Science news, Anthropology, Physics, Agriculture - Scicornwall

Prelude to the Higgs: A work for two bosons in the key of Z

Fermilab's DZero experiment observes rare ZZ diboson production

Batavia, Ill.— Scientists of the DZero collaboration at the US Department of Energy’s Fermilab have announced the observation of pairs of Z bosons, force-carrying particles produced in proton-antiproton collisions at the Tevatron, the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator. The properties of the ZZ diboson make its discovery an essential prelude to finding or excluding the Higgs boson at the Tevatron.

The observation of the ZZ, announced at a Fermilab seminar on July 25, connects to the search for the Higgs boson in several ways. The process of producing the ZZ is very rare and hence difficult to detect. The rarest diboson processes after ZZ are those involving the Higgs boson, so seeing ZZ is an essential step in demonstrating the ability of the experimenters to see the Higgs. The signature for pairs of Z bosons can also mimic the Higgs signature for large values of the Higgs mass. For lower Higgs masses, the production of a Z boson and a Higgs boson together, a ZH, makes a major contribution to Higgs search sensitivity, and the ZZ shares important characteristics and signatures with ZH.

The ZZ is the latest in a series of observations of pairs of the so-called gauge bosons, or force-carrying particles, by DZero and its sister Tevatron experiment, CDF. The series began with the study of the already rare production of W bosons plus photons; then Z bosons plus photons; then observation of W pairs; then WZ. The ZZ is the most massive combination and has the lowest predicted likelihood of production in the Standard Model. Earlier this year, CDF found evidence for ZZ production; the DZero results presented on Friday for the first time showed sufficient significance, well above five standard deviations, to rank as a discovery of ZZ production.

“Final analysis of the data for this discovery was done by a thoroughly international team of researchers including scientists of American, Belgian, British, Georgian, Italian and Russian nationalities,” said DZero cospokesperson Darien Wood. “They worked closely and productively together to achieve this challenging and exciting experimental result.”

DZero searched for ZZ production in nearly 200 trillion proton-antiproton collisions delivered by the Tevatron. Scientists used two analyses that look for Z decays into different combinations of secondary particles. One analysis looked for one Z decaying into electrons or muons, the other decaying into “invisible” neutrinos. The neutrino signature is challenging experimentally, but worthwhile because it is more plentiful. In the even rarer mode, both Z bosons decay to either electrons or muons. Just three events were observed in this mode, but the signature is remarkably distinctive, with an expected background of only two tenths of one event.

Sourced from Fermilab Press Room

The amazing quantum world of ultra cold matter

ESF's EUROCORES Program EuroQUAM presents itself at ESOF

Many of us have been fascinated by the concept of absolute zero, the temperature at which everything comes to a complete stop. But physics tells us otherwise: absolute zero cannot be reached but only approached, and the closer you get, the more interesting phenomena you find!

Three outstanding scientists from ESF's EUROCORES Programme EuroQUAM gave insight into this 'cool' matter at the event "The Amazing Quantum World of Ultra Cold Matter", held at this year's ESOF (Euroscience Open Forum) in Barcelona. It was co-organised by the European Science Foundation (ESF) and The Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) within the collaborative research programme "Cold Quantum Matter" (EuroQUAM).

Maciej Lewenstein leads the quantum optics theory group at ICFO and is a Humboldt Research Prize Awardee. Introducing the basics of quantum mechanics, he explained without mathematics why laser light cools atoms and told the audience about recent developments in atomic, molecular and optical physics and quantum optics, toward reaching temperatures close to absolute zero. "I expect major developments in fields like quantum information", said Lewenstein. He argued that while in classical physics absolute zero is in certain sense "boring", in the quantum world new, fascinating states of matter such as Bose-Einstein condensates arise at ultralow temperatures. Moreover, he elaborated on the tremendous advances in physics that have made such experiments possible, and which led to Nobel prizes in physics in 1997 and 2001. "Concerning Nobel Prizes in this area, it's only a question of who's next" predicted Lewenstein.

