Scientists search for dark matter in the depths of an abandoned gold mine

Staff Writer | February 7, 2023 | 

In a South Dakota gold mine, a research team is hunting for a yet-undiscovered particle that could explain dark matter. (Image by Matthew Kapust, courtesy of the Sanford Underground Research Facility).

An interdisciplinary team of researchers is working to lure a hypothesized particle from outer space to the Sanford Underground Research Facility, housed in a former gold mine that operated at the height of the 1870s gold rush in the town of Lead, South Dakota.


In detail, they are prospecting for WIMPs —weakly interacting massive particles— which are thought to have formed when the universe was just a microsecond old and which may exist unseen all around us. The research facility suits this type of search because the depth prevents the intrusion of cosmic rays, which would otherwise interfere with experiments.

If WIMPs are observed, they could hold clues to some of the most perplexing problems in physics: the nature of dark matter and the very structure of the universe itself.

The US-based group is using the Large Underground Xenon-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, the most sensitive WIMP dark matter detector located at the Sanford Lab. Unlike experiments conducted at particle smashers like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, the LZ attempts to directly observe—rather than manufacture—dark matter.

Anwar Bhatti, a research professor at the University of Maryland, said there are pros and cons to both approaches.

In his view, the odds of finding irrefutable proof of WIMPs are slim, but he hopes previously undiscovered particles will show up in their experiment, leaving a trail of clues in their wake.

“There’s a chance we will see hints of dark matter, but whether it’s conclusive remains to be seen,” Bhatti said.
An underground mine – the perfect location

Lead scientist Carter Hall explained that these direct searches for dark matter can only be conducted underground because researchers need to eliminate surface-level cosmic radiation, which can muddle dark matter signals and make them easier to miss.

“Here, on the surface of the earth, we’re constantly being bathed in cosmic particles that are raining down upon us. Some of them have come from across the galaxy and some of them have come across the universe,” Hall explained. “Our experiment is about a mile underground, and that mile of rock absorbs almost all of those conventional cosmic rays. That means that we can look for some exotic component which doesn’t interact very much and would not be absorbed by the rock.”

In the LZ experiment, bursts of light are produced by particle collisions. Scientists then work backward, using the characteristics of these flashes of light to determine the type of particle.

The UMD research group calibrates the instrument that powers the LZ experiment, which involves preparing and injecting tritium—a radioactive form of hydrogen—into a liquefied form of xenon, an extremely dense gas. Once mixed, the radioactive mixture is pumped throughout the instrument, which is where particle collisions can be observed.

The researchers then analyze the mixture’s decay to determine how the instrument responds to background events that are not dark matter. By process of elimination, the researchers learn the types of interactions that are—and aren’t—important.

“That tells us what dark matter does not look like, so what we’re going to be looking for in the dark matter search data are events that don’t fit that pattern,” Hall said.

The researcher also pointed out that they will not know if they found dark matter until their next data set is released. This could take at least a year.

If detected, these WIMP particles would prompt a massive overhaul of the Standard Model of particle physics, which explains the fundamental forces of the universe. While this experiment could answer pressing questions about the universe, there is a good chance it will also create new ones.

“It would mean that a lot of our basic ideas about the fundamental constituents of nature would need to be revised in one way or another,” Hall said.

The 5 biggest scientific breakthroughs of 2022: Fusion energy, ‘life after death’, and more

Scientific Breakthroughs of the Year: 

From a breakthrough in nuclear fission energy technology to pigs being "revived" after their death, here are some of the biggest scientific breakthroughs that happened in 2022.

Written by Sethu Pradeep
New Delhi | Updated: December 17, 2022 

Scientific Discoveries of 2022: The year 2022 bore witness to many impressive scientific breakthroughs including the simulation of a wormhole to an artificial mouse embryo that developed a brain. 

(Image credit: Indian Express)

A major US breakthrough in nuclear fusion technology gave us a glimpse of a future where a renewable, clean and near-limitless source of energy might just be possible. This breakthrough capped off an exciting year for science, which bore witness to many scientific developments that promise to alter the course of humanity and our understanding of the universe. Here, we have put together five of the most significant scientific developments that happened this year.

Fusion energy breakthrough promises future of clean energy

Scientists announced on Tuesday (December 13) that researchers at the Lawrence National Laboratory in California conducted a nuclear fission reaction that produced more energy than what was used to ignite it. This marks a major breakthrough for the field. Nearly all the energy on the planet comes from nuclear fusion energy. Many of the energy sources that we know, from the food we eat to the fossil fuels that we burn, can be traced back to nuclear fission reactions that happen in the Sun. But we are still years, and maybe decades away, from mastering the process ourselves.

The conventional nuclear electric plants that we know and nuclear weapons derive their energy from a nuclear fission process, where the nucleus of an atom, usually Uranium, is split into two different nuclei, generating large amounts of energy.

Also read |Why fusion could be a clean-energy breakthrough

In an almost contrary process, nuclear fusion is when two nuclei fuse together to form a single heavier nucleus. When this happens, the mass of the new heavier nucleus is less than the sum of the individual nuclei combined, meaning that a little bit of mass is lost. E=MC^2, Einstein’s most famous equation, explains how this mass is converted into a large amount of energy.

