WATCH OUT
TikTok community panics over ‘alternate dimension’ theories as CERN fires up Large Hadron Collider

IT CHANGES QUANTUM REALITY

Jona Jaupi,

Technology and Science

6 Jul 2022


MANY TikTok accounts have been sharing doomsday theories about CERN's Large Hadron Collider, sparking fear on the platform.

Conspiracy theories about the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have been running rampant on TikTok, raking in millions of views.

1Many TikTok accounts have been sharing doomsday theories about CERN's Large Hadron ColliderCredit: Reuters

On July 4 2012, scientists used the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to study a spin-zero particle known as the Higgs boson.

Ten years later, the Geneva-based physics institution announced they were firing up the LHC once more.

But now conspiracy theorists believe that the LHC will open a "portal" to another dimension following experimentation, which resumed on July 3.

One TikTok user claimed that scientists are trying to "reverse engineer the Big Bang".


READ MORE ON CERN


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"There's a possibility that this can create a black hole, an alternate universe or a portal," the TikToker said.

That video has garnered more than 400,000 likes and nearly 20,000 comments.

"I don’t know man I’m very concerned about it," one user commented under the popular reel.

A second TikToker made a similar claim in a separate video that has received more than 250,000 likes.


"The [scientists] are opening a portal to another dimension, where the other universes are," she said.

"They know this, they're just trying to hide it from you."

In response to the video, one fear-stricken user said: "Jesus Christ protect us all."

Meanwhile, other TikTok creators have been demystifying CERN and the LHC's purpose to others via 'debunking' videos'.

User @New_Age_Mythbuster posted a reel that shared facts from CERN's website in an attempt to quell people's fears.

CERN themselves posted information on their website underlining the accelerator's safety.

The scientists explain: "Although powerful for an accelerator, the energy reached in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is modest by nature’s standards.

"Cosmic rays – particles produced by events in outer space – collide with particles in the Earth’s atmosphere at much greater energies than those of the LHC.

"These cosmic rays have been bombarding the Earth’s atmosphere as well as other astronomical bodies since these bodies were formed, with no harmful consequences.


"These planets and stars have stayed intact despite these higher energy collisions over billions of years."
What is the LHC?

CERN's Large Hadron Collider is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator.

It's located 300 feet under the Swiff-French border in a massive tunnel.

First launched on September 10, 2008, LHC remains the latest addition to CERN’s accelerator complex.

What is CERN using the LHC for?

CERN studies high-energy physics and is using LHC to further its research.

LHC basically uses electromagnetic fields to make particles move extremely quickly.

CERN has been conducting a series of experiments that began on July 3, 2022.

On July 5, the experimental collisions at LHC uncovered three new "exotic particles", per Fox News.

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IT'S "THAT GODDAMN PARTICLE"
10 years after the discovery of the Higgs boson, physicists still can't get enough of the 'God particle'


By Keith Cooper published about 16 hours ago

"Particle physics has changed more in the past 10 years than in the previous 30 years."

An artist's depiction of a Higgs boson. (Image credit: Tobias Roetsch/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

Ten years ago, jubilant physicists working on the world's most powerful science experiment, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, announced the discovery of the Higgs boson — a particle that scientists had been searching for since 1964, when its existence was first predicted.

"For particle physicists, the Higgs boson was the missing piece of the Standard Model," Victoria Martin, a professor of particle physics at the University of Edinburgh in the U.K., told Space.com.

Although the Large Hadron Collider's remit is wide-ranging, searching for the Higgs boson was its top priority when it came online in 2010. The LHC's two key experiments — ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) and CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) — detected the Higgs boson within just two years of beginning operations.

"We were not expecting to see the Higgs boson so quickly," CERN's Director-General, Fabiola Gianotti, said during a preview press conference held on Thursday (June 30). It was the LHC's superior computing infrastructure applied to experiments that performed better than their design specifications — testament to the many years of hard work put into building the LHC — that accelerated the Higgs boson's discovery, she said.


Related: 10 cosmic mysteries the Large Hadron Collider could unravel

Read more: Our original coverage of the Higgs discovery

The mystery of mass

The Higgs boson changed the world of particle physics, opening doors that had been slammed shut until its discovery.