Christophe Salomon is Head of the cold Fermi gas group at Ecole Normale Supérieure, France and Principal Investigator for the ACES/PHARAO Space Clock Mission. He has received the "Three Physicists" prize (FR), the Mergier-Bourdeix Grand Prize of the French Academy of Sciences, the European Time and Frequency Prize, and the Philip-Morris Prize.

In his talk "Precision Time with Cold Atoms" he described an important application of cold atoms, the realization of ultra precise clocks. Using atomic fountains and microwave radiation, the SI unit of time, the second, is realised with an error of less than one second over 100 million years. Clocks operating in the optical domain show even better performances and cycles of light can now be easily counted with a femtosecond laser. "In a few years clocks will be able to monitor local changes of the Earth gravitational potential by using relativity, which might help us forecast tsunamis, earthquakes, or global climate warming", said Salomon.

The third speaker, Christopher Foot, Professor of Physics at Oxford University, elucidated "The extraordinary behaviour of quantum systems". Small particles such as atoms and electrons behave in strange ways that often seem very weird when compared to our everyday experience of large 'ordinary' objects such as a tennis ball or football. For these very small objects the effects of quantum mechanics are manifested in striking ways, which Foot outlined.

A single quantum object can exist in two places at once – "It is in a state of indecision" said Foot. Additionally, there is a second property of quantum systems of two or more particles that is truly difficult to understand, known as entanglement. Indeed Einstein pointed out that this so-called "spooky action at a distance" is so bizarre that he thought there must be something wrong. Experiments have shown, however, that the quantum world really behaves in this peculiar way. "By understanding it we can do new things such as build quantum computers that, in the future, could store and process far more information than 'ordinary computers' and may outperform them in certain applications, e.g. cracking the encryption commonly used to transmit information electronically" explained Foot.

With current technology, quantum systems of many atoms at temperatures less than one millionth of a degree above absolute zero can be made. These systems can be controlled in such a way that they act like small quantum calculating machines, or 'quantum simulators', with which the quantum properties of a wide range of other interesting physical systems can be studied. Foot also gave an example of this type of experiment currently carried out in the EuroQUAM Programme, where laser beams are used to form 'optical lattices' that resemble crystals.

Spanish Anchorman and former Minister of European Relations in the Spanish Government Eduardo Punset moderated the event, and Jürgen Eschner, an experimentalist and group leader from ICFO, was the main organizer of this activity of EuroQUAM. "I think our biggest challenge in the coming years is to bring together knowledge and entertainment, and the speakers captivated the public here in Barcelona" said Punset. ESOF marked a unique opportunity for EuroQUAM to go public with its research and make cold quantum matter more graspable. "We have clearly conveyed the fascination that the EuroQUAM scientists have for the exciting fundamental phenomena and technological opportunities of ultra-cold matter" concluded Eschner.

European Science Foundation

For further information on EuroQUAM, please go to www.esf.org/euroquam.   
For further information on EUROCORES, please go to www.esf.org/eurocores.
For further information on ICFO, please go to www.icfo.es.

Viterbi Algorithm goes quantum

An old technique helps Bob correctly decode Alice's entangled message qubits

       

Alice would like to transmit a stream of quantum information to Bob. She shares entanglement in the form of ebits before quantum communication begins. Red qubits belong to Alice and...               Click here for more information.

The Viterbi Algorithm, the elegant 41-year-old logical tool for rapidly eliminating dead end possibilities in data transmission, has a new application to go alongside its ubiquitous daily use in cell phone communications, bioinformatics, speech recognition and many other areas of information technology.

In a recent set of papers two investigators from the University of Southern California school that bears the name of the algorithm's inventor say it can play a key role in quantum communication.

Mark Wilde, a graduate student in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, collaborated with his faculty advisor Todd Brun on the work. The research is also his thesis, for which he will receive a PhD from the School's Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering in August.

Brun, an associate professor in the Hsieh Department, is also deputy director of the USC Center for Quantum Information Science & Technology.

The quantum communication applications Wilde and Brun explored are for an environment in which a sender "Alice" (the traditional sender name) is trying to send a quantum message to a receiver named (again by tradition) "Bob" using a stream of pairs of "entangled" photons.

"Such [entangled] photons," in the words of the recent New Scientist story, "obey the strange principles of quantum physics, whereby disturbing the state of one will instantly disturb the other, no matter how much distance there is in between them."

Use of such a system has been proposed for a variety of uses, including space based communication, and progress is being made on the physical devices that might create entanged photons for messages. But noise is created in the transmission of quantum data, an issue the USC work addresses using the time-hallowed Viterbi algorithm.

In the system considered by Wilde and Brun, Alice encodes each quantum bit of the message with the help of an ebit, an entangled qubit. She sends her part of the encoded quantum message over a noisy quantum communication channel, a process that can introduce errors.

From his side, Bob receives what Alice sent and combines her transmitted qubits with his half of the ebits. He measures all of the qubits, processes the results of the measurements, performs recovery operations, and finally decodes them, receiving the message qubits Alice sent. At the conclusion of the process Bob will have the transmitted quantum information error-free.

The above description is a condensed and simplified paraphrase of what is in fact a much more complex process, a ballet in which Alice and Bob can exploit ancilla or helper qubits, gauge or noisy qubits, and ebits to transmit both quantum and classical information.

But the bottom line question coming out remains, how does Bob know that the dancers were following the music, that the message he now has was transmitted correctly?

The fact that the noisy quantum communication channel can be modeled as a sequential process of steps, each step of which changes the state of the system, offers an opening. The Viterbi algorithm is, precisely, a way of analyzing the products of such progressions, called "Markov processes."

In Wilde and Brun's analysis, Bob watches the step coming out of his measurement process, testing them against statistical probabilities, using standard Viterbi tools.

Cell phones use similar programming to correct for errors in the transmission of digital voice data.

The result: Bob can reliably spot errors, and knows which message qubits are bogus before he opens the message - crucial, because opening it destroys it; and if it is garbled, he has nothing.

With thanks to the University of Southern California

Where did the Universe come from?

ssuming the Big Bang is a valid theory of the creation of Earth and the Universe, then where did the original mass come from, that formed everything that we see today?

First of all, note that mass and energy are equivalent. So, the total mass of the Universe need not be conserved even though the total energy (taking into account the energy that is equivalent of the mass in the Universe) is conserved. Mass and energy are related by the famous equation E=mc². Hence if there is enough energy, photons can create matter-antimatter pairs. This is called pair production and is responsible for the mass in the Universe.

As to where everything came from, there is no conclusive opinion. One idea was that the Universe was created from vacuum. This is because according to quantum theory, the apparently quiescent vacuum is not really empty at all. For example, it is possible for an electron and a positron (a matter antimatter pair) to materialize from the vacuum, exist for a brief flash of time and then disappear into nothingness. Such vacuum fluctuations cannot be observed directly as they typically last for only about 10^-21 seconds and the separation between the electron and positron is typically no longer than 10^-10 cm. However, through indirect measurements, physicists are convinced that these fluctuations are real.

Hence, any object in principle might materialize briefly in the vacuum. The probability for an object to materialize decreases dramatically with the mass and complexity of the object. In 1973, Edward Tyron proposed that the Universe is a result of a vacuum fluctuation. The main difficulty of this proposal is that the probability that a 13.7 billion year old Universe could arise from this mechanism is extremely small. In addition, physicists would question Tyron's starting point: if the Universe was born from empty space, then where did the empty space come from? (Note that from the point of view of general relativity, empty space is unambiguously something, since space is not a passive background, but instead a flexible medium that can bend, twist and flex.)

In 1982, Alexander Vilenkin proposed an extension of Tyron's idea and suggested that the Universe was created by quantum processes starting from "literally nothing", meaning not only the absence of matter, but the absence of space and time as well. Vilenkin took the idea of quantum tunneling and proposed that the Universe started in the totally empty geometry and then made a quantum tunneling transition to a non-empty state (subatomic in size), which through inflation (the Universe expands exponentially fast for a brief period of time which causes its size to increase dramatically) came to its current size.

