Tag: physics
World’s Biggest, Fastest Particle Collider Restarts

World’s Biggest, Fastest Particle Collider Restarts

By Thomas Burmeister, dpa (TNS)

BASEL, Switzerland — The Large Hadron Collider restarted Sunday after a two-years of work to make the biggest machine ever built even faster in the hope that it will unspin the secrets of the creation of the universe.

Particles were pushed through the collider’s 17-mile tunnel for the first time since February 2013, said the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).

“There is great joy here,” CERN director general Rolf-Dieter Heuer said at the control centre in Meyrin, near Geneva. “It came off brilliantly.”

The collider, which is under the Swiss-French border, accelerates subatomic particles to nearly the speed of light and smashes them together with the aim of clarifying the theory of the Big Bang, believed to be the moment the universe sprang to life 14 billion years ago.

The renovations at the collider have revved up the already record-breaking machine so the energy of its particle collisions will be nearly doubled, opening up the possibility of discovering new particles and testing unproven theories.
Heuer said CERN expects its collider to be up to full speed in about two months, after the new equipment is calibrated and particle streams intensified.

Part of what the CERN scientists hope to discover is how elementary particles acquire mass.

The collider was restarted nearly three years after experiments there showed that the Higgs boson particle is likely to exist. The particle is believed to be responsible for all mass in the universe. The Higgs boson, nicknamed the “God particle,” was the missing piece in the standard model of physics, which describes how nature’s smallest building blocks interact but could not previously explain why they have mass.

It could also unlock other mysteries left unexplained by the standard model, including dark matter, a form of invisible matter that is believed to make up most of the universe.

CERN researchers said they hope the collider will provide the first concrete evidence for the existence of dark matter, as well as information about its composition.

“The restart with notable higher energy opens up the chance to push forward into unexplored regions and to discover new physics phenomena like dark matter,” said Joachim Mnich, director of particle physics at Germany’s national research center that operates particle accelerators. “All particle physicists involved look towards Geneva with excitement.”

Mnich and the 150 other researchers at his center are among the tens of thousands of scientists taking part worldwide in the CERN experiments.

“We are all excited how quickly now after more than two years of construction that the first particle stream occurred successfully in the accelerator ring,” Heuer said.

But he advised patience about when new discoveries might be announced.

“I am very careful here” about predictions, he said.

(c)2015 Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH (Hamburg, Germany), Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Photo: Mark Hillary, Flickr

Trio Win Nobel Prize In Physics For Blue-Light Emitting Diodes

Trio Win Nobel Prize In Physics For Blue-Light Emitting Diodes

By Dpa Correspondents, dpa

STOCKHOLM — Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics Tuesday for inventing blue-light emitting diodes, which the Nobel Prize Committee said would illuminate the 21st century in a more environmentally-sustainable manner.
“Red and green LEDs have been around for many years, but the blue was really missing,” committee member Per Delsing said during the prize announcement. LED is an acronym for light-emitting diodes, which are electro-conductors.
“If you combine these colors you get white light. This is something that Isaac Newton showed already in 1671. Thanks to the blue LED, we can now get white light sources that have very high energy efficiency and a very long lifetime.”
Responding to the announcement, Nakamura, a Japan-born U.S. national, said winning the Nobel prize “is unbelievable.”
Nakamura, who was woken up at 3 am (1000 GMT) in California, was speaking by phone to reporters at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.
Organizers had been unable to immediately contact another co-winner, Amano of Japan, who was on a plane from Japan to France, secretary Staffan Normark of the academy said. Akasaki is also a Japanese national.
White light LEDs are widely used in smartphone devices. LEDs are a recent development in the history of lighting, only having been developed in the 21st century after light bulbs dominated much of the 19th century. They use far less electrical energy than traditional light bulbs.
Almost one-fourth of electrical consumption in industrialized countries is devoted to illumination, the prize committee said. With the development of diodes, more light can be emitted for less energy without the need for mercury.
The prize committee lauded the scientists specifically for developing gallium nitride crystal in the geometrical formations necessary to build diodes.
“The structure of these lamps is very similar to what you have at the base of your semi-conductor electronics that’s driving the information technology,” the prize committee said.

Photo via Wikicommons

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Gravitational Waves From Just After Big Bang Show How Universe Grew

Gravitational Waves From Just After Big Bang Show How Universe Grew

By Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times

Nearly 14 billion years ago, in a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the universe suddenly expanded from smaller than an atom to 100 trillion trillion times its original size, faster than the speed of light. This mysterious period, known as cosmic inflation, had been theorized but never confirmed.

But now, scientists using telescopes at the South Pole say they have discovered the first direct evidence for this incredible growth, in the signature of gravitational waves.

“It’s amazing,” said experimental cosmologist John Carlstrom of the University of Chicago, who leads the competing South Pole Telescope project. “Everyone in my field, what we’re thinking of doing in the future, we have to all rethink. This is an amazing milestone.”

The groundbreaking results from the BICEP2 team confirm a long-held theory about the universe’s earliest moments and show that what we can see with visible light is just a tiny fraction of the cosmos, which may extend far beyond the edges we know of today. And they confirm the sometimes uneasy relationship between Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which works on large scales, and quantum mechanics, which governs the infinitesimally small scales.

It’s a discovery that could well be worthy of a Nobel Prize, said researchers who were not involved in the project.

“This is a watershed moment,” said California Institute of Technology astrophysicist Jamie Bock, one of the lead scientists on the BICEP2 collaboration.

The researchers used telescopes in Antarctica to stare at the cosmic microwave background radiation — a faint glow of low-energy light left over from the Big Bang that permeates the entire universe — and analyzed the light for signs of polarization. Swirling patterns left in the polarized light would be a clear sign that gravitational waves had left their mark.

Many theorists have long thought that if the universe had suddenly expanded, gravitational waves would have left a rippling mark on the structure of the universe. The discovery of these gravitational waves confirms that theory, but scientists still don’t agree on exactly what triggered inflation in the first place. And whatever inflation was, they do think that it was a mysterious, repulsive force — rather like the dark energy that pervades the universe today and is causing it to expand — but far, far more powerful.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons