-induced neutrons, which occur naturally in the universe.

The third aspect of the experiment will measure the poorly understood flux caused by fast neutrons emitted from the neutrino beam. The challenge in detecting fast neutrons is that the signal is often overshadowed by existing gamma rays. The neutrons, as they scatter off nuclei, could give insights into background dark matter and double beta decay, the rarest known type of radioactive decay.

SciBath has been in the MINOS tunnel for more than a month, and the plans are for it to stay through December, depending on its success. So far, it’s performing well.

Garrison hopes the detection method will increase the price-to-performance ratio for neutrino detectors, lowering the cost of large-scale detectors while incorporating a higher-precision tracking method.

“If everything goes as planned, and we expect it to,” Garrison said. “We hope to go underground with an experiment that needs background neutron detection.”

After proving itself at Fermilab, the team would like to see the SciBath technology used to understand neutron fluxes in low-background experiments like neutrino and dark matter searches and to ultimately be scaled up for a larger role in neutrino detection.

Brad Hooker

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Lisa Randall’s Chicago appearance is one for the books

November 8, 2011 | 3:15 pm

Like other physicists, Lisa Randall certifies that quantum mechanics does not apply to our everyday experience. Unlike other physicists, Randall almost seems to possess the quantum capability of being in two places at once.

Lisa Randall (Photo by Christopher Kim)

No sooner has she traded quips with Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” (Stewart, slyly: “You’re really just making all this stuff up, aren’t you…”), than Randall appears at the lectern at the Cindy Pritzker Auditorium in Chicago’s Harold Washington Library.

The noted theorist and author is on tour with her new book, “Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World.” Randall says that scales of measurement are the critical factor in studying the universe, the quantum world and our everyday experiences: We must be able to make measurements “on the scale that is most useful to what we want to see and what we want to know,” she says.

The resulting scale-appropriate observations comprise what Randall calls “effective information,” part of the larger category of “effective theory.” She states that phenomena beyond our current technical reach, by definition, won’t have any measurable consequences aside from those that are already taken into account.

Which brings us to the Large Hadron Collider at the European particle center CERN, with its unprecedented reach into high energy and subatomic scales. To Randall, the Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science at Harvard, the LHC has sufficient energy to test ideas about gravity and space, including supersymmetry, extra dimensions, strings and dark matter, and might even provide clues as to why gravity is “40 magnitudes weaker than electromagnetism.” She calls viewing the LHC tunnel, which forms a 16-mile-long circle, an “amazing experience.”

Randall sees an LHC future that might have already arrived: the possibility that the LHC might already have a sighting of the Higgs boson in its data. “We know its properties precisely. The ATLAS and CMS experiments might have actual data on it now, though of course they need time to analyze their data.”

Not that she’s ready to throw Fermilab, the dedicated U.S. particle physics laboratory, 45 miles west of Chicago, under the bus. “Now they’re exploring the intensity frontier, which will indirectly tell us what happens at high energies,” says Randall, a Fermilab summer student in 1982. “They also have very interesting experiments to study neutrinos.”

Results from two collider experiments at Fermilab, which stopped taking data at the end of September, will provide additional information on the Higgs this spring.

With the best-seller “Warped Passages” (2005) already to her credit, and with the constant motion of the national book tour, Randall continues to explore the intersection of science with the arts. She has written the text for an opera, Hypermusic: A Projective Opera in Seven Planes that premiered in Paris, and she has been a co-curator for a multimedia exhibit on the topic of scale (“Measure for Measure”), currently on display at Harvard.

And then there’s that title, at one level an adaptation of Bob Dylan’s song of the early 1970s. But Randall actually sees the meaning as closer to the Biblical, in a passage from Matthew: “Knock and it shall be opened unto you. . .” Her chapter titles often derive from popular culture: Living in a Material World, The Magical Mystery Tour, One Ring to Rule Them All. And when she signs her book, she adds: “Keep Trucking!” It is probably among the few links of physics and cosmology, with the late Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead. At the quantum level, and with the scope of Lisa Randall’s scientific vision, almost anything is possible.

Mike Perricone

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The multiplying effects of an accelerator economy

November 7, 2011 | 4:13 pm

ILC NewsLine first published this story on Nov. 3 2011. 

On the homepage of a US-based company website is a picture that, at first glance, looks like an advertisement for a major household appliance. A yellow starburst graphic assures you that delivery time is quick. A text-boxed baseline price is presented in glowing type. And at the centre is the touted item: an ILC/TESLA-type accelerator cavity.

Image of Niowave's website. Image: Niowave

Through the ad, Niowave, Inc., a superconducting linear accelerator company based in Lansing, US, showcases its capability for producing cavities with relatively short turnaround times. For the accelerator community, the ad could be a sign that the production of these superconducting structures is very slowly inching its way towards a place in the market as an in-stock product.

“It’s an indication of their confidence in this product as a catalog item,” said Global Design Effort Project Manager Marc Ross. “It means there’s somebody there willing to buy a number of them in that way.”

Niowave is one of several US companies developing superconducting technology for the ILC. To weld its cavity cells together, it relies on C.F. Roark, a partner company in Indianapolis, US.

It’s too early to predict how well cavities will do in the market as a prefabricated good, but Terry Grimm, who started the company in 2005 and worked extensively with particle accelerators as a laboratory and university physicist, knows there’s a niche for them outside high-energy physics.

“We see a real opportunity here – there’s a commercial market out there for these devices,” Grimm said. The devices aren’t necessarily for large, underground high-energy particle colliders. Plenty of biology and defense projects make use of tabletop accelerators that use similar technology as that for the ILC. “Going into the commercial market, we can talk about those smaller machines.”