Another idea is from Stephen Hawking and James Hartle. Hawking proposed a description of the Universe in its entirety, viewed as a self-contained entity, with no reference to anything that might have come before it. The description is timeless, in the sense that one set of equations delineates the Universe for all time. As one looks to earlier and earlier times, one finds that the model Universe is not eternal, but there is no creation event either. Instead, at times of the order of 10^-43 seconds, the approximation of a classical description of space and time breaks down completely, with the whole picture dissolving into quantum ambiguity. In Hawking's words, the Universe "would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE."

So, the origin of mass in the Universe and the Universe itself is quite speculative at this point. If you are interested, you can read Alan Guth's book "The Inflationary Universe", page 271-276. You can also read Hawking's "A brief history of time: From the Big Bang to black holes" page 136.

Ask an Astronomer is run by volunteers in the Astronomy Department at Cornell University.

WW2 Secrets - The Pysics of Water and the Sound Channel

The History:

During World War II, American pilots were given hollow metal spheres to be used when their planes went down over water. Metal, as you probably know, tends to be quite heavy and quite useless as a flotation device. So why were these pilots given chunks of metal? Well, they were told that if they dropped the sphere into the ocean, their current position could be worked out by allies in the region, and they would be rescued. However, as foreign intelligence was soon to find out, the spheres were just that - hollow metal spheres - no electronics, no radio equipment, no imbued magical properties. So was the military just playing with it’s pilots, or was there actually something to these spheres?

Well, some of the details are still kinda top secret, but with a little physics and an active imagination, it’s possible to work out how they were used. Arrgh! Scary! I just said the P word. Don’t worry, I’ll try to summarize things without delving to deep into the physics.

Simple Facts: The Ocean

• The deeper you go, the colder it gets
• The deeper you go, the higher the pressure

Simple Facts: Soundwaves

• Sound travels in waves

• These waves bend towards where the sound travels _slower_
• Sound travels faster in warm temperatures than cold temperatures

 

Combining the facts:

Normally, the temperature difference of water is quite gradual as you go deeper; however, there is a zone (at around 500m) where the temperature change is quite rapid. Therefore, any soundwaves entering this area, will be bent down. Once you are past this zone, at around 1km deep, the pressure becomes the dominant effect, and sound will bend upwards.

 

So, if a sound originates in the sweet spot, between these two areas of bending, it gets trapped, and ends up travelling great distances. This is called the sound channel:

Note, if a sound originates outside of this channel, it gets deflected somewhat, but doesn’t bend back enough to get trapped. Note also, that the lines here show the path of the wave, not the wave itself. View each line as a zoomed out version of the wave pictures above.

Keep your eye on the sphere:

So, the spheres that the pilots were dropping into the ocean were of a specific thickness that would be crushed by the ocean pressure at about 1km deep. This would cause a “ping” that could be detected by underwater microphones thousands of miles away. By triangulating the sound (kinda like how GPS works) the Navy was able to work out where the sphere was dropped and go rescue the pilot!

Implications - LOFAR:

I don’t believe it - I am about to recommend a Tom Clancey novel, The Hunt for the Red October. Tom goes into details as to how the US Navy took this technology and used it to detect submarines that entered the sound channel. I’d totally recommend buying it here for those of you who have enjoyed reading this posting.

Implications - Nature:

It turns out that nature beat us to the punch. Whales have been using the sound channel for years to communicate with each other over long distance via Whale Song!

Source

Particle Physicists Discover Lowest Energy "Bottomonium" Particle

Particle physicists working with the BaBar detector at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center have discovered a new particle in the bottomonium family of "quarkonium" particles. Technically it isn't a "new particle" it is a previously unobserved state of particle, but when we are talking about subatomic particles, their energy states become a big deal (and their names get very cool). We are in the realms of the vanishingly small and the discovery of the lowest energy bottomonium particle may not seem very significant. But in the world of quantum chromodynamics, this completes the long quest to find experimental evidence for this elusive meson and may help explain why there is more matter than anti-matter in the Universe…

Quarkonia are types of mesons containing two quarks: one quark and its anti-quark (they are therefore "colourless"). They belong to one of two families: "bottomonium" or "charmonium". As the names suggest, bottomonium contains a bottom quark and anti-bottom quark; charmonium contains a charm quark and anti-charm quark. Groups of three quarks (interacting via the strong force) are baryons (i.e. protons and neutrons) whereas groups of two quarks are mesons. Mesons are all thought to be made from a quark-antiquark pair and are therefore of huge importance when studying why there is more matter than anti-matter in the Universe.

This is where the BaBar detector at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), CA, comes in. The BaBar international collaboration investigates the behaviour of particles and anti-particles during the production of the bottomonium meson (bottom-antibottom quark pairs) in the aim of explaining why there is an absence of anti-particles in everyday life.

For each particle of matter there exists an equivalent particle with opposite quantum characteristics, called an anti-particle. Particle and anti-particle pairs can be created by large accumulations of energy and, conversely, when a particle meets an anti-particle they annihilate with intense blasts of energy. At the time of the big-bang, the large accumulation of energy must have created an equal amount of particles and anti-particles. But in everyday life we do not encounter anti-particles. The question, therefore, is "What has happened to the anti-particles?" - From the BaBar/SLAC collaboration pages.

All matter has a "ground state", or the lowest energy the system is trying to attain. As particles for instance try to reach this ground state, they lose energy, often in the form of electromagnetic radiation. Once reached, the ground state determines the baseline at which measurements can be made for higher energy states of those particles. And this is what the BaBar team has done, they have been able to isolate the lowest possible energy state for the bottomonium particle (which is far from easy). So what have they named the ground state of bottomonium? Quite simply: ηb, pronounced "eta-sub-b".

The bottomonium particle was generated during a collision between an electron and positron. The energy generated by this collision created a bottom quark and an anti-bottom quark bound together. At this point, the bottomonium particle was of too high an energy, but it very quickly decayed, emitting a gamma ray leaving the ηb behind. However, ηb's are highly unstable and will quickly decay into other particles, plus they are very rare and difficult to detect. This particular decay event only occurs once in every two or three thousand higher energy bottomonium decays, so many collisions had to be measured and a huge amount of data had to be gathered by the BaBar detector before a precise measurement of the ηb ground state could be gained.

"This very significant observation was made possible by the tremendous luminosity of the PEP-II accelerator and the great precision of the BaBar detector, which was so well calibrated over the BaBar experiment's 8-plus years of operation. These results were highly sought after for over 30 years and will have an important impact on our understanding of the strong interactions." - Hassan Jawahery, BaBar Spokesperson, University of Maryland.

If you want to find out more, you can check out the BaBar team's publication (with the longest list of co-authors I've ever seen!) or the SLAC press release.

Source

Super atoms turn the periodic table upside down

Researchers at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands have developed a technique for generating atom clusters made from silver and other metals. Surprisingly enough, these so-called super atoms (clusters of 13 silver atoms, for example) behave in the same way as individual atoms and have opened up a whole new branch of chemistry.

If a silver thread is heated to around 900 degrees Celsius, it will generate vapour made up of silver atoms. The floating atoms stick to each other in groups. Small lumps of silver comprising for example 9, 13 and 55 atoms appear to be energetically stable and are therefore present in the silver mist more frequently that one might assume. Prof. Andreas Schmidt-Ott and Dr. Christian Peineke of TU Delft managed to collect these super atoms and make them suitable for more detailed chemical experiments.

The underlying mechanism governing this stability in super atoms was described in Science by scientists from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2005. They had discovered metal super atoms, but from aluminium. Their aluminium clusters of 13, 23 and 37 atoms reacted in the same way as individual atoms because they comprised electrons that revolved around the atom cluster as a whole. These so-called outer layers were strikingly similar to the outer layers of elements from the periodic table.