While both fission and fusion reactions release large amounts of energy, the latter produces substantially more energy than the former. For example, the nuclear fusion of two nuclei of a heavier hydrogen isotope will produce four times as much energy as the fission of a uranium atom.

If nuclear fission energy were to be commercialised, it would offer a clean and renewable source of energy that will help fight climate change, while also not producing the panoply of radioactive waste products that fission energy reactors are known for. The technology still has a long way to go before becoming a viable energy alternative, as fusion reactions currently being tested barely last a few minutes, due to the difficulty in maintaining the conditions required for the reactions to happen.
Large hadron collider gets back into action, producing almost immediate results

After a hiatus of over three years for maintenance and upgrades, the world’s largest particle accelerator, the large hadron collider (LHC), got back into action in April this year. This marked the beginning of the third run of LHC, when scientists will collect data from an unparalleled number of particle collisions happening at unprecedented energy levels.

The LHC did not take long after starting up again to deliver impressive new science. In July this year, CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) announced the discovery of three new exotic particles—a new pentaquark and a pair of new tetraquarks— using the particle accelerator.

Also read |“Everyone wants to look for a signal that goes beyond the standard physics model”: Scientist at Large Hadron Collider

“The newly-discovered pentaquark is still a baryon, but with the three quarks, it has an extra pair consisting of a quark and an anti-quark. The two tetraquarks are within the family of mesons, but instead of having pairs of quarks and anti-quarks, it has two pairs of quarks. These states were predicted in the nominal quark model introduced in the sixties, but these states were not found until now,” said Nicola Neri, a senior member of the LHCb (LHC beauty) experiment, to indianexpress.com at the time.

During its third run, the unrivalled number of collisions in LHC will allow physicists from around the world to study the Higgs boson particle in great detail, while also putting the “Standard model of particle physics” through its most rigorous tests yet.

“Baby wormhole” simulated in a quantum computer

Since they were first proposed by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen in 1935, wormholes have remained in the realm of speculative science fiction. Wormholes, or Einstein-Rosen bridges, are theoretical structures that can be considered a tunnel with two ends at different points in space-time. This tunnel could be connecting two points at large or small distances, or two different points in time.

Now, scientists have brought wormholes out of the worlds of “Interstellar” and “Star Trek” and have brought it into this world that we live in. Well, sort of. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) created two simulated black holes in a quantum computer and transmitted a message between them, essentially creating a tunnel in space-time.

While the researchers did not create a rupture in space and time in physical space, it appeared a traversable wormhole was formed based on quantum information “teleported” using quantum codes on the quantum computer.

“There’s a difference between something possible in principle and possible in reality. So don’t hold your breath about sending your dog through the wormhole. But you have to start somewhere. And I think it’s exciting that we can get our hands on this at all,” said Fermilab physicist and study co-author Joseph Lykken to Reuters, at the time.

While it may be a long time before we can send a person, or indeed, their dog, through a wormhole, this research still represents an important breakthrough. Scientists have long pursued a better understanding of these wormholes, and the new research will help them make progress towards that goal.

“Reversing death” by reviving pig cells

From the Greek mythological figure Achilles to the Hindu mythological figure Hiranyakashipu, who was killed by Narasimha, the quest for immortality is a tale as old as time. But new research published in the journal Nature this August by Yale scientists plays with that notion of immortality.

The New York Times reported how scientists pumped a custom-made solution called OrganEx into dead pigs’ bodies using a device similar to the heart-lung machines used in hospitals. As the machine began circulating the solution into the cadavers’ veins and arteries, its brain, heart, liver and kidney cells began functioning again. Also, the cadavers never got stiff, unlike typical dead bodies.

Even though the seemingly dead cells seemed revived, the pigs were not conscious. While this experiment was far off from immortality and actually reversing death, it opens up important questions about the scientific division between life and death.

One of the main goals of the researchers is to increase the supply of human organs for transplant in the future by letting doctors obtain viable organs long after a patient has died. They also hope this technology could be used to prevent severe damage to organs like the heart after a major heart attack or the brain after a stroke.

The OrganEx solution used by researchers consisted of nutrients, anti-inflammatory medications, drugs to prevent cell death, and interestingly, nerve blockers—substances that dampen the activity of neurons and prevent the possibility of the pigs regaining consciousness.

But what if the solution did not contain nerve blockers? Would the brains of the pigs be revived, essentially reanimating them from death? Well, these are questions that the researchers are still yet to answer. But any research in this direction will be burdened by many ethical considerations, apart from the scientific challenges.

Synthetic mouse embryo develops a beating heart

In another scientific breakthrough that will have you questioning what life means, the University of Cambridge and Caltech created an artificial embryo without using any sperm or egg cells. The embryo created using mouse stem cells developed a brain, a beating heart, and the foundations for all the other organs in the body, according to the University of Cambridge.

The stem cells are the body’s master cells and can develop into almost any of the many cell types in the body. The researchers mimicked the natural processes that happen at conception and guided three types of stem cells found in early mammalian development till they began interacting. They established a unique environment for their interactions and got the stem cells to talk to each other.

Due to this, the stem cells organised themselves into structures and progressed through developmental stages until the embryos had beating hearts and the foundations of the brain, along with the yolk sac from which embryos get nutrients in the first weeks. Unlike other synthetic embryos developed in the past, the researchers’ embryos reached the point where the entire brain began to develop.

“Our mouse embryo model develops not only a brain, but also a beating heart, all the components that make up the body. It’s unbelievable that we’ve got this far. This has been the dream of our community for years, and a major focus of our work for a decade, and finally we’ve done it,” said Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, corresponding author of a research article published in the journal Nature.

This research was carried out on mice, but the researchers hope the technology can be used to develop certain human organ types. This research helps them understand the crucial organ development processes that could not be done with real human embryos. The “14-day rule” in the United Kingdom and other countries prevents scientists from studying human embryos in laboratory conditions.

But further investigating this science could potentially lead to a future where individual human organs can be grown in laboratory settings using stem cells, so that they can be transplanted to a human patient.

Nuclear theorists collaborate to explore 'heavy flavor' particles

Leading US researchers will develop framework for describing exotic particles' behavior at various stages in the evolution of hot nuclear matter

Grant and Award Announcement

DOE/BROOKHAVEN NATIONAL LABORATORY

 

IMAGE: COLLISIONS AT THE RELATIVISTIC HEAVY ION COLLIDER (RHIC) PRODUCE A HOT SOUP OF QUARKS AND GLUONS (CENTER)—AND ULTIMATELY THOUSANDS OF NEW PARTICLES. A NEW THEORY COLLABORATION SEEKS TO UNDERSTAND HOW HEAVY QUARKS (Q) AND ANTIQUARKS (Q-BAR) INTERACT WITH THIS QUARK-GLUON PLASMA (QGP) AND TRANSFORM INTO COMPOSITE PARTICLES THAT STRIKE THE DETECTOR. TRACKING THESE "HEAVY FLAVOR" PARTICLES CAN HELP SCIENTISTS UNRAVEL THE UNDERLYING MICROSCOPIC PROCESSES THAT DRIVE THE PROPERTIES OF THE QGP. view more 

CREDIT: BROOKHAVEN NATIONAL LABORATORY

UPTON, NY—Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory will participate in a new Topical Theory Collaboration funded by DOE’s Office of Nuclear Physics to explore the behavior of so-called “heavy flavor” particles. These particles are made of quarks of the “charm” and “bottom” varieties, which are heavier and rarer than the “up” and “down” quarks that make up the protons and neutrons of ordinary atomic nuclei. By understanding how these exotic particles form, evolve, and interact with the medium created during powerful particle collisions, scientists will gain a deeper understanding of a unique form of matter known as a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) that filled the early universe.

These experiments take place at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven Lab and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Europe’s CERN laboratory. Scientists accelerate and smash together the nuclei of heavy atoms at energies high enough to set free the quarks and gluelike “gluons” that hold ordinary matter together. These collisions create a soup of quarks and gluons much like the matter that existed just after the Big Bang, some 14 billion years ago.

A powerful theory, known as quantum chromodynamics (QCD), describes very accurately how the plasma’s quarks and gluons interact. But understanding how those fundamental interactions lead to the complex characteristics of the plasma—a trillion-degree, dense medium that flows like a fluid with no resistance—remains a great challenge in modern research.

The Heavy-Flavor Theory (HEFTY) for QCD Matter Topical Theory Collaboration, which will be led by Ralf Rapp from Texas A&M University, seeks to close that gap in understanding by developing a rigorous and comprehensive theoretical framework for describing how heavy-flavor particles interact with the QGP.

“With a heavy-flavor framework in place, experiments tracking these particles can be used to precisely probe the plasma’s properties,” said Peter Petreczky, a theorist at Brookhaven Lab, who will serve as co-spokesperson for the collaboration along with Ramona Vogt from DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “Our framework will also provide a foundation for using heavy-flavor particles as a probe at the future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). Future experiments at the EIC will probe different forms of cold nuclear matter which are the precursors of the QGP in the laboratory,” Petreczky said.

In heavy ion collisions at RHIC and the LHC, heavy charm and bottom quarks are produced upon initial impact of the colliding nuclei. Their large masses cause a diffusive motion that can serve as a marker of the interactions in the QGP, including the fundamental process of quarks binding together to form composite particles called hadrons.

“The framework needs to describe these particles from their initial production when the nuclei first collide, through their subsequent diffusion through the QGP and hadroniziation,” Petreczky said. “And these descriptions need to be embedded into realistic numerical simulations that enable quantitative comparisons to experimental data.”

Swagato Mukherjee of Brookhaven Lab will be a co-principal investigator in the collaboration, responsible for lattice QCD computations. These calculations require some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers to handle the complex array of variables involved in quark-gluon interactions.

“Recently there has been significant progress in lattice QCD calculations related to heavy flavor probes of QGP,” Mukherjee said. “We are in an exciting time when the exascale computing facilities and the support provided by the topical collaboration will enable us to perform realistic calculations of the key quantities needed for theoretical interpretation of experimental results on heavy flavor probes.”

In addition to lattice QCD the collaboration will use variety of theoretical approaches, including rigorous statistical data analysis to obtain the transport properties of QGP.

“The resulting framework will help us unravel the underlying microscopic processes that drive the properties of the QGP, thereby providing unprecedented insights into the inner workings of nuclear matter based on QCD,” said Rapp of Texas A&M, the principal investigator of the project.

The HEFTY collaboration will receive $2.5 Million from the DOE Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, over five years. That funding will provide partial support for six graduate students and three postdoctoral fellows at 10 institutions, as well as a senior staff position at one of the national laboratories. It will also establish a bridge junior faculty position at Kent State University.

Partnering institutions include Brookhaven National Laboratory, Duke University, Florida State University, Kent State University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Texas A&M University, and Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility.

The HEFTY Topical Theory collaboration will develop a theoretical framework for describing the behavior of heavy quarks at various stages in the evolution of hot nuclear matter to gain a deeper understanding of the quark-gluon plasma that filled the early universe.

CREDIT

HEFTY Collaboration/Brookhaven National Laboratory

Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.

Follow @BrookhavenLab on Twitter or find us on Facebook.

Related Links

• Department of Energy Announces $11.24 Million for Research on Nuclear Theory Topical Collaborations
• Topical Theory Collaboration on Saturated Glue

No one in physics dares say so, but the race to invent new particles is pointless

In private, many physicists admit they do not believe the particles they are paid to search for exist – they do it because their colleagues are doing it

‘The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) hasn’t seen any of the particles theoretical physicists have hypothesised, even though many were confident it would.’ A technician works on the LHC, near Geneva, Switzerland. Photograph: Laurent Gilliéron/AP

Sabine Hossenfelder

THE GUARDIAN
Mon 26 Sep 2022

Imagine you go to a zoology conference. The first speaker talks about her 3D model of a 12-legged purple spider that lives in the Arctic. There’s no evidence it exists, she admits, but it’s a testable hypothesis, and she argues that a mission should be sent off to search the Arctic for spiders.

The second speaker has a model for a flying earthworm, but it flies only in caves. There’s no evidence for that either, but he petitions to search the world’s caves. The third one has a model for octopuses on Mars. It’s testable, he stresses.

Kudos to zoologists, I’ve never heard of such a conference. But almost every particle physics conference has sessions just like this, except they do it with more maths. It has become common among physicists to invent new particles for which there is no evidence, publish papers about them, write more papers about these particles’ properties, and demand the hypothesis be experimentally tested. Many of these tests have actually been done, and more are being commissioned as we speak. It is wasting time and money.

Since the 1980s, physicists have invented an entire particle zoo, whose inhabitants carry names like preons, sfermions, dyons, magnetic monopoles, simps, wimps, wimpzillas, axions, flaxions, erebons, accelerons, cornucopions, giant magnons, maximons, macros, wisps, fips, branons, skyrmions, chameleons, cuscutons, planckons and sterile neutrinos, to mention just a few. We even had a (luckily short-lived) fad of “unparticles”.

All experiments looking for those particles have come back empty-handed, in particular those that have looked for particles that make up dark matter, a type of matter that supposedly fills the universe and makes itself noticeable by its gravitational pull. However, we do not know that dark matter is indeed made of particles; and even if it is, to explain astrophysical observations one does not need to know details of the particles’ behaviour. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) hasn’t seen any of those particles either, even though, before its launch, many theoretical physicists were confident it would see at least a few.

Talk to particle physicists in private, and many of them will admit they do not actually believe those particles exist. They justify their work by claiming that it is good practice, or that every once in a while one of them accidentally comes up with an idea that is useful for something else. An army of typewriting monkeys may also sometimes produce a useful sentence. But is this a good strategy

Experimental particle physicists know of the problem, and try to distance themselves from what their colleagues in theory development do. At the same time, they profit from it, because all those hypothetical particles are used in grant proposals to justify experiments. And so the experimentalists keep their mouths shut, too. This leaves people like me, who have left the field – I now work in astrophysics – as the only ones able and willing to criticise the situation.

There are many factors that have contributed to this sad decline of particle physics. Partly the problem is social: most people who work in the field (I used to be one of them) genuinely believe that inventing particles is good procedure because it’s what they have learned, and what all their colleagues are doing.

But I believe the biggest contributor to this trend is a misunderstanding of Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, which, to make a long story short, demands that a good scientific idea has to be falsifiable. Particle physicists seem to have misconstrued this to mean that any falsifiable idea is also good science.

In the past, predictions for new particles were correct only when adding them solved a problem with the existing theories. For example, the currently accepted theory of elementary particles – the Standard Model – doesn’t require new particles; it works just fine the way it is. The Higgs boson, on the other hand, was required to solve a problem. The antiparticles that Paul Dirac predicted were likewise necessary to solve a problem, and so were the neutrinos that were predicted by Wolfgang Pauli. The modern new particles don’t solve any problems.

In some cases, the new particles’ task is to make a theory more aesthetically appealing, but in many cases their purpose is to fit statistical anomalies. Each time an anomaly is reported, particle physicists will quickly write hundreds of papers about how new particles allegedly explain the observation. This behaviour is so common they even have a name for it: “ambulance-chasing”, after the anecdotal strategy of lawyers to follow ambulances in the hope of finding new clients.

Ambulance-chasing is a good strategy to further one’s career in particle physics. Most of those papers pass peer review and get published because they are not technically wrong. And since ambulance-chasers cite each other’s papers, they can each rack up hundreds of citations quickly. But it’s a bad strategy for scientific progress. After the anomaly has disappeared, those papers will become irrelevant.

This procedure of inventing particles and then ruling them out has been going on so long that there are thousands of tenured professors with research groups who make a living from this. It has become generally accepted practice in the physics community. No one even questions whether it makes sense.

 At least not in public.

I believe there are breakthroughs waiting to be made in the foundations of physics; the world needs technological advances more than ever before, and now is not the time to idle around inventing particles, arguing that even a blind chicken sometimes finds a grain. As a former particle physicist, it saddens me to see that the field has become a factory for useless academic papers.



Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Germany. She is author of Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions and creator of the YouTube Channel Science Without the Gobbledygook.

Europe’s Energy Crisis Could Force The Large Hadron Collider To Be Idled

By Charles Kennedy - Sep 05, 2022, 

• A combination of factors is feeding into a major energy crisis in Europe at the moment, forcing households to ration their power and industrial companies to shut plants.
• Now, the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator may have to be idled to ensure grid stability in France and Switzerland.
• The European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, will shut down other accelerators first, claiming that it could reduce its power use by 25% without idling the LHC.

The energy crisis in Europe is not only disrupting businesses and household finances, but it’s also hitting at the heart of crucial scientific research and experiments. 

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, the world’s largest particle physics lab and home of the Large Hadron Collider, could shut down some accelerators and could even idle the LHC to ensure grid stability in the nearby French and Swiss regions amid the severe energy crisis in Europe, Serge Claudet, chair of the CERN energy management panel, told The Wall Street Journal. 

Europe is experiencing an unprecedented energy crisis amid halted Russian gas supply via the Nord Stream pipeline, low nuclear power generation in France, a power crisis in Switzerland, and sky-high gas and power prices.    

Large European industrial companies have already announced plant or production line closures due to soaring gas and energy prices, while governments in Europe are drafting plans to potentially ration gas supply to industries according to their specific priorities.  

The crisis became much worse at the end of last week, when Russian gas giant Gazprom said after three-day maintenance on Friday that Nord Stream would remain shut until “operational defects in the equipment are eliminated”, upping the ante in its gas war against Europe. 

For most governments in Europe, the indefinite suspension of Russian gas flows through the main pipeline to Germany wasn’t a surprise; they had expected such a move from Putin. But this doesn’t make the EU’s task of ensuring lights and heating on this winter any easier. Switzerland and France – whose grids CERN uses to power its supercollider and seven other particle accelerators to study matter and two decelerators to study antimatter – are among the worst hit.   

Switzerland has admitted that the country might have to resort to using oil for electricity generation this winter as Europe is dealing with low levels of Russian natural gas supply, which could be cut even further or cut off altogether.

In France, year-ahead power prices surged to $1,001 (1,000 euro) per megawatt-hour for the first time ever last month. French power prices have now soared tenfold over the past year, as drought and hot weather this summer have added to France’s nuclear power generation problems at the worst possible moment. EDF will restart all its nuclear reactors in the country this winter, French Energy Transition Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher said last week. Currently, more than half of EDF’s reactors are out of operation either because of maintenance or technical issues. 

One of EDF’s largest clients is none other than CERN, which uses 1.3 terawatt hours of electricity annually. That’s enough power to fuel 300,000 UK homes for a year. At peak consumption, usually from May to mid-December, CERN uses about 200 MW, which is about a third of the amount of energy used to feed the nearby city of Geneva in Switzerland. 

May to mid-December is the period of active work at the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, which discovered ten years ago the existence of the Higgs boson that gives mass to the elementary particles. The collider was just restarted this July after a three-and-a-half-year hiatus for upgrades. 

However, due to the energy crisis, CERN is now considering how it could idle the world’s most powerful collider. 

“Our concern is really grid stability, because we do all we can to prevent a blackout in our region,” Claudet told the Journal.  

CERN and its power supplier, EDF, are now discussing the possibility of implementing daily warnings for power grid instability at the research complex to determine when it would need to conserve energy and use less electricity, the head of CERN energy management panel told the WSJ. The organization will shut down other accelerators first, before possibly having to resort to a shutdown of the world’s largest particle accelerator, he added. With the shutdown of some of the other accelerators, CERN could thus lower its power use by 25%.  

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

Surprise! Protons Contain a Subatomic Particle That’s Heavier Than the Proton Itself

Robert Lea - Yesterday 

POP MECH

But when the charm quark is present, it still only accounts for around half of the proton’s mass. How can that be?

New research shows that protons contain intrinsic charm quarks.

This is despite the fact that subatomic charm quarks are about 1.5 times more massive than the proton, itself.

When charm quarks are present, they carry about half of the proton’s mass.

Protons are particles that exist in the nucleus of all atoms, with their number defining the elements themselves. Protons, however, are not fundamental particles. Rather, they are composite particles made up of smaller subatomic particles, namely two “up quarks” and one “down quark” bound together by force-carrying particles (bosons ) called “gluons.”

This structure isn’t certain, however, and quantum physics suggests that along with these three quarks, other particles should be “popping” into and out of existence at all times, affecting the mass of the proton. This includes other quarks and even quark-antiquark pairs.

Indeed, the deeper scientists have probed the structure of the proton with high-energy particle collisions, the more complicated the situation has become. As a result, for around four decades, physicists have speculated that protons may host a heavier form of quark than up and down quarks called “intrinsic charm quarks,” but confirmation of this has been elusive.

Now, by exploiting a high-precision determination of the quark-gluon content of the proton and by examining 35 years’ worth of data, particle physics data researchers have discovered evidence that the proton does contain intrinsic charm quarks.

What makes this result more extraordinary is that this flavor of quark is one-and-a-half times more massive than the proton itself. Yet when it is a component of the proton, the charm quark still only accounts for around half of the composite particle’s mass.
The Weirdness of Quantum Mechanics

This counter-intuitive setup is a consequence of the weirdness of quantum mechanics, the physics that governs the subatomic world. This requires thinking of the structure of a particle and what can be found within it as probabilistic in nature.

“There are six kinds of quarks in nature, three are lighter than the proton [up, down, and strange quarks] and three are heavier [charm, up, and down quarks],” Stefano Forte, NNPDF Collaboration team leader and professor of theoretical Physics at Milan University, tells the Nature Briefing podcast. “One would think that only the lighter quarks are inside the proton, but actually, the laws of quantum physics allow also for the heavier quarks to be inside the proton.”

Forte — the lead author of a paper published earlier this month in the journal Nature, describing the research—and his team set out to discover if the lightest of these heavier quarks, the charm quark, is present in the proton.

When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and other particle accelerators smash protons against each other (and other particles, like electrons) at high energies, what emerges is a shower of particles. This can be used to “reconstruct” the composition of the original particle and the particles that comprised it, collectively known as “partons.”

Each of these partons carries away a portion of the overall momentum of the system — the momentum distribution—with this share of momentum known as the momentum fraction.

Forte and colleagues fed 35 years of data from particle accelerators, including the world’s largest and most powerful machine of this kind, the LHC, to a computer algorithm that pieces proton structure back together by looking for a “best fit” for its structure at high-energies. From here, the team calculated the structure for the proton when it is at rest.

This resulted in the first evidence that protons do indeed sometimes have charm quarks. These are labeled “intrinsic” because they are part of the proton for a long time and are still present when the proton is at rest, meaning it doesn’t emerge from the high-energy interaction with another particle.

“You have a chance, which is small but not negligible, of finding a charm quark in the proton, and when you do find one, it so happens that that charm quark is typically carrying about half of the proton mass,” Forte says on the podcast. “This is quantum physics, so everything is probabilistic.”
The “Intrinsic” Charm Quark Scenario

Romona Vogt is a high-energy physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, who wrote a “News and Views” piece for Nature to accompany the new research paper.

She explains to Popular Mechanics how charm quarks could be connected to proton structure and how the intrinsic charm quark scenario differs from the standard scenario that sees protons comprised of just two up and one down quarks joined by gluons.

“Charm quarks come in quark-antiquark pairs in both the standard scenario and the intrinsic charm one,” Vogt says. “In the standard scenario, a gluon radiates this pairing during a high-energy interaction. Because of the charm quark’s mass, it is too heavy to be part of the ‘sea’ of light up, down, and strange quarks.”

This means the charm quark doesn’t have a large role when physicists calculate the standard parton momentum distribution functions until momentum reaches a threshold above mass.

“That’s very different from the intrinsic charm scenario where the charm distribution carries a large fraction of the proton momentum,” Vogt adds. “Because in the intrinsic charm quark scenario, the quark-antiquark pair is attached to more than one of the up and down quarks in the proton they travel with. That’s why the charm quarks appear at large momentum fractions.

“The proton is more or less ‘empty’ in this scenario or has a small size configuration because the proton is just up, up, down quarks and charm quark pairs with no other quarks at low momentum fractions in the minimal model of intrinsic charm.”

Vogt suggests that the NNPDF Collaboration’s results could lead other researchers to ask if other quarks could play a role in the composition of protons.

“One question these findings might raise is whether or not there are other intrinsic quark scenarios, like intrinsic bottom and intrinsic strangeness,” she says.

A New Cold War Could Slow the Advance of Science

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research laboratory

 for particle physics.

Credit...Leslye Davis for The New York Time

OPINION
GUEST ESSAY
By Michael Riordan
Aug. 22, 2022, 

Dr. Riordan is a physicist who writes about science, technology and public policy. He is the author of “The Hunting of the Quark” and a co-author of “Tunnel Visions: The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider.”

ORCAS ISLAND, Wash. — One of the many unfortunate consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the collateral damage to international scientific cooperation. The past two decades may have represented the apex of this cooperation. Now it appears to be coming to at least a pause, if not an end.

In the years immediately after the Cold War ended in 1991, Russian scientists turned increasingly to Europe and the United States to remain involved in frontier research. Through the efforts of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Space Station Freedom became the International Space Station, which included major contributions from Canada, Japan, European nations and Russia as partners.

Between 1993 and 1996, the Russian agency responsible for atomic energy signed agreements with the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, known as CERN, and contributed money, equipment and brainpower to the Large Hadron Collider Project. That project led to the discovery in 2012 of the Higgs boson, a heavy subatomic particle that imbues other elementary particles with mass. Its existence had been predicted a half-century earlier.

And during the 1990s, Russian scientists from Lomonosov Moscow State University joined the international LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which in 2016 announced striking evidence of mergers of ultramassive black holes. The discovery confirmed the prediction in Einstein’s general theory of relativity that cataclysmic events like the merger of two black holes — in this case, about 1.3 billion light years away — create ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves.

But Russia recently decided to terminate its participation in the space station after 2024, and CERN will no longer allow Russian institutes to participate in collider experiments after its contracts with Russia expire that year. What’s more, the European Space Agency has excluded Russia from its planned ExoMars rover project, despite the yearslong delays that will likely result. And notwithstanding Russia’s efforts in support of the X-ray laser project known as European XFEL in Germany, which has opened new opportunities for research in materials science, biology and physics, scientists and institutions based in Russia cannot (at least for now) perform new experiments at this facility.

Scientific research has advanced to such an extent since the end of the Cold War that such large, expensive international projects are the only way to push back the frontiers in many disciplines. Individual nations no longer have sufficient financial and intellectual resources to pursue the science unilaterally. The current retreat from Russian involvement in these big projects can in this way easily curtail scientific progress — as well as impair international relations more broadly.

CERN was established in a suburb of Geneva in the early 1950s to promote peaceful cooperation among European nations, which had experienced two disastrous wars during the previous 40 years. Organizers viewed nuclear and high-energy physics as promising disciplines that invited cooperation. And it succeeded. With the discovery in the early 1980s of the W and Z bosons, which together are responsible for one of the four fundamental forces that govern the behavior of matter in the universe, CERN established itself as the world’s premier laboratory for high-energy physics. To many European leaders, it had become the highest expression of continental unity — reason enough to approve its multibillion euro LHC project in the 1990s.

After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the funding of many of its institutes for scientific research collapsed. CERN became the principal venue where Russian high-energy physicists could continue doing cutting edge research. And CERN had begun to seek additional LHC funding from well beyond its European member nations. Physicists from Russia’s Joint Institute for Nuclear Research joined the gargantuan Compact Muon Solenoid experiment on this collider, contributing to its design and making sophisticated contributions. They could take due credit for their part in the breakthrough Higgs boson discovery — perhaps the pinnacle of international scientific achievement. Russia became an important player in a “world laboratory” knit together by the internet and Web, which now includes Canada, China, India, Japan, the United States and many other non-European nations.

Part of the rationale for establishing CERN was to promote international understanding among researchers working toward common scientific goals. It has proved a wonderful polyglot place. Although English and French dominate conversations in labs, offices and the cafeteria, national differences seem to melt away amid vigorous technical exchanges and good food.

But this scientific camaraderie begins to dissolve when one of the participant nations savagely attacks another. During the first month of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, thousands of Russian scientists signed a petition opposing the attack, taking great risks to their careers and livelihoods. In contrast, Russian scientific institutes have toed the Kremlin line — dependent as they are on its continued support.

Collaborations on the basis of individual relationships may continue with some Russian scientists. This intellectual exchange is certainly valuable. But one can easily imagine that pullbacks and withdrawals will continue on other large scientific projects, if they haven’t already, to the detriment of international relations generally. That would be an unfortunate aspect of a renewed bifurcation of the world order much like what happened during the Cold War. But I sincerely hope that the strong scientific bonds established during the last three decades will survive and help re-establish broader East-West relations.

A THEORY IN SEARCH OF EVIDENCE

Dark matter: Why we keep searching for something that may not even exist

Our understanding of the universe keeps improving. But there's a huge invisible force out there called dark matter and we're virtually clueless about it.

Astrophysicists say the James Webb Space Telescope may help them detect,

 if not see, dark matter in the universe

It has never been detected, only speculated. But scientists estimate that up to 85% of the matter in the universe could be made of what's called dark matter.

Scientists cannot define dark matter with any certainty, but that hasn't stopped the search for it. Our largest and newest space-based telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope is on the case.

It was barely moments after the first images taken by the telescope had been released on July 12, 2022, when Kai Noeske said something both mysterious and true.

Noeske, an astronomer at the European Space Observation Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, was pointing to an image of Stephan's Quintet, a group of five galaxies, as they have never been seen before.

