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Large Hadron Collider


A.J

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Posted
  • Location: Sunderland
  • Weather Preferences: Hot Summer, Snowy winter and thunderstorms all year round!
  • Location: Sunderland

I was looking to make an update on the LHC thread, but noticed it had been banished to the NW Archives, so I'd like to start a new thread if it's ok with the powers that be....

At the moment, scientists at the LHC are in the middle of a 4 week long experiment, using the ALICE & ATLAS detectors to measure & collect data on lead ion particle collisions...These type of collisions, as opposed to proton collisions, result in much higher particle densities and temperatures, the aim of which is to observe quark-gluon plasma, which in turn will allow to team to learn more about the 'Strong nuclear force' (one of the 4 basic forces of physics)

It must be noted that the media have, as usual, misreported the experiments, claiming that 'Boffins have created a mini-big bang' in their experiments...This is complete rubbish, as what scientists have achieved is in recreating the conditions of the universe, in an controlled enviroment, that existed in the 1st few billionths of a second after the initial 'explosion/expansion' of space-time....This doesn't sound like much time, but believe it or not, but even in this incredibly short space of time, our universe had already gone through several cosmological phase transitions, and besides the originating singularity was a zero dimensional object (in theory) so you can't have a 'mini' anything, at that scale!...... Sorry, misreported science stories just get my back up! :rolleyes:

For a more in depth analysis of the on-going experiments, please click on the official CERN link

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Posted
  • Location: Cheltenham,Glos
  • Weather Preferences: Thunderstorms :D
  • Location: Cheltenham,Glos

Yes, they are really progressing well. Have been following it daily for 2 years on here http://meltronx.com/lhclite/index.html and also am a member of the Lhc portal forum where one of my Lhc friends has been getting aquainted with one of the Cern Physicists .. If anybody comes across a russian bloke called Ivan Gorelik, don't worry he is a scaremonger , do not take him seriously he has frightened a lot of people with his so called theories and according to a Cern Physicist I emailed, he mentions there's nothing scientific in what he says lol... Well done to Cern for getting this far.:D

http://www.lhcportal.com/

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Posted
  • Location: Aldborough, North Norfolk
  • Location: Aldborough, North Norfolk

Good to see the thread resurrected, and good to see how well they are doing..

And I hate badly reported science stories as well really bugs me when it shows that the reporter obviously doesn't know his/her field

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  • 8 months later...
Posted
  • Location: Eastbourne, East Sussex (work in Mid Sussex)
  • Location: Eastbourne, East Sussex (work in Mid Sussex)

It looks like scientists from two different research facilities may have identified the sub atomic, 'Higgs Boson' particle last week:

You wait millions of years for a God particle to come along, and then two clusters turn up at once.

Scientists in the US announced they may have detected the elusive and potentially universe-changing Higgs boson particle yesterday, just two days after rivals in Switzerland signalled that they, too, have caught their first sight of it. The physicists working at the Fermilab facility in Illinois may not be as well known as their more illustrious competitors at the Cern Institute near Geneva, which attracted widespread media attention and predictions of an apocalypse when its Large Hadron Collider.

However, Fermilab have their own version of the $10 billion collider, known as the Tevatron, in which they are also accelerating beams of protons and antiprotons around tunnels many miles long at extreme speeds. Both teams are doing this to create high-energy collisions between the particles, which they believe should produce the mysterious Higgs boson.

This puzzling sub-atomic object is the key missing element in the Standard Model theory of particle physics, hence its "God particle" nickname.

If its existence can be proven, it will confirm our understanding of why some elements of our universe have a mass, while others, such as light, do not. And the problem, scientists believe, is not so much in creating the boson but in observing it.

It was on Friday that the team working on the Cern project said they had finally detected the first "bumps" in data collected from their particle collisions, and that was followed yesterday by similar, though not quite as strong, results released from the Fermilab team.

However, while there was excitement at the announcements at the Europhysics conference in Grenoble, south-eastern France, it could be as long as a month before the results can be verified. For now, the researchers are saying their findings are merely "hints", and what they think are signs of the Higgs boson could yet be eliminated during the filtering of the data.

But coming together in such a short space of time and offering similar forms of data, the work of these two labs appears to offer reassurance that the Standard Model is correct – and that the billions of dollars invested in the programmes have been well spent. The Fermilab team will doubtless feel especially pleased as the Large Hadron Collider has made their Tevatron obsolete, and it is set to close in September.

Someone else likely to feel he is on the road to final vindication is Professor Peter Higgs, the theoretical particle physicist after whom the particle is named. Now in his eighties, Higgs first proposed its existence more than 40 years ago when he was a young theoretical physicist at the University of Edinburgh. Almost nobody took him seriously then, with even the Cern-based editor of a leading physics journal thinking it was too doubtful to be published. How times have changed.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/breakthrough-hailed-in-quest-for-god-particle-2319902.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14266358

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Posted
  • Location: Beccles, Suffolk.
  • Weather Preferences: Thunder, snow, heat, sunshine...
  • Location: Beccles, Suffolk.