The super atoms gave the periodic table a third dimension as it were, according to Schmidt-Ott: 'The chemical properties of the super atoms that have been identified up until now are very similar to those of elements in the periodic table, because their outer layers are much the same. However, we may yet discover super atoms with a different outer layer, giving us another set of completely new properties.'

Schmidt-Ott hopes to find atom clusters with new unique magnetic, optical or electrical properties, which would also be stable enough to create crystals or other solid forms. Potential applications include catalysts in fuel and extra-conductive crystals.

So although super atoms are nothing new, thanks to TU Delft the particles can now be collected in a very pure form and selected according to size, thereby making them suitable for chemical experiments.

Full article can be read in the new edition of TU Delft magazine Delft Outlook. See http://www.delftoutlook.tudelft.nl

Want to fly? Don't copy the birds and the bees

Since earliest recorded history, and presumably beyond, humans have always wanted to fly. First attempts involved imitation of winged creatures around them, and unfailingly ended in disaster. No workable flying machines have ever looked particularly similar to nature's fliers, and today there is little comparison between a top of the range military chopper and the humble bumblebee, despite similar flight patterns. In an era in which engineers are increasingly exploiting designs from nature, understanding this paradox is becoming ever more important. Dr Jim Usherwood, from the Royal Veterinary College, has studied the reasons behind these differences in aerodynamics and concluded that scientists should, in this instance, be more hesitant before imitating nature. He will be presenting his results on Sunday 6th July at the Society for Experimental Biology's Annual Meeting in Marseille [Session A3].

Dr Usherwood believes the reason that flying creatures don't look like man made machines is all to do with the need to flap. "Animals' wings, unlike propellers, have to keep stopping and starting in order produce lift (animals have forgotten to invent propellers, just as they forgot wheels)," he explains. "Think of vigorous waving, or perhaps exuberant rattling of a cocktail shaker - this takes a fair amount of power to overcome inertia. So, the idea is that both wing shape and how wings are used can be understood better if the effort of flapping is remembered, which explains why vultures don't look like gliders, and most winged creatures, from insects to pigeons, fly so inefficiently."

His research has centred on creatures as diverse as dragonflies and quails. Currently he is investigating the compromise winged creatures face between meeting aerodynamic requirements and overcoming inertia in order to generate lift, by loading wings of racing pigeons with lead fishing weights. He believes that lessons from all of these studies lead to the same conclusion. "My work should act as a reminder to be cautious in copying nature. There is lots of interest in making MAVs/UAVs (micro/unmanned air vehicles) that flap, which may present all sorts of advantages in terms of maneuverability, speed and so on. However, there is a tendancy to presume that biology is efficient, and I would say that, even at very small sizes, if you want to hover efficiently, be a helicopter not a flapper…"

For more information please visit Society for Experimental Biology

Fantastic video showing sound resonance with rice.

Just a quick warning, If you have sound on for this video turn it down a little bit as the frequancy gets very high and can hurt your ears >.<, It hurt mine!

Found this on Hollowmarked's Blog

Brian Cox Discusses the Large Hadron Collider at CERN

I was recently contact by a gentleman from that was involved in an interview with Brain Cox. The Interview is really long so I have put some highlights from the interview below! Thanks Tim at Oreilly.com

For a video of Brian Cox at the TED conference check out an earlier post I made

Brian Cox on CERN's supercollider

TO: Is there any real disagreement? Are there camps that have developed?

BC: Oh absolutely; there's a huge disagreement because this is--it's truly a leap into the unknown. I mean you hear that a lot about scientific experiments but this one really is a big jump. The most powerful accelerator at the moment is in Chicago actually; the Tevatronat Fermilab where I've worked. I worked there before I moved onto the LHC. And the LHC is an order of magnitude pretty much--increase in energy and it's a huge increase in the number of proton/proton collisions we can have every second, so it--in a sense I was going to say all bets are off. It's not quite true; I mean we know some things that we're going to discover so we will discover the origin of mass in the universe, the mechanism that generates the mass for the fundamental particles.

TO: And that would be the Higgs Boson?