Astronomer Kai Noeske looked at the image of Stephan's Quintet and said:

 "There is a lot out there that we do not know [...] One of those things could be dark matter."

And he said: "There is a lot out there that we do not know. And we do not know what we do not know. [But] one of those things could be dark matter." 

An accidental discovery

In the 19th century, Lord Kelvin, a Scottish-Irish physicist, wanted to estimate the mass of our galaxy, the Milkyway, using data on how fast stars moved around the galaxy's core.

But Kelvin found discrepancies or anomalies in the data, things which could not be explained and were attributed to "dark bodies" that we cannot see.

"The galaxy seems to be rotating much faster than it should, based on estimates," explained Tevong You, a theorist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

The Large Hadron Collider is the world's most powerful particle accelerator

The theory is that there is an "invisible matter" responsible for the speed at which our galaxy rotates, said You. And that may be true of other galaxies as well.

Stars have been observed to travel at higher-than-estimated speeds, especially at the edges of galaxies. And that is weird.

Stars should cut loose and 'fly off'

Imagine you attached a stone to a string, and you rotated it at high speed. The stone would cut loose and fly off if it reached a speed higher than a certain threshold — a point at which the string becomes too weak to hold onto the stone, as the stone picks up speed and gains more force.

But astronomers have observed stars that continue to spin around the center of the galaxy, even when the string holding them to the galaxy, as it were, should have ripped, and the stars should have "flown off".

The astronomers' only explanation is that there must be some invisible matter holding the stone in range. Perhaps it's this elusive dark matter?

That remains an unanswered question. And there are many other anomalies, such as the shape of some galaxies, including our Milkyway, that are so far unexplained.

We can't see dark matter but we may see its effects

Scientists say that the reason we are unable to see or detect this invisible matter is that it does not interact with electromagnetic forces — things like visible light, X-ray or radio waves.

They argue that we can, however, observe some of the effects of dark matter through its gravitational force.

But we still want to detect dark matter in its own right. And here's where CERN's Large Hadron Collider comes in. Tevong You and other researchers at CERN think the LHC is our best chance of detecting dark matter.

When particles collide at the LHC, the resulting debris gets caught in detectors

 such as this one. This is a illustrating one of the LHC's detectors.

A decade ago, experiments at the LHC proved the Standard Model of particle physics by detecting the Higgs boson particle — a particle which itself had long proved to be elusive.

The Standard Model is the idea that everything in the universe is made of a few fundamental particles and that those are governed by four fundamental forces — the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force.

Tevong You said that the LHC could help solve the mystery of dark matter. But even now, You suspects that dark matter will be nothing like the particles we know from the Standard Model.

"It has to interact very weakly. It can't interact with light or electromagnetism. It can't interact with the strong force, and it may interact through the weak force that causes radioactivity," said You.

If that reads like a riddle, you're not alone. Scientists are still trying to work it out themselves.

Measuring dark matter by what's missing

The Large Hadron Collider smashes particles together to create collisions. The collisions produce a debris that gets caught by particle detectors.

It's just the same as if you smashed two apples together, bits would spray in all directions and get caught on the walls and floor. Those bits of apple would still be fruit, but they would have also become somewhat different. Even so, if we then collected all the bits of apple, including the juices, we would theoretically have all the bits to reconstruct those two original apples.

And the same is true of fundamental particles. We smash them up, they split and spray against the LHC detectors, and if we piece them back together, we should be able to account for all the bits that made those original particles.  

But if after all that, we find that there is something missing... especially missing energy or mass, as energy is also known... Well, when it comes to particle physics, scientists tend to think that there would have to be some dark, or invisible, matter — elements that we can't see, but which are very much part of the whole thing.

Andre David is an experimental physicist at CERN who builds particle detectors and says that if there is missing energy after a collision, it is likely that that energy has been transferred to dark matter. 

"The Higgs boson interacts with all the other elements that have mass. And so dark matter must [also] have mass in order to fulfill the effect that we see in the galaxies," said David.

New theories about dark matter

Some scientists argue that if there were invisible forces in the universe, we would have found them already and that, given that we haven't detected those forces, they suggest we should think outside of the Standard Model.

One of those scientists is the physicist Mordehai Milgrom. Milgrom has developed an alternative theory of gravity, one that suggests that gravitational force operates differently at different distances from the core of a galaxy.

While Newton's theory of gravity explains most large-scale movements in the cosmos, Milgrom's Modified Newtonian Dynamics suggests that a force acts differently when it is weak, such as at the edge of a galaxy.

Advocates of the theory say it predicts the rotation of galaxies and the speed of the stars better than Newton's theory.

But we still don't know whether we will ever discover dark matter or prove Milgrom's Modified Newtonian Dynamics. What we do know is that our understanding of the universe is far from complete.

Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany

INSIDE THE COSMOS: JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE CONTINUES TO DAZZLE
Spinning wormholes
Webb recently peered into a wormhole in the mysterious-looking "Phantom Galaxy." Scientists believe the dust lanes spiral towards an intermediate-mass black hole at the heart of the galaxy.
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