TED Ed Video: The Higgs Field explained - Don Lincoln

One of the most significant scientific discoveries of the early 21st century is surely the Higgs boson, but the boson and the Higgs Field that allows for that magic particle are extremely difficult to grasp.

Fermilab's Don Lincoln outlines an analogy (originally conceived by David Miller) that all of us can appreciate, starring a large dinner party, a raucous group of physicists, and Peter Higgs himself.

Lesson by Don Lincoln, animation by Powerhouse Animation Studios Inc.

Other informative animated videos are available here

Post Higgs breakthrough, CERN readies for next cosmic quest

A view of the detector in the 12,500-ton Compact Muon Solenoid experiment (CMS). Image courtesy of CERN

A year ago, the world's largest particle collider made one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science, identifying what is believed to be the Higgs Boson—the long-sought maker of mass.

Today, its computer screens are dark, the control desks unstaffed and the giant, supercooled tunnel empty of the crashing proton beams whose snapshots of the Big Bang helped flush out the elusive particle.

But the silence is an illusion.

Behind the scenes, work is pushing ahead to give the vast machine a mighty upgrade, enabling it to advance the frontiers of knowledge even farther.

The 27-kilometre (17-mile) circular lab, straddling the French-Swiss border 100 metres (325 feet) underground, went offline in February for an 18-month overhaul.

When experiments resume in 2015, scientists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) will use its enhanced power to probe dark matter, dark energy and supersymmetry—ideas considered as wild as the Higgs Boson was, half a century ago.

As engineers focus on the technical mission, physicists are sifting through the mountains of data that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has churned out since 2010, for there could be more nuggets to find.

"The things that are easy to spot have already been exploited, and now we're taking another look," said Tiziano Camporesi of CERN, noting wryly that dealing with the unknown was, well, unknowable.

"We always say that astronomers have an easier task, because they can actually see what they're looking for!"

The LHC's particle collisions transform energy into mass, the goal being to find fundamental particles in the sub-atomic debris that help us to understand the Universe. At peak capacity, the "old" LHC managed a mind-boggling 550 million collisions per second.

"We give the guys as many collisions as we can," said Mike Lamont, head of its operating team. "That's our bread and butter."

"Most of that stuff is not very interesting, so there are real challenges sorting out and throwing most of that away, and picking out the interesting stuff," he explained in the tunnel, which mixes installations fit for a starship with the low-tech practicality of bicycles for inspection tours.

Chinese Physicists Teleport Photons 60 Miles, Breaking current record

Good news for Science Fiction fans; Teleportation is real.

Using powerful lasers and optics to manipulate photons, or units of light, researchers in China set a record for teleporting a photon more than 10 miles (16 km), TIME reported in 2010.

Now a different team of physicists at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai says it has shattered that record, claiming to have sent a photon more than 60 miles (97 km).

Quantum teleportation, which has been around since 1997, is a little different than what you see in sci-fi movies. Considered “one of the holy grails of practical quantum communication,” as the scientists write in their abstract, teleportation is the ability to essentially move one object from one place to another without traversing the space in between.

But as Forbes explains, the actual object is not moving from point A to point B. Rather, the distant photon mirrors the information contained by the original photon, essentially becoming an identical twin.

The team’s greatest contribution is not necessarily the distance it made the data travel but the method it used to harness the 1.3-watt laser beam that carries it.

The longer a beam of light travels, the more it spreads out, causing the photon to lose information and trail off course. To keep the beam on target, the researchers created a technique that focuses and steers the laser.

Though beaming up humans and animals à la Star Trek is not on the agenda anytime soon, as the technology becomes more sophisticated, it will likely be applied to military communication.

What’s the big deal? As Matthew Luce, a researcher at the Defense Group Inc.’s Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, told TIME in 2010:

Theoretically, this method “cannot be cracked or intercepted,” says Luce. If the photons in the laser beam are observed by a third party, the particles themselves will be altered due to a law of physics called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which states that measuring a particle alters it. As such, the sender and receiver would be immediately informed that someone was snooping.

As Technology Review notes, “these guys clearly have their eye on the possibility of satellite-based quantum cryptography, which would provide ultra-secure communications around the world.” Experts say this all-but-unbreakable code would be a perfect way to transmit classified information such as military directives or codes.

 

MORE: China Announces 11.2% Increase in Military Spending

CERN LHC: Particle collider to get energy boost

European particle physicists say the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland will be run at higher energies in 2012 than in previous years

The higher energy 4 Tev level, 0.5 higher than levels used in 2010 and 2011, will allow the LHC to deliver the maximum possible amount of data this year before it goes into a long shutdown to prepare for even higher-energy running, a release from CERN headquarters in Geneva said Tuesday.

"When we started operating the LHC for physics in 2010, we chose the lowest safe beam energy consistent with the physics we wanted to do," Steve Myers, CERN's director for accelerators and technology, said.

"Two good years of operational experience with beam and many additional measurements made during 2011 give us the confidence to safely move up a notch, and thereby extend the physics reach of the experiments before we go into the LHC's first long shutdown."

In the last two years, the LHC has concentrated on narrowing the search for the Higgs boson, considered the foundation particle of particle physics.

However, to confirm its discovery or to rule out the Standard Model Higgs particle altogether will require one more year's worth of data, researchers said.

"By the time the LHC goes into its first long stop at the end of this year, we will either know that a Higgs particle exists or have ruled out the existence of a Standard Model Higgs," CERN's research director, Sergio Bertolucci, said.

"Either would be a major advance in our exploration of nature, bringing us closer to understanding how the fundamental particles acquire their mass, and marking the beginning of a new chapter in particle physics."

CERN SUSY: Higgs-Boson result means elegant universe is back on agenda

After a short spell on the rocks, a mathematically elegant view of the universe is back in vogue. 

Recent hints of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider help explain why we have not seen evidence for the beautiful theory of supersymmetry yet - and point to fresh ways to focus the search.

Supersymmetry, or SUSY, is an extension to the standard model of how particles and forces interact. Via elegant equations, it posits that every fundamental particle - including quarks, electrons, photons and neutrinos - has a heavier, as yet unseen "superpartner" with slightly different properties (see diagram). 

This smooths some embarrassing wrinkles in the standard model. However, not one superpartner has yet shown up at the LHC, the particle smasher at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, prompting fears that, despite its beauty, SUSY could be wrong.

That changed on 13 December, when LHC physicists reported that they might have found traces of the Higgs boson, the standard-model particle that is thought to give all others mass. The data suggested a mass for the Higgs close to 125 gigaelectronvolts, 133 times that of the proton and too light for a Higgs to survive without a heavier companion particle, which could be a superpartner.

"This is very good news for people who believe in supersymmetry," says Howard Baer of the University of Oklahoma in Norman. 

He's one of several researchers who have calculated what the suspected Higgs mass could mean for SUSY particle, or sparticle, detections at the LHC.

Baer reckons it can explain why sparticles have not yet been seen. Particles get their masses by interacting with the Higgs field; the stronger the interaction, the heavier the particle.

So if the Higgs is confirmed at 125 GeV, which is heavy for SUSY models, many superpartners must be on the heavy side too. 

Baer and colleagues calculated that in several different versions of SUSY, a 125-GeV Higgs means squarks (the SUSY version of quarks) and sleptons (SUSY versions of electrons and neutrinos) must weigh 10,000 GeV or more, far too heavy for the LHC's detectors to find (arxiv.org/abs/1112.3017).

"Even last summer, people thought that squarks might be quite light and around the corner," Baer says. 

"This makes it look like the LHC will have a little bit more difficulty trying to pull out a SUSY signal."

That's not to say the LHC won't find any sparticles, though.

Given the new estimated mass of the Higgs, Baer calculates that the gluino - superpartner to the gluon, which carries the force that holds atomic nuclei together - could be as light as 500 to 1000 GeV.

The LHC is already probing this range, albeit not for gluinos specifically. Light gluinos won't be detected directly, but by the particles they decay into.

Another possible super-quarry is the stop, the superpartner of the top quark. In some models of supersymmetry, there are two stops, one monstrously heavy and another relatively light. 

According to Marcela Carena at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, and colleagues, a 125-GeV Higgs could put the light stop between 100 and 130 GeV, easily visible at the LHC (arxiv.org/abs/1112.3336).

Of course, all this assumes that the Higgs signals recur in further experiments. Right now, they do not have the statistical significance to count as a discovery. "I very much hope that what we have seen so far finally ends up being the real Higgs," says Carena.

LHC Discovers First New Particle - Chi_b (3P)

CERN physicists, analysing data from the Atlas experiment, have made their first new particle discovery at the Large Hadron Collider, known as Chi_b (3P), which will help scientists better understand the forces that hold matter together.

This is the first clear observation of a new particle since the LHC opened in 2009. The LHC is the largest facility exploring fundamental questions in "big physics" by colliding proton particles together.

Physicists said the Chi_b (3P), which like the Higgs boson, is a boson, portends a new way of combining a beauty quark and its antiquark so that they bind together. But whereas the Higgs is not made up of smaller particles, the Chi_b(3P) combines two very heavy objects via the same 'strong force' which holds the atomic nucleus together.

According to Professor Roger Jones, who works on the Atlas detector at the LHC, the Chi_b (3P) is a more excited state of Chi particles already seen in previous collision experiments. "The new particle is made up of a 'beauty quark' and a 'beauty anti-quark', which are then bound together," he said.

He noted that people have thought this more excited state should exist for years, but nobody has managed to see it until now.

"The Chi_b(3P) is a particle that was predicted by many theorists, but was not observed at previous experiments, such as in my previous work on the D-Zero experiment in Chicago," said Dr James Walder, a Lancaster research associate who worked on the analysis.

"It's also interesting for what it tells us about the forces that hold the quark and the anti-quark together - the strong nuclear force. And that's the same force that holds, for instance, the atomic nucleus together with its protons and the neutrons," Jones said.

The physicist explained that LHC discoveries are an important part of this quest because they add to the wider background knowledge.

"The better we understand the strong force, the more we understand a large part of the data that we see, which is quite often the background to the more exciting things we are looking for, like the Higgs," Jones noted.

"While people are rightly interested in the Higgs boson, which we believe gives particles their mass and may have started to reveal itself, a lot of the mass of everyday objects comes from the strong interaction we are investigating using the chi b," he concluded.

CERN Physicists Anxiously Await News of Higgs Boson

High noon is approaching for the biggest manhunt in the history of physics.

On Tuesday morning, scientists from CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, are scheduled to give a progress report on the search for the Higgs boson — infamously known as the “God particle” — whose discovery would vindicate the modern theory of how elementary particles get mass.

The report comes amid rumors that the two competing armies of scientists sifting debris from hundreds of trillions of proton collisions in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, or L.H.C., outside Geneva, have both finally seen hints of what might turn out be the elusive particle when more data is gathered next year.

Alternatively, the experimentalists say that a year from now they should have enough data to rule out the existence of the most popular version of the Higgs boson, sending theorists back to their blackboards in search of another explanation of why particles have mass.

So the whole world will be watching.

ESA Cluster Mission: Cosmic particle accelerators

ESA's Cluster satellites have discovered that cosmic particle accelerators are more efficient than previously thought.

The discovery has revealed the initial stages of acceleration for the first time, a process that could apply across the Universe.

All particle accelerators need some way to begin the acceleration process. For example, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN employs a series of small accelerators to get its particles up to speed before injecting them into the main 27 km-circumference ring for further acceleration.

In space, large magnetic fields guide particles known as cosmic rays across the Universe at almost the speed of light, but are notoriously bad at getting them moving in the first place.

Now ESA's Cluster mission has shown that something similar to the 'staging' process used at CERN is happening above our heads in the natural particle accelerators of space.

On 9 January 2005, Cluster's four satellites passed through a magnetic shock high above Earth. The spinning craft were aligned almost perfectly with the magnetic field, allowing them to sample what was happening to electrons on very short timescales of 250 milliseconds or less.

The measurements showed that the electrons rose sharply in temperature, which established conditions favourable to larger scale acceleration.

It had long been suspected that shocks could do this, but the size of the shock layers and the details of the process had been difficult to pin down.

Steven J. Schwartz, Imperial College London, and colleagues used the Cluster data to estimate the thickness of the shock layer. This is important because the thinner a shock is, the more easily it can accelerate particles.

"With these observations, we found that the shock layer is about as thin as it can possibly be," says Dr Schwartz.

Thin in this case corresponds to about 17 km. Previous estimates had only been able to tie down the width of the shock layers above Earth at no more than 100 km.

This is the first time anyone has seen such details of the initial acceleration region.

LHC Physicists Get an Antimatter Surprise

This giant magnetic is part of the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland.

CREDIT: CERN/LHCb

The world's largest atom smasher, designed as a portal to a new view of physics, has produced its first peek at the unexpected: bits of matter that don't mirror the behavior of their antimatter counterparts.

The discovery, if confirmed, could rewrite the known laws of particle physics and help explain why our universe is made mostly of matter and not antimatter.

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider, the 17-mile (27 km) circular particle accelerator underground near Geneva, Switzerland, have been colliding protons at high speeds to create explosions of energy. From this energy many subatomic particles are produced.

Now researchers at the accelerator's LHCb experiment are reporting that some matter particles produced inside the machine appear to be behaving differently from their antimatter counterparts, which might provide a partial explanation to the mystery of antimatter.

CERN: Speed of light broken

Prof Jenny Thomas, of University College London, says the claims, if proven true, would call into question our very understanding of physics and the universe.

She said: "It would turn everything on its head. It is too awful to think about.

"The basic thing it that would be questioned is that there is an absolute speed limit which is the basis of special relativity and that is a huge building block of modern physics.

"It permeates everything to do with how we have modelled the universe and everything. It would be very hard to predict what the effects would be."

UPDATE: The ‘discovery’ was made by the OPERA experiment while the neutrinos were beamed from Geneva to a lab in Gran Sasso in Italy. The pre-print of the report, prepared by CERN and published today (23rd September) can be found here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897

Special relativity is integral to the understanding of particle accelerators and the creation of particle beams, which are of crucial importance in fields like medicine and engineering, she said.

It could even be that the most famous equation of all time, E=mc2, turns out to be incorrect because it is based on the law of special relativity, Prof Thomas said.

Before any conclusions can be drawn, the CERN team's results will be checked by scientists across the globe including at Fermilab near Chicago, where a similar experiment known as Minos is based.

Prof Thomas – the co-spokesperson for the Minos project – said the team had thrown up similar results several years ago but had discounted them because the possible margin of error was too high.

She said: "Our errors were rather large so we dismissed it. Nothing is further from your belief than that the results might be correct.

CERN Press Release by CMS: http://www.interactions.org/cms/?pid=1031063

"When I heard about the Cern results my first thought was that they must be wrong, there must be something they have not taken into account."

Potential errors could occur in the measurement of distance between the point the particle was created and where it was detected; the time it took to travel from one point to the other; or in the structure of the accelerator which the whole measurement relies upon.

Prof Thomas added: "I think everyone is sceptical. The scientists themselves have admitted they are sceptical but they cannot see what they have done wrong.

"We will repeat our experiment with higher precision, hopefully in the next six months."

The Fermilab team will then begin a second stage of their experiment, called Minos Plus, which is even more similar to the Cern trial and will deliver results accurate to one nanosecond, she said.

Big Bang experiments inside particle accelerators at CERN - images

A collection of tracks left by subatomic particles in a bubble chamber.

A bubble chamber is a container filled with liquid hydrogen which is superheated - momentarily raised above its normal boiling point by a sudden drop in pressure in the container.

Any charged particle passing through the liquid in this state leaves behind a trail of tiny bubbles as the liquid boils in its wake.

These bubbles are seen as fine tracks, showing the characteristic paths of different types of particle

Picture: SPL/Barcroft Media

Images of Big Bang experiments inside particle accelerators at CERN - Telegraph

Neutrino particle 'flips to all flavours'

An important breakthrough may be imminent in the study of neutrinos.

The multinational T2K project in Japan says it has seen indications in its data that these elementary particles can flip to any of their three types.

The results are provisional because experiments had to be suspended in the wake of the Tohoku earthquake in March.

But if confirmed, they would open the door to further research on where the matter in the Universe came from.

Specifically, such studies would ask why the cosmos is composed of normal matter rather than its opposite - antimatter - which theorists say must have been created in equal amounts at the Big Bang.

"It's a step on the road," explained Professor Dave Wark, of Imperial College London and the STFC's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, which leads the UK involvement in T2K.

"We want to address this asymmetry, but first we have to show that the different 'flavours' of neutrinos can spontaneously change into each other - something we call 'neutrino oscillation'. So far, our experiments have been very positive," he told BBC News.

Detecting 'ghosts'

Neutrinos are among the fundamental building blocks of matter. They swarm all about us.

The Sun, for example, releases them in huge quantities when it fuses hydrogen to make helium - the raw nuclear process at its core.

They are, however, very difficult to study because they interact so weakly with normal matter. Hence, their nickname - "ghost particles".