Saw that on my mobile; it's very interesting, too. Will the LHC prove its worth?

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Posted
  • Location: Cockermouth, Cumbria - 47m ASL
  • Weather Preferences: Winter - snow
  • Location: Cockermouth, Cumbria - 47m ASL

That article proves nothing. It reads more like a spoilt child having a tantrum because his or her idea wasn't given the same interest.

The LHC is one of the most important experiment of modern time - even if it fails as a failure will allow theory to look elsewhere for the key parts to the theory of everything.

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Posted
  • Location: Aldborough, North Norfolk
  • Location: Aldborough, North Norfolk

Am I alone in thinking that 2 lots of "Spikes" in data announced within hours of each other just seems wrong? I'd like to see when the spikes happened, could they have happened at the same time on different sides of the planet? if they did, what was the external influence that caused the spike?

So far more questions than answers

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Posted
  • Location: 4 miles north of Durham City
  • Location: 4 miles north of Durham City

That article proves nothing. It reads more like a spoilt child having a tantrum because his or her idea wasn't given the same interest.

The LHC is one of the most important experiment of modern time - even if it fails as a failure will allow theory to look elsewhere for the key parts to the theory of everything.

I disagree.

http://hozturner.blogspot.com/2011/05/newspaper-article-about-plasma.html

http://sites.google.com/site/cosmologyquest/peer-reviewed-papers

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Posted
  • Location: Swallownest, Sheffield 83m ASL
  • Location: Swallownest, Sheffield 83m ASL

I've recently been watching a few videos on the subject of the electric universe and it is an interesting subject. It doesn't however mean the LHC is a waste of money. I do agree though that more money should be made available to other scientific studies.

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Posted
  • Location: Eastbourne, East Sussex (work in Mid Sussex)
  • Location: Eastbourne, East Sussex (work in Mid Sussex)

Make your minds up!!!

We may not have found God particle after all, admits Hadron chief

Fevered speculation about the discovery of the so-called "God particle" by physicists at Europe's underground atom-smasher experiment is premature, according to the director general of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) near Geneva. Professor Rolf Heuer said yesterday that his scientists had detected "intriguing fluctuations" in the data gathered by Cern's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is searching for the elusive Higgs boson, a subatomic particle predicted by Professor Peter Higgs of Edinburgh University in the 1960s but so far never detected.

Professor Heuer cautioned that the data fluctuations detected by Cern scientists may turn out to have nothing to do with the Higgs boson and could even be random statistical "noise" generated when beams of protons are crashed together within the LHC at velocities just short of the speed of light.

The Higgs, mischievously nicknamed the "God particle" by one physicist, is predicted to confer mass to other sub-atomic particles and matter. If it exists, the LHC – a 27km circular tunnel that straddles the Swiss-French border – is powerful enough to detect it, but researchers have first to eliminate any random fluctuations that could interfere with their observations, which is why they are urging caution about these early results.

"Don't expect too much too quickly," Professor Heuer said at an international meeting of physicists in Grenoble to review the LHC's first few months of gathering data. "You have to be careful about combining small numbers because you can easily be fooled. "I hope the first big discovery will come next year, namely the discovery of the Higgs boson. I have learned in life to be patient, something will come," he said.

It is still possible that the particle does not actually exist, but that would mean physicists would have to abandon the Standard Model, their fundamental theory of how the many different subatomic particles interact with one another. Two experiments attached to the LHC, called Atlas and CMS, are both detecting interesting fluctuations in the "low mass" region of energy levels where the Higgs could exist, according to Professor Heuer. However, so far the evidence is still equivocal and is unlikely to be strong enough to confirm or refute the existence of the Higgs until the end of 2012.

"I think towards the end of next year we'll have the answer. The Higgs is not like any other subatomic particle. The difference is that with the Higgs we know everything about it, but whether it exists," Professor Heuer said. "[its discovery] will come slowly. In the meantime you will hear what I can only call rumours, but slowly the right signal will be creeping up, and we need to see it creeping up in both experiments," he said. "We are really living in exciting times for particle physics. To a large extent it's due to the LHC. It's working really well, beyond my expectations.

"Now it's bringing us into unchartered territory. We are still missing the Higgs boson, the key particle of the Standard Model. If we find it, the Standard Model is complete, and if we don't find it, then the Standard Model has a problem," Professor Heuer said. "If we fail to find the Higgs, the Standard Model is no longer valid as we know it today."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/we-may-not-have-found-god-particle-after-all-admits-hadron-chief-2325940.html

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Posted
  • Location: 4 miles north of Durham City
  • Location: 4 miles north of Durham City

I've recently been watching a few videos on the subject of the electric universe and it is an interesting subject. It doesn't however mean the LHC is a waste of money. I do agree though that more money should be made available to other scientific studies.

I'm sure it could come to some other use :p

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  • 3 weeks later...
Posted
  • Location: Cheltenham,Glos
  • Weather Preferences: Thunderstorms :D
  • Location: Cheltenham,Glos

Interesting smile.png

Help CERN search for the Higgs boson

If you have been following our reports on new developments in the search for the Higgs Boson you may be itching to get involved yourself. Now you can by joining LHC@Home 2.0 a new project for people to run simulations of LHC particle collisions on their home PCs.

Projects like this used to be difficult to set up because the software is written to run on LINUX systems, but a new virtual machine environment from Oracle has made it much easier. CERN runs simulations on a powerful global computing grid but you can never have too much CPU time for the calculations they have to do.

Running monte carlo simulations to compare with the latest experiments is an importnat part of the analysis that goes into the plots they show at the conferences. CERN have been making extraordinary efforts to show results as quickly as possible to the public but these calculations is one of the limiting factors that keeps us waiting. Getting the public involved in the process may be one way to solve the problem.

http://blog.vixra.org/2011/08/11/help-cern-search-for-the-higgs-boson/

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  • 1 month later...
Posted
  • Location: Sunderland
  • Weather Preferences: Hot Summer, Snowy winter and thunderstorms all year round!
  • Location: Sunderland

Although not actually part of the LHC experiments, the following link describes an interesting experiment at CERN, the results of which suggest the detection of Neutrinos (near-massless particles) traveling at superluminal (faster-than-light) speeds..

http://www.bbc.co.uk...onment-15017484

Whilst newsworthy, it should be added that the BBC article is factually innacurate in that it states that superluminal velocities violate the theories of relativity as written by Einstein...This is incorrect because superluminal velocities do not violate special relativity as special relativity theories that the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) is not constant in all places....Worth baring in mind that Physicists have long theorised the existance of sub-atomic particles called Tachyons, which according to physical law can only travel at superluminal speeds, if they do indeed exist....Fascinating stuff though!

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  • 2 months later...
Posted
  • Location: Doncaster South Yorkshire 4m( 13ft) ASL
  • Location: Doncaster South Yorkshire 4m( 13ft) ASL

Physicists to Make Major 'God Particle' Announcement Next Week

Scientists at the Swiss lab that hosts the world's largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will announce their latest findings in the search for an elusive subatomic particle called the Higgs boson or "God particle," next week. Already blogs and online news outlets are abuzz with speculation about the big announcement.

http://www.space.com/13871-physicists-major-god-particle-announcement-week.html

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Posted
  • Location: Cheltenham,Glos
  • Weather Preferences: Thunderstorms :D
  • Location: Cheltenham,Glos

Physicists to Make Major 'God Particle' Announcement Next Week

Scientists at the Swiss lab that hosts the world's largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will announce their latest findings in the search for an elusive subatomic particle called the Higgs boson or "God particle," next week. Already blogs and online news outlets are abuzz with speculation about the big announcement.

http://www.space.com/13871-physicists-major-god-particle-announcement-week.html

Yes, very interesting, can't wait to see what their recent results show. Looking forward to when the LHC goes up to 14 Tev although they are more likely to see signs of the higgs at a lower energy as they have mentioned.

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  • 6 months later...
Posted
  • Location: Eastbourne, East Sussex (work in Mid Sussex)
  • Location: Eastbourne, East Sussex (work in Mid Sussex)

OK, maybe this is a better place to put this, but I'm still not sure if we have or have not got the Higgs boson!

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5h0IZahtxBjCOSAPgH07Q36k0RvQA?docId=N0253441341316060907A

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Posted
  • Location: Beccles, Suffolk.
  • Weather Preferences: Thunder, snow, heat, sunshine...
  • Location: Beccles, Suffolk.

'You can't have Mass without me!' Said the Higgs Boson to the bishop...

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Posted
  • Location: Lower Brynamman, nr Ammanford, 160-170m a.s.l.
  • Location: Lower Brynamman, nr Ammanford, 160-170m a.s.l.
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Posted
  • Location: Upper Tweeddale, Scottish Borders 240m ASL
  • Location: Upper Tweeddale, Scottish Borders 240m ASL

Aye, when I was having dinner with Professor Higgs a few weeks ago, it was a badly kept secret around the table then *ahem* :winky:

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Posted
  • Location: Napton on the Hill Warwickshire 500ft
  • Weather Preferences: Snow and heatwave
  • Location: Napton on the Hill Warwickshire 500ft

Aye, when I was having dinner with Professor Higgs a few weeks ago, it was a badly kept secret around the table then *ahem* wink.png

Basically as I understand it you acquire more mass by more interaction with this thing. I'm sticking well clear.

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See they are closing Hadron for a couple of years or so for an upgrade - the next thing they have in their sights is an investigation into 'dark matter' which they are hoping to start at the end of the decade.

I hope they hurry up - I will be getting ontowards 80 then and not sure how long I will be able to hang on.search.gif

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Posted
  • Location: Horsham, West sussex, 52m asl
  • Location: Horsham, West sussex, 52m asl

the wife was looking for a Large Hadron Collider on ebay... until i told her that's not how you spell it....

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