BC: Well yeah it would be. I mean the correct thing to say is whatever does that job we should see. I mean I would say actually we will see; as long as the machine functions properly we'll see it. It could be the Higgs; yes--in a sense the most likely and that it's a theory that works and--but it could be something else and you will find people who don't--certainly don't believe in the so-called standard model Higgs. There--there are many different Higgs theories; there's the--or Higgs manifestations of the Higgs mechanism. One of the--the standard model of the Higgs at the [simplest] you find one Higgs particle covers standard model Higgs, but there are so-called sleeper symmetric theories that many people think are actually possibly more likely. And in some of those theories, the [simplest] you get five Higgs particles. You know so--so even the Higgs--you can have different camps as to how many Higgs particles you'll find. It's fascinating times to be a particle physicist.

TO: So the existence of the Higgs was suggested in the early '90s in Chicago; is that true?

BC: No; it was the--we've got no direct experimental evidence for the Higgs particle. We've got--we've got indirect evidence in that the standard model of which it starts, which our best theory of particle physics at the moment--works and as far as--and you can--we tested it to immense precision in Chicago at Tevatron and experiments at CERN and at SLAC for that matter in San Francisco and elsewhere. And it always--it works beautifully well and the Higgs is a part of that. So you can claim it as indirect evidence but you can evade that indirect evidence actually very easily in the theories. So the correct thing to say is it might not exist; it might be something else that we haven't thought of yet.

TO: It's called the Large Hadron Collider but I've heard you say protons.

BC: Yeah.

TO: Was the reasoning behind calling it the Large Hadron Collider is it going to be colliding other things besides protons?

BC: Well you can actually yes; it can collide nuclei so there is a program at the LHC to collide gold nuclei which is what RHIC does--the Relative Heavy Iron Collider--at Brookhaven in New York. And so it can--it can collide different things. The proton program is kind of the you know--the lead program in a sense because that's how you get the most amount of energy to the smallest amount of space, so you can try to look at things like Higgs particles. But there's a whole program--clan within a detector called Alice which is dedicated to heavy iron collisions, the nucleus collisions and they look at these things called quark gluon plasmas, which that's the way the universe was believed to be let's say a millionth of a second after it began--it's a big soup of quarks and gluons. So it can bang together other things, but--yeah; maybe it's just--I don't know why you'd call it--you could have called it the Large Collider I suppose. I don't know why it's called the LHC; I'd have to ask--Lyn Evans is one of the LHC Project Leaders. It's a good question; I'm going to ask him that.

TO: So it's not a large particle per se; it's just a "large Collider"? It could be called the "Hadron Collider"?

BC: Yeah, yeah; no large just means big 27-kilometer in circumference ring, so [Laughs] yeah. I mean--although it's got to be said actually that protons are pretty big things compared to the things we're looking for, the elementary particles of matter.

Some questions excluded

TO: In the circle and the protons travel in some sort of perfect vacuum? I mean how do they--

BC: Yes; there are actually two pipes for most of the LHC, so two beam pipes and they're about you know what--10-centimeters maybe across you know--they're not very big pipes, so one going one way and one going the other way and those pipes are in a--in what we call a cryostat so which is where the magnets are as well and that's I'm told one yard across--. Now that's not me being quaint in English. It's the only imperial measurement in the LHC and it's there because that's the diameter of a standard oil pipe. This is what I'm told, so it's cheaper to make things one-yard across. So basically you've got a big pipe--one yard across with all the magnets and the beam pipes embedded in it and that's the thing that's down at the--at minus 271-degrees. And then as you say the beams are in beam pipes and those bean pipes emerge into one pipe at the interaction point so at the places where you cross the beams through each of the--so you get the collision and that happens inside the four detectors of the LHC.

TO: There are four main test points on the circle?

BC: Yeah; basically--that's right.

TO: And these are--what have these machines like--if you look at something called the Atlas or the CMS, these are at each of the points and that's what you work on?

BC: Yes; so Atlas is a--you think of a digital camera. It really is except that it's 40-meters long and 20-meters high; it's a big cylinder. It's in a cavern 100-meters below the ground. It's bigger than the nave of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. So it's an immense structure but its job is to sit around the point where you pass the beams through each of them so you collide the protons together and it's in those collisions that you--one way of thinking about it is recreating the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began--for a fraction of a second and it's in those conditions that you hope to reveal the earth--I suppose the underlying simplicity of the universe.

TO: Two protons, two positively charged particles each made up of three quarks a piece--what do you get when you bang those together?

BC: Well what you do is you get a big mess is the answer. [Laughs] And what happens I mean protons are actually full of stuff. The three quarks is a simple view; there's other things called gluons in there. There are more quarks that are not in there in a sense so it's a big bag of particles and what you actually do is you collide two of the constituents together so let's say two gluons bump into each other. The rest of the protons fly out in the direction in which they came as a big cloud of debris really. So typically you'll bang two gluons together and it's that--that you're interested in. Those two gluons could produce a Higgs particle let's say and then the Higgs particle will decay into other particles and you'll collect that debris as well. So you're interested--the protons are really energy deliverers. All you're doing is trying to get energy into this small space and out of that energy you would hope to make new particles that you've never seen before.

For more of the interview please check the whole thing over at Oreilly

Really Phun Pysics engine software!

Take a look at this video of this cool software and then download, would provide ours of fun to anyone!!
Avaliable PC, Linux MAC

Download

UBC physicists develop 'impossible' technique to study and develop superconductors

A team of University of British Columbia researchers has developed a technique that controls the number of electrons on the surface of high-temperature superconductors, a procedure considered impossible for the past two decades.

Led by Physics Assoc. Prof. Andrea Damascelli, the team deposited potassium atoms onto the surface of a piece of superconducting copper oxide. The approach allows the scientists to continuously manipulate the number of electrons on ultra-thin layers of material.

The details are published this week in the prestigious journal Nature Physics.

Superconductivity – the phenomenon of conducting electricity with no resistance – occurs in some materials at very low temperatures. High-temperature superconductors are a class of materials capable of conducting electricity with little or no resistance in temperatures as high as -140 degrees Celsius.

"The development of future electronics, such as quantum computer chips, hinges on extremely thin layers of material," says Damascelli, Canada Research Chair in the Electronic Structure of Solids.

"Extremely thin layers and surfaces of superconducting materials take on very different properties from the rest of the material. Electrons have been observed to re-arrange, making it impossible for scientists to study," says Damascelli. "It's become clear in recent years that this phenomenon is both the challenge and key to making great strides in superconductor research.

"The new technique opens the door to systematic studies not just of high-temperature superconductors, but many other materials where surfaces and interfaces control the physical properties," says Damascelli. "The control of surfaces and interfaces plays a vital role in the development of applications such as fuel cells and lossless power lines, and may lead to new materials altogether."

The superconductors Damascelli's team experimented on are the purest samples currently available and were produced at UBC by physicists Doug Bonn, Ruixing Liang and Walter Hardy.

Part of the study was carried out at the Advanced Light Source synchrotron in California. In the future, the design and study of novel complex materials for next-generation technologies will be carried out at the Quantum Materials Spectroscopy Center currently under construction at the Canadian Light Source in Saskatoon under Damascelli's leadership.

University of British Columbia Via Eurekalert

Brian Greene on String Theory

Here is the video of Brian Greene on string theory. This is part of my insight into the LHC, the who's what and whys. Although Brian Greene is not working on the LHC himself I still feel this is relevant and can explain some underlying annoyances I didn't quite get and goes nicely with the first video from Brian Cox, Brian Cox on CERN's supercollider.

Enjoy source for this video is from ted.com

Brian Cox on CERN's supercollider

I recently got back into watching the talks on Ted.com. Reason for this being is that I picked up on a video about the CERN Supercollider. I found this Brian Cox's talk to be a great help in my understanding of what the CERN project is all about, the shear size of the project and the reasons behind this idea. Enjoy :)

Link to Ted.com  Brian Cox