Nonetheless, scientists have been able to discern three flavours - electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos, and tau neutrinos.

Previous research has characterised two forms of oscillations.

The T2K experiment has now seen hints for a third transformation - that of a muon neutrino turning into an electron neutrino.

ALPHA stores antimatter atoms for nearly 17 minutes

The ALPHA Collaboration, an international team of scientists working at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, has created and stored a total of 309 antihydrogen atoms, some for up to 1,000 seconds (almost 17 minutes), with an indication of much longer storage time as well.

ALPHA announced in November, 2010, that they had succeeded in storing antimatter atoms for the first time ever, having captured 38 atoms of antihydrogen and storing each for a sixth of a second. In the weeks following, ALPHA continued to collect anti-atoms and hold them for longer and longer times.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley, including Joel Fajans and Jonathan Wurtele of Berkeley Lab's Accelerator and Fusion Research Division (AFRD), both UC Berkeley physics professors, are members of the ALPHA Collaboration.

Says Fajans, "Perhaps the most important aspect of this result is that after just one second these antihydrogen atoms had surely already decayed to ground state. These were likely the first ground state anti-atoms ever made." Since almost all precision measurements require atoms in the ground state, ALPHA's achievement opens a path to new experiments with antimatter.

A principal component of ALPHA's atom trap is a superconducting octupole magnet proposed and prototyped in Berkeley Lab's AFRD. It takes ALPHA about 15 minutes to make and capture atoms of antihydrogen in their magnetic trap.

"So far, the only way we know whether we've caught an anti-atom is to turn off the magnet," says Fajans. "When the anti-atom hits the wall of the trap it annihilates, which tells us that we got one. In the beginning we were turning off our trap as soon as possible after each attempt to make anti-atoms, so as not to miss any."

Says Wurtele, "At first we needed to demonstrate that we could trap antihydrogen. Once we proved that, we started optimizing the system and made rapid progress, a real qualitative change."

SKA: The Square Kilometer Radio Telescope Array

Download and View the SKA Animation Here

Over the past several years, discussions have been occurring in several countries about the next logical step in radio astronomy following the construction of the large millimetre array ALMA. 

An initiative has emerged to develop a telescope to provide two orders of magnitude increase in sensitivity over existing facilities at metre to centimetre wavelengths. 

To achieve this goal will require a telescope with one square kilometre of collecting area - one hundred times more collecting area than the Very Large Array (VLA).

Credit: Canadian glactic plane survey

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will probe the gaseous component of the early Universe, thereby addressing fundamental questions in research on the origin and evolution of the Universe. 

The SKA will complement planned facilities at other wavelengths, such as ALMA and James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). HI, CO and continuum radiation would be observed from the interstellar medium of most of the galaxies the JWST will discover in the infrared at large redshifts. 
 

Extensive discussion of the science drivers and of the evolving technical possibilities has led to a concept for the Square Kilometre Array and a set of design goals. 

The SKA will be an interferometric array of individual antenna stations, synthesizing an aperture with diameter of up to several 1000 kilometers. A number of configurations are under consideration to distribute the 1 million square metres of collecting area.

These include 30 stations each with the collecting area equivalent to a 200 metres diameter telescope, and 150 stations each with the collecting area of a 90 m telescope ( more about design and location proposals ).

Approximately 50% of the collecting area is to be contained within a centrally-condensed inner array of 5km diameter to provide ultrahigh brightness sensitivity at arc-second scale resolution for studies of the faint spectral line signatures of structures in the early Universe. 

Another 25 % of the collecting area will be located within a diameter of 150 km, and the remainder out to 3000 km or more. 

This high angular resolution capability will allow imaging of faint emission from the interstellar medium of distant galaxies, as well as the surface of stars, and the active nuclei of galaxies.

Particle Physics: TRIUMF Photowalk 2010

Click on the Image to view all the photos in Flickr

LHC Towards higher intensities - CERN Bulletin

Towards higher intensities - CERN Bulletin

Over the past 2 weeks, commissioning of the machine protection system has advanced significantly, opening up the possibility of higher intensity collisions at 3.5 TeV. The intensity has been increased from 2 bunches of 1010 protons to 6 bunches of 2x1010 protons. Luminosities of 6x1028 cm-2s-1 have been achieved at the start of fills, a factor of 60 higher than those provided for the first collisions on 30 March.

The recent increase in LHC luminosity as recorded by the experiments.

(Graph courtesy of the experiments and M. Ferro-Luzzi)

To increase the luminosity further, the commissioning crews are now trying to push up the intensity of the individual proton bunches.

After the successful injection of nominal intensity bunches containing 1.1x1011 protons, collisions were subsequently achieved at 450 GeV with these intensities.

However, half-way through the first ramping of these nominal intensity bunches to 3.5 TeV on 15 May, a beam instability was observed, leading to partial beam loss.

Work is now under way to understand, control and cure this instability by using longer bunches and by powering the special correction magnets (octupoles).

Chaos Theory Moves on: What about Entanglement?

At the level of atoms, our definition of chaos has run into a problem.

Chaos is usually defined by a system’s movement: Set a pendulum swinging, track exactly where it goes, and its motion will reveal whether it is chaotic. Atoms, however, are governed by the uncertainty principle, which means that their location cannot be known precisely. What’s more, the laws of quantum mechanics say that hypersensitivity to initial conditions, which is considered the primary characteristic of a chaotic system, is physically impossible for atoms—at least in the way it’s understood at the classical level.

This presents a serious quandary because quantum mechanics is considered the most basic set of universal laws. Chaos must have some connection with the quantum level, but how it manifests itself, or how to quantify it, has thus far eluded physicists. Work published recently in Nature helps shed light on this problem as researchers working with cooled atoms searched for what they call signatures of chaos.

If such hypersensitivity to initial conditions cannot happen in a quantum system, other red flags of classical chaos might still be detectable. This could indicate that chaos in some form could exist at the level of atoms, or, at the very least, would imply a connection between quantum events and classical chaos. “Though you will never be able to find hypersensitivity to initial conditions in the quantum system, you are able to tell if the outward signs produced by classical chaotic systems are the same in quantum systems,” says Poul Jessen of Arizona State University, the lead researcher on the Nature paper.

In order to see these signatures, physicists have taken the conditions that cause chaotic behavior in human-scale systems and applied them on the atomic level. Jessen and his collaborators recently succeeded in making a quantum “kicked top” out of cesium atoms for the first time.

Kicked tops are an excellent example of chaotic systems when it comes to classic physics. You start an object twirling—say, a gyroscope—and then give it a series of kicks and twists as it spins. The initial condition that decides whether a gyroscope moves stably or chaotically is the direction of its axis when it starts spinning.

In order to visualize the gyroscope’s behaviour, the different values of its angular momentum are plotted on the surface of a globe. Some initial orientations of its axis cause the momentum to swerve in a “chaotic sea,” covering most of the surface of the globe. But other orientations cause the spin to settle into stable, regular motion in one of three main “islands” in the sea.

In their experiment, researchers substituted atoms for gyroscopes and looked at how angular momenta affected the atoms’ quantum states. What they found was intriguing: Some spins of the quantum top locked the atoms into a stable set of islands, while other values let the atoms’ quantum states wander erratically.

The number and location of the islands, when plotted, corresponded eerily to the classical model. So while the atoms’ behavior could not technically be called chaotic because they cannot show hypersensitivity, they mimicked the evolution of the classical, chaotic system almost exactly. Other measurements indicated that the system might have some sensitivity to disturbances, another interesting link to chaotic behaviour.

These observations alone provided good evidence that something related to chaos was happening. But the most fascinating result was that one of the strangest properties of atoms, entanglement, shot up in areas corresponding to the chaotic sea. When two quantum-scale objects, like atoms or nuclei, are entangled, performing an action on one instantaneously affects the other even if vast distances separate the entangled objects. Einstein famously called entanglement “spooky action at a distance,” and it forms the basis of modern attempts to built quantum computers.

Could entanglement be a signature of chaos?

Read the full article in Seed magazine ..............

Large Hadron Collider (LHC) first synch test succesful

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has circulated two beams simultaneously for the first time, allowing the operators to test the synchronization of the beams and giving the experiments their first chance to look for proton-proton collisions.

With just one bunch of particles circulating in each direction, the beams can be made to cross in up to two places in the ring. From early in the afternoon, the beams were made to cross at points 1 and 5, home to the ATLAS and CMS detectors, both of which were on the lookout for collisions. Later, beams crossed at points 2 and 8, ALICE and LHCb.

"It's a great achievement to have come this far in so short a time," said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. "But we need to keep a sense of perspective - there's still much to do before we can start the LHC physics program."