Cavities for the ILC are a much taller order than those for commercial projects. The niobium is purer, the gradients are higher and the basic structures have complicated add-ons. Commercial projects don’t require as much of their cavities. But in the course of developing state-of-the-art niobium structures, you learn a few things that can only help when manufacturing simpler systems.

“That work could work out well for them, even for the sake of the technology, not just the company,” Ross said.

For Niowave, developing the technology isn’t just about maximising gradients. It also means perfecting a basic, so-called Entry Level model of superconducting cavity, much like the no-frills Chevrolet. This 20 megavolt-per-metre cavity can be produced at a significantly lower cost than the ILC’s 35 MV/m ‘Cadillac’ standard model, and since many of the company’s customers don’t need the highest possible gradients, the Entry Level could go over well with a fair share of their clients.

Niowave sees enough of a market that it stockpiles raw niobium so that it’s within arm’s reach, ready to be treated and shaped when an order comes in. It’s the only company in the world that can make that claim. Being able to pull niobium off the shelf is the convenient first step in an operation that develops turnkey accelerator systems, including cryogenics and beam testing. Conveniently, the company has a radiation generating license that allows them to conduct beam tests, something that’s otherwise reserved for laboratories.

Developing such systems is a relatively young enterprise for industry in the US.

“In the US, the niobium cavities were made at the laboratories themselves. That’s part of why it’s such a new business for industry,” Grimm said. “That’s where the ILC has been very helpful – getting industry and the labs working together. The ILC community keeps pushing for more work in that area.”

Niowave is housed in a former elementary school in Lansing, Michigan. The research and development of superconducting accelerators takes place in classrooms, offices and lounges – even in the boiler room. The name Niowave is a combination of ‘niobium’ and ‘microwave’. Image: Niowave

Other fields seem to be feeling the effect of the push. Niowave’s free-electron laser systems can help see through a cargo container that might be carrying illegal weapons materials. The company is also developing superconducting cavities for electron microscopes in which the high-frequency pulsed electron beam would make it possible to image a series of snapshots in a chemical reaction. There, researchers hope to be able see the chemical reactants transform into products in front of their eyes.

“Some of the scientists that are developing and using electron microscopes come to us. They have some of the things we need, but they have very little experience with microwaves and accelerating cavities,” Grimm said. “That’s where we come in.”

The same push to make better superconducting linacs has also been felt in the Lansing region’s economy, best known for automobile manufacturing. Also, Michigan State University, home of the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory and future Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), is a hub of atomic and particle physics expertise. A recent renewal of high-technology manufacturing has brought life to an area hit hard by the 2008 recession.

The multiplier effect, said Bob Trezise, CEO of Lansing Economic Development Corporation, is significant.

“This has certainly been true with Niowave, where almost all of its sales originate from customers outside of Michigan,” he said. “By combining the research at the new FRIB project and the commercialisation efforts of FRIB’s research at Niowave, mid-Michigan has established itself as a worldwide powerhouse for the superconducting accelerator industry.”

While reaching out to other areas of exploration, Niowave will continue developing cavities for the ILC.

“They have the opportunity to show that there’s a small business model for this technology,” Ross said.

Leah Hesla

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CERN announces competition for dance and performance arts residency

November 4, 2011 | 9:19 am

Performance at CERN by dancers from the Rudra-Béjart Ballet School of Lausanne. Image: CERN

Today the Collide@CERN residency program begins accepting submissions for artists working in dance or performance arts to come learn and create in the laboratory.

Unlike the program’s other residency in digital arts, which was announced at September’s Ars Electronica Festival, this competition is funded by the state and city of Geneva, Switzerland, and is limited to artists who were either born in the area or are currently living or working there.

“This shows how CERN is really connecting to the city,” the program’s leader Ariane Koek said, adding that it also fits into Geneva’s strategy for refocusing itself as a city of arts and sciences.

Collide@CERN will host two residencies each year for three years, starting with the digital arts and the dance and performance arts competitions. The latter residency may change art forms every year, though the digital arts residency will remain in place.

Each selected artist is given a cash prize, three months of housing, board and living stipends and a science partner from the laboratory with whom he or she will meet regularly. Throughout their program, both partners will keep a blog, and the artist will have an open meeting with other scientists over lunch fortnightly in a CERN cafeteria. At the beginning and end of the residency, the artist-scientist pair will also hold joint lectures, which will be open to the public and available to watch online.

“It’s creating a lab of the imagination here, which will lead to unexpected innovations in the arts and sciences,” Koek said. “I see this as a great experiment.”

Since dance and performance arts are such laborious undertakings, often requiring many elements to produce — mainly people and money  – Koek said completing a finished piece by the end of three months is unlikely. Instead, the goal of this residency is to create a work in progress that will hopefully be realized in the future with outside funding.

“Dance and performance are really the art forms most directly connected with time and space, which are the domain of particle physics,” Koek said.

Ballet by the Rudra-Béjart ballet school, Lausanne. Image: CERN

According to Koek, Collide@CERN residencies are designed to put art and science on the same level. Just as CERN physicists are meticulously selected for their expertise, artists will be selected with the same degree of consideration. A panel of five judges, including two members of the CERN cultural board, two dance and performance specialists from the region and one person from the Swiss arts council, Pro Helvetica, will make the final decision. “It’s to bring mutual respect and understanding across arts and science,” Koek said. “That’s what’s so radical about this program, and it is at such a high international level.”

The closing date for dance and performance arts submissions is Dec. 20. A selection will be announced in early January, with the residency to begin a few months later.

Amy Dusto

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