"Particle physics has changed more in the past 10 years than in the previous 30 years," Gian Giudice, head of CERN's theoretical physics department, said during the event.

The Higgs boson is important because it carries the force of an energy field known as the Higgs field, in much the same way that a photon carries the force of the electromagnetic field.

"The field is more fundamental than the particles," Martin said. "It permeates all the way across space and time." It's the interaction between certain particles and the Higgs boson, which represents the Higgs field, that gives those particles their mass.

"Particle physics has changed more in the past 10 years than in the previous 30 years."— Gian Giudice

One analogy is to think of the Higgs field as a kind of cosmic treacle that slows down some particles more than others. Less massive particles pass through the Higgs field relatively effortlessly, and so they can fly off at the speed of light — think of electrons, which have a tiny mass, or photons, which have no mass at all. For other particles, wading through the cosmic treacle of the Higgs field slows them down, giving them more mass, and therefore these particles are the most massive.

Just like these particles, scientists believe — although they have yet to watch the process happen — that the Higgs boson also gets its mass from interacting with itself. And measurements by the LHC have shown that the Higgs boson has a high mass as well: 125 billion electronvolts, which is about 125 times more massive than one of the positively charged protons at an atom's core. (Thanks to Einstein's special relativity, particle physicists know that mass and energy are interchangeable and so refer to masses in terms of their energy.) Only one fundamental particle known to science is more massive.

Discovering the Higgs boson and measuring its mass was only the beginning. "We've spent the last 10 years testing the Higgs boson, because discovering it was one thing, but the Standard Model also tells us lots of things about the way the Higgs boson should behave," Martin said.



The ATLAS instrument at the Large Hadron Collider.

 (Image credit: CERN/Claudia Marcelloni/Max Brice)

An existential question


For one thing, the Higgs boson's quantum spin — or lack thereof — could provide an insight into why our universe even exists.

Every known particle has a quantum spin, except for the Higgs boson. The Standard Model of particle physics predicted this oddity, so it isn't a surprise, but scientists including Martin and her research team have continued trying to measure the spin of the Higgs boson as a way to test the Standard Model. So far, they've found no evidence that it has any spin.

The reason why the Higgs boson has no spin when every other known particle does is because of the nature of the Higgs field. Unlike the gravitational and electromagnetic fields, which have obvious sources such as an object's mass or an electric current passing through magnetic fields, the Higgs field has no source. It's just there, a non-localized part of the cosmos pervading everything. As such it is coupled to the 'vacuum,' the very fabric of space-time, and therefore the field shares the vacuum's properties. The vacuum has no quantum spin, and therefore neither does the Higgs boson.

However, the vacuum isn't inert. Particles fizz in and out of existence thanks to quantum fluctuations, raising the energy level of the vacuum above its lowest possible state. The thing about energy levels is that an object — be it a person in a gravitational field, an electron orbiting an atomic nucleus, or the vacuum — always prefers to be at its lowest possible energy level. Yet our universe is not. What keeps the universe from succumbing to the inevitable urge to drop energy levels is the shape of what scientists characterize as the energy potential of the Higgs field.

A graph of this energy potential would look like a 'mountain' in the middle, and two 'valleys' flanked by 'hills' on either side. The energy level of the vacuum would lie in one of those valleys, but physicists strongly suspect that on either side of those hills are even deeper 'valleys' representing even lower energy states. And the measurement of the mass of the Higgs boson supports this idea; the particle is so large that it suggests that there's room for the Higgs field to potentially decay to a lower energy level one day.

"The Higgs boson is a very precise microscope to study nature at the smallest scales, and at the same time it is a formidable telescope to access physics at very high energy scales."— Fabiola Gianotti

For this reason, physicists call our vacuum a 'false' vacuum, because it 'wants' to decay to a lower energy — a 'truer' vacuum. The valleys and hills of the Higgs field's energy potential are holding our universe in this false vacuum, long enough for planets, stars and galaxies to form.

However, over eons upon eons of time, the false vacuum is inherently unstable, and eventually it will decay. Maybe quantum energy fluctuations will allow the false vacuum to climb over those 'hills' and roll down the slope on the other side, or maybe the strange phenomenon of quantum tunneling will let it drill through the 'hill' that is the energy barrier.

However it happens, it would be bad for the universe — the decay of the false vacuum would expand outward in a wave moving at the speed of light, destroying everything and replacing it all with a true vacuum. It's only the Higgs field that is holding vacuum decay at bay, so we therefore have the Higgs field to thank for our current universe

A schematic of one of the proton-proton collisions at the LHC that revealed the Higgs boson decaying into daughter particles.

 (Image credit: CERN/CMS Collaboration/Thomas McCauley/Lucas Taylor)

Another run at understanding the universe

In addition to the Higgs boson's spin, researchers have spent the past decade trying to pin down its life span. The Higgs boson existence is fleeting; the standard model predicts that a Higgs boson survives for a tiny amount of time, just 10^–22 seconds, before breaking apart into more subatomic particles. However, this calculation hasn't been experimentally verified yet. "It happens so quickly," Martin said.

THEY ARE ABOUT TO CHANGE QUANTUM REALITY, AGAIN
Physicists hope that the next operational phase on the LHC, dubbed Run 3 and beginning on Tuesday (July 5), will serve as the much sought-after stopwatch.

"We hope that in an indirect way we might be able to make a measurement of how long the Higgs boson is living for," Martin said. "If we can measure the lifetime it will give us more constraints on what particles the Higgs boson is decaying into."

In turn, understanding how the Higgs boson breaks apart into other particles could reveal hidden subatomic particles new to science, perhaps even including particles of mysterious dark matter.

Because of these implications, Gianotti described the Higgs boson as a crucial tool for probing the deepest mysteries of particle physics. "The Higgs boson is a very precise microscope to study nature at the smallest scales, and at the same time it is a formidable telescope to access physics at very high energy scales," she said.

The discovery of the Higgs boson hasn't just allowed physicists to tick another particle off the list. Its very existence and its behavior raise questions about some of the most profound areas of fundamental physics: the structure of matter in the universe, the fate of the universe, whether the universe is stable, and how elementary particles relate to each other.

RELATED STORIES:
— Higgs boson: The 'God Particle' explained
— The Large Hadron Collider: Inside CERN's atom smasher
— The Higgs boson could have kept our universe from collapsing

However, the Higgs boson continues to play coy with its secrets. "Everything that we've seen so far seems to be just what the Standard Model predicted," Martin said. "While this is interesting, it is also slightly disappointing because we were hoping that the Higgs boson might help us see beyond the Standard Model."

Far from breaking the rules and destroying physics, moving beyond the Standard Model is necessary to explain phenomena that doesn't fit, such as dark matter, or opening doorways into new physics, such as supersymmetry. It's why, fresh off four years of upgrades, the LHC will once again tackle the mysteries of the Higgs boson.


Follow Keith Cooper on Twitter @21stCenturySETI. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
Keith Cooper (opens in new tab)

Contributing writer
Keith Cooper is a freelance science journalist and editor in the United Kingdom, and has a degree in physics and astrophysics from the University of Manchester. He's the author of "The Contact Paradox: Challenging Our Assumptions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2020) and has written articles on astronomy, space, physics and astrobiology for a multitude of magazines and websites.

Particle physics: A decade of Higgs boson research

Nature

July 4, 2022

Ten years after the first reported observation of the Higgs boson at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, the most up-to-date results of the properties of this elementary particle from the ATLAS and CMS collaborations are presented in two papers published Nature.

In July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations announced that they had found a particle with properties that matched those expected for the Higgs boson. Since then, more than 30 times as many Higgs bosons have been detected, offering the opportunity to verify if its behaviour matches up with the standard model of elementary particle physics.

The two collaborations present an analysis of data produced within Run 2 of the Large Hadron Collider (between 2015 and 2018) that involve production or decay of Higgs bosons. The key question investigated by the researchers is how the Higgs boson interacts with other elementary particles. According to the theory from the standard model of particle physics, the strength with which any particle interacts with the Higgs boson should be proportional to the particle mass. Ten years of data allow the two collaborations to estimate, within reasonable errors, the Higgs interaction with the heaviest known particles: top and bottom quarks, Z and W bosons and tau lepton. For all these particles the data fall precisely in line, within experimental errors, of the behaviour predicted by the standard model of elementary particle physics.

The progress made over the past decade is predicted to continue over the next one. Some of the key properties of the Higgs boson, such as coupling to itself or to lighter particles, remain to be measured and potentially reveal deviations from theory. However, the current dataset is expected to more than double during the next decade of research, which will help to improve our understanding of Higgs boson physics.

The progress made in the past decade, what remains to be established, and potential future explorations are discussed in a Perspective by Giulia Zanderighi and colleagues.

doi:10.1038/s41586-022-04893-w

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CREATING QUANTUM REALITY
As the Large Hadron Collider Revs Up, Physicists’ Hopes Soar

The particle collider at CERN will soon restart. “There could be a revolution coming,” scientists say.

Inside the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, a worker uses a bicycle to navigate its 17 miles of tunnels during maintenance in 2020.

Credit...Valentin Flauraud/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


By Dennis Overbye
June 13, 2022

Sign up for Science Times Get stories that capture the wonders of nature, the cosmos and the human body. Get it sent to your inbox.


In April, scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, outside Geneva, once again fired up their cosmic gun, the Large Hadron Collider. After a three-year shutdown for repairs and upgrades, the collider has resumed shooting protons — the naked guts of hydrogen atoms — around its 17-mile electromagnetic underground racetrack. In early July, the collider will begin crashing these particles together to create sparks of primordial energy.

And so the great game of hunting for the secret of the universe is about to be on again, amid new developments and the refreshed hopes of particle physicists. Even before its renovation, the collider had been producing hints that nature could be hiding something spectacular. Mitesh Patel, a particle physicist at Imperial College London who conducts an experiment at CERN, described data from his previous runs as “the most exciting set of results I’ve seen in my professional lifetime.”

A decade ago, CERN physicists made global headlines with the discovery of the Higgs boson, a long-sought particle, which imparts mass to all the other particles in the universe. What is left to find? Almost everything, optimistic physicists say.

When the CERN collider was first turned on in 2010, the universe was up for grabs. The machine, the biggest and most powerful ever built, was designed to find the Higgs boson. That particle is the keystone of the Standard Model, a set of equations that explains everything scientists have been able to measure about the subatomic world.

But there are deeper questions about the universe that the Standard Model does not explain: Where did the universe come from? Why is it made of matter rather than antimatter? What is the “dark matter” that suffuses the cosmos? How does the Higgs particle itself have mass?

Physicists hoped that some answers would materialize in 2010 when the large collider was first turned on. Nothing showed up except the Higgs — in particular, no new particle that might explain the nature of dark matter. Frustratingly, the Standard Model remained unshaken.

The control room of the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, reopened in April.

Credit...Pierre Albouy/Reuters

The collider was shut down at the end of 2018 for extensive upgrades and repairs. According to the current schedule, the collider will run until 2025 and then shut down for two more years for other extensive upgrades to be installed. Among this set of upgrades are improvements to the giant detectors that sit at the four points where the proton beams collide and analyze the collision debris. Starting in July, those detectors will have their work cut out for them. The proton beams have been squeezed to make them more intense, increasing the chances of protons colliding at the crossing points — but creating confusion for the detectors and computers in the form of multiple sprays of particles that need to be distinguished from one another.

“Data’s going to be coming in at a much faster rate than we’ve been used to,” Dr. Patel said. Where once only a couple of collisions occurred at each beam crossing, now there would be more like five.

“That makes our lives harder in some sense because we’ve got to be able to find the things we’re interested in amongst all those different interactions,” he said. “But it means there’s a bigger probability of seeing the thing you are looking for.”

Meanwhile, a variety of experiments have revealed possible cracks in the Standard Model — and have hinted to a broader, more profound theory of the universe. These results involve rare behaviors of subatomic particles whose names are unfamiliar to most of us in the cosmic bleachers.

Take the muon, a subatomic particle that became briefly famous last year. Muons are often referred to as fat electrons; they have the same negative electrical charge but are 207 times as massive. “Who ordered that?” the physicist Isador Rabi said when muons were discovered in 1936.

Nobody knows where muons fit in the grand scheme of things. They are created by cosmic ray collisions — and in collider events — and they decay radioactively in microseconds into a fizz of electrons and the ghostly particles called neutrinos.

Last year, a team of some 200 physicists associated with the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois reported that muons spinning in a magnetic field had wobbled significantly faster than predicted by the Standard Model.

The discrepancy with theoretical predictions came in the eighth decimal place of the value of a parameter called g-2, which described how the particle responds to a magnetic field.

Scientists ascribed the fractional but real difference to the quantum whisper of as-yet-unknown particles that would materialize briefly around the muon and would affect its properties. Confirming the existence of the particles would, at last, break the Standard Model.

The Fermilab accelerator laboratory in Batavia, Ill. Fermilab’s Tevatron was the world’s most powerful collider until the Large Hadron Collider was built.

Credit...U.S. Department of Energy

But two groups of theorists are still working to reconcile their predictions of what g-2 should be, while they wait for more data from the Fermilab experiment.

“The g-2 anomaly is still very much alive,” said Aida X. El-Khadra, a physicist at the University of Illinois who helped lead a three-year effort called the Muon g-2 Theory Initiative to establish a consensus prediction. “Personally, I am optimistic that the cracks in the Standard Model will add up to an earthquake. However, the exact position of the cracks may still be a moving target.”

The muon also figures in another anomaly. The main character, or perhaps villain, in this drama is a particle called a B quark, one of six varieties of quark that compose heavier particles like protons and neutrons. B stands for bottom or, perhaps, beauty. Such quarks occur in two-quark particles known as B mesons. But these quarks are unstable and are prone to fall apart in ways that appear to violate the Standard Model.

Some rare decays of a B quark involve a daisy chain of reactions, ending in a different, lighter kind of quark and a pair of lightweight particles called leptons, either electrons or their plump cousins, muons. The Standard Model holds that electrons and muons are equally likely to appear in this reaction. (There is a third, heavier lepton called the tau, but it decays too fast to be observed.) But Dr. Patel and his colleagues have found more electron pairs than muon pairs, violating a principle called lepton universality.

“This could be a Standard Model killer,” said Dr. Patel, whose team has been investigating the B quarks with one of the Large Hadron Collider’s big detectors, LHCb. This anomaly, like the muon’s magnetic anomaly, hints at an unknown “influencer” — a particle or force interfering with the reaction.

One of the most dramatic possibilities, if this data holds up in the upcoming collider run, Dr. Patel says, is a subatomic speculation called a leptoquark. If the particle exists, it could bridge the gap between two classes of particle that make up the material universe: lightweight leptons — electrons, muons and also neutrinos — and heavier particles like protons and neutrons, which are made of quarks. Tantalizingly, there are six kinds of quarks and six kinds of leptons.

“We are going into this run with more optimism that there could be a revolution coming,” Dr. Patel said. “Fingers crossed.”

There is yet another particle in this zoo behaving strangely: the W boson, which conveys the so-called weak force responsible for radioactive decay. In May, physicists with the Collider Detector at Fermilab, or C.D.F., reported on a 10-year effort to measure the mass of this particle, based on some 4 million W bosons harvested from collisions in Fermilab’s Tevatron, which was the world’s most powerful collider until the Large Hadron Collider was built.

Paolo Girotti, a scientist at Fermilab, adjusting instruments with the Muon g-2 experiment in 2017.

Credit...Reidar Hahn/U.S. Department of Energy

According to the Standard Model and previous mass measurements, the W boson should weigh about 80.357 billion electron volts, the unit of mass-energy favored by physicists. By comparison the Higgs boson weighs 125 billion electron volts, about as much as an iodine atom. But the C.D.F. measurement of the W, the most precise ever done, came in higher than predicted at 80.433 billion. The experimenters calculated that there was only one chance in 2 trillion — 7-sigma, in physics jargon — that this discrepancy was a statistical fluke.

The mass of the W boson is connected to the masses of other particles, including the infamous Higgs. So this new discrepancy, if it holds up, could be another crack in the Standard Model.

Still, all three anomalies and theorists’ hopes for a revolution could evaporate with more data. But to optimists, all three point in the same encouraging direction toward hidden particles or forces interfering with “known” physics.

“So a new particle that might explain both g-2 and the W mass might be within reach at the L.H.C.,” said Kyle Cranmer, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin who works on other experiments at CERN.

John Ellis, a theoretician at CERN and Kings College London, noted that at least 70 papers have been published suggesting explanations for the new W-mass discrepancy.

“Many of these explanations also require new particles that may be accessible to the L.H.C.,” he said. “Did I mention dark matter? So, plenty of things to watch out for!”

Of the upcoming run Dr. Patel said: “It’ll be exciting. It’ll be hard work, but we are really keen to see what we’ve got and whether there is something genuinely exciting in the data.”

He added: “You could go through a scientific career and not be able to say that once. So it feels like a privilege.”

Dennis Overbye joined The Times in 1998, and has been a reporter since 2001. He has written two books: “Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Story of the Scientific Search for the Secret of the Universe” and “Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance.” @overbye
A version of this article appears in print on June 14, 2022, Section D, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Hopes Soar as Collider Revs Up. 

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THE QUANTUM UNIVERSE HAS CHANGED
Large Hadron Collider hits world record proton acceleration
AGAIN

By Chelsea Gohd 
APRIL 25,2022

The Large Hadron Collider restarted after a three-year shutdown on April 22, 2022. 

(Image credit: CERN)

The newly-upgraded Large Hadron Collider (LHC) just broke a world record with its proton beams.

The LHC, located at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, restarted on Friday (April 22) after a planned, three-year hiatus during which a number of upgrades were made to the facility. These improvements are already being put to the test and, in restarting and preparing for its new operating phase, called Run 3, the LHC has already beaten a previous record.

This particle accelerator is both the largest and most powerful in the world. And, in a test run conducted shortly after being switched back on, the LHC accelerated beams of protons to a higher energy than ever before.

"Today the two #LHC pilot beams of protons were accelerated, for the first time, to the record energy of 6.8 TeV per beam. After #restartingLHC, this operation is part of the activities to recommission the machine in preparation of #LHCRun3, planned for the summer of 2022," CERN tweeted today (April 25).

Related: The Large Hadron Collider will explore the cutting edge of physics after 3-year shutdown

The LHC works by accelerating two beams of particles like protons towards each other. These high-energy beams collide, allowing particle physicists to explore the extreme limits of our physical world and even discover aspects of physics never seen before.

With the upgrades implemented during the planned shutdown, the energy of the LHC's proton beams was set to increase from 6.5 teraelectronvolts (TeV) to 6.8 TeV. For reference, one teraelectronvolt is equivalent to 1 trillion electron volts and, in terms of kinetic energy, is roughly equal to the energy of a mosquito flying. While this might seem like a very small amount of energy, for a single proton it is an incredible amount of energy.

The LHC facility is used to explore cosmic mysteries ranging from investigating possible candidates for dark matter to completely breaking apart our understanding of physics. Now both switched on and working as intended with the new upgrades, the LHC is well on its way to enabling a new round of groundbreaking physics research.

RELATED STORIES:

— Photos: Behind the scenes at the largest U.S. atom smasher

— What does it take to be an astrophysicist?

— 20 trailblazing women in astronomy and astrophysics

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IT'S QUANTUM REALITY TIME
CERN restarts Large Hadron Collider in quest to unlock origins of the universe
BE PREPARED FOR ANYTHING

April 22 (UPI) -- Scientists at the European Council for Nuclear Research restarted the Large Hadron Collider on Friday, more than three years after the world's most powerful particle accelerator was paused for maintenance and upgrades.

The first beams of protons began spinning in opposite directions, marking the start of what is expected to be four years of data gathering in the search for dark matter, according to CERN.

The collider works by smashing particles together to allow scientists to study what's inside. Data collection is expected to begin in the summer after ramping up the energy and intensity of the beams.

"These beams circulated at injection energy and contained a relatively small number of protons. High-intensity, high-energy collisions are a couple of months away," Rhodri Jones, head of CERN's Beams department said.

"But first beams represent the successful restart of the accelerator after all the hard work of the long shutdown."

The third run of the 16-mile-long collider, which was launched in 2008, is expected to produce collisions at record energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts and in record numbers, thanks to extensive upgrades. This will allow physicists from around the world to study the Higgs boson in detail.

The Higgs boson, also known as the "God particle,"(IT SHOULD BE CALLED BY ITS CORRECT FULL NAME;"THAT GODDAMN PARTICLE")

is an elusive subatomic particle discovered at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012 that scientists believe may be a fundamental building block of the universe.

Experiments during the third run of the Large Hadron Collider will test the standard model of particle physics and improve understanding of cosmic-ray physics and a state of matter known as quark-gluon plasma, which was existed at the time of the Big Bang.

  

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CHANGES QUANTUM REALITY

Scientists prepare CERN collider restart in hunt for 'dark matter'

A man works in the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) Control Centre in Meyrin near Geneva, Switzerland, on Apr 13, 2022.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) tunnel is pictured at The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Saint-Genis-Pouilly, France, on Mar 2, 2017. 

(Photo: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse)

A view through a glass of people working in the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) Control Centre in Meyrin near Geneva, Switzerland, on Apr 13, 2022. 

Head of the Operations Group in the Beam Department Rende Steerenberg gestures during an interview with Reuters in the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) Control Centre in Meyrin near Geneva, Switzerland, on Apr 13, 2022.

People work in the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) Control Centre in Meyrin near Geneva, Switzerland, on Apr 13, 2022. 

Photos: REUTERS/Pierre Albouy

21 Apr 2022

PREVESSIN, France: Scientists at Europe's physics research centre will this week fire up the 27 kilometre-long Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the machine that found the Higgs boson particle, after a shutdown for maintenance and upgrades was prolonged by COVID-19 delays.

Restarting the collider is a complex procedure, and researchers at the CERN centre have champagne on hand if all goes well, ready to join a row of bottles in the control room celebrating landmarks including the discovery of the elusive subatomic particle a decade ago.

"It's not flipping a button," Rende Steerenberg, in charge of control room operations, told Reuters. "This comes with a certain sense of tension, nervousness."

Potential pitfalls include the discovery of an obstruction; the shrinking of materials due to a nearly 300 degree temperature swing; and difficulties with thousands of magnets that help keep billions of particles in a tight beam as they circle the collider tunnel beneath the Swiss-French border.

Steerenberg said the system had to work "like an orchestra".

"In order for the beam to go around all these magnets have to play the right functions and the right things at the right time," he said.

The batch of LHC collisions observed at CERN between 2010-2013 brought proof of the existence of the long-sought Higgs boson particle which, along with its linked energy field, is thought to be vital to the formation of the universe after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

But plenty remains to be discovered.

Physicists hope the resumption of collisions will help in their quest for so-called "dark matter" that lies beyond the visible universe. Dark matter is thought to be five times more prevalent than ordinary matter but does not absorb, reflect or emit light. Searches have so-far come up empty-handed.

"We are going to increase the number of collisions drastically and therefore the probability of new discoveries also," said Steerenberg, who added that the collider was due to operate until another shutdown from 2025-2027.

Source: Reuters/ec

FOR PROFIT HEALTHCARE INC.

UnitedHealth to acquire LHC Group in $5.4 billion deal

UnitedHealth building in Minnesota. Photo courtesy of UnitedHealth.

March 29 (UPI) -- UnitedHealth, the largest healthcare insurance company in the United States, announced Tuesday that it intends to purchase LHC Group, a leader in home healthcare services, for approximately $5.4 billion.

The transaction, in which UnitedHealth said it would pay $170 in cash for each share of LHC stock, is expected to close later this year.

Based in Lafayette, La., and founded in 1994, LHC Group employs 30,000 people in 37 states and the District of Columbia. The deal will combine LHC Group with UnitedHealth's Optum health services company.

The companies produced a video about the deal as part of the announcement.

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"LHC Group's sophisticated care coordination capabilities and its warm, human touch is so important for home care, and will greatly enhance the reach of Optum's value-based capabilities along the full continuum of care, including primary care, home and community care, virtual care, behavioral health and