Beams were first tuned to produce collisions in the ATLAS detector, which recorded its first candidate for collisions at 14:22 this afternoon. Later, the beams were optimized for CMS. In the evening, ALICE had the first optimization, followed by LHCb.

"This is great news, the start of a fantastic era of physics and hopefully discoveries after 20 years' work by the international community to build a machine and detectors of unprecedented complexity and performance," said ATLAS spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti.

"The events so far mark the start of the second half of this incredible voyage of discovery of the secrets of nature," said CMS spokesperson Tejinder Virdee from Imperial College London.

"It was standing room only in the ALICE control room and cheers erupted with the first collisions," said ALICE spokesperson Jurgen Schukraft. "This is simply tremendous."

"The tracks we're seeing are beautiful," said LHCb spokesperson Andrei Golutvin, "we're all ready for serious data taking in a few days time."

These developments come just three days after the LHC restart, demonstrating the excellent performance of the beam control system. Since the start-up, the operators have been circulating beams around the ring alternately in one direction and then the other at the injection energy of 450 GeV.

The beam lifetime has gradually been increased to 10 hours, and today beams have been circulating simultaneously in both directions, still at the injection energy.

Professor Norman McCubbin, Head of Particle Physics at the Science and Technology Facilities Council's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory said, "Achieving low-energy collisions in the LHC so quickly after the re-start is a huge boost for the worldwide particle physics community. We look forward eagerly to the next stages in commissioning the LHC and to embarking on our quest to unlock new secrets of the Universe as the machine becomes fully operational."

Prof. John Womersley, Director Science Programmes at STFC said, "The CERN accelerator team is doing a tremendous job and I congratulate them on achieving this vital step on the way to full operation of the LHC. As a scientist who has worked on this kind of machine myself, I understand the challenges involved - from here the CERN team will be working on increasing the number of particles in the beams and gradually ramping up the energy of these particles. The LHC will soon be the highest energy particle accelerator in the world, and in 2010 we can expect to see it start delivering new science."

Next on the schedule is an intense commissioning phase aimed at increasing the beam intensity and accelerating the beams. All being well, by Christmas, the LHC should reach 1.2 TeV per beam, and have provided good quantities of collision data for the experiments' calibrations

Mega Black Hole is Bigger than we first thought: Giga?

THE black hole at the centre of the M87 galaxy may be twice as big as originally thought - possibly large enough to measure directly.

M87 is 55 million light years away. Its central black hole devours vast amounts of gas and spews out a huge jet of particles that extends far into intergalactic space.

Karl Gebhardt at the University of Texas at Austin and Thomas Jens of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, weighed M87 by running existing data through a new model that simulates the galaxy on a supercomputer.

Unlike earlier efforts, the model accounts for the invisible halo of dark matter thought to surround the galaxy. Their analysis credited the monstrous central black hole with a mass of 6.4 billion suns - much more than was expected (The Astrophysical Journal, DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/700/2/1690).

(LHC) Large Hadron Collider Restarts, at half speed

(Image: CERN)

A technician inspects the site of a faulty electrical connection that damaged the LHC in September 2008

The world's most powerful particle smasher will restart in November at just half the energy the machine was designed to reach. But even at this level, the Large Hadron Collider has the potential to uncover exotic new physics, such as signs of hidden extra dimensions, physicists say.

CERN Lab

The LHC is a new particle accelerator at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, designed to answer fundamental questions, such as what gives elementary particles their mass, by colliding particles at higher energies than ever achieved in a laboratory before.

The First Attempt

The first attempt to turn on the LHC failed in September 2008 when a joint connecting a pair of superconducting wires overheated, causing an explosive release of helium used as a coolant. Scientists have been making repairs and checking the strength of other electrical connections since then to pave the way for a second start attempt.

Restart November

Now, CERN has announced that the LHC's first data collecting run, to begin in November, will collide protons at only half the energy the accelerator was designed to achieve. The run will initially smash protons together at 7 trillion electron volts (7 TeV), compared to the design goal of 14 TeV, according to a CERN statement on 6 August. (Protons in each of the two opposing beams will have 3.5 TeV of energy, producing collisions at 7 TeV.)

Even 7 TeV is much higher than physicists have ever probed in the laboratory before. The Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, is the current record holder, with collisions at 2 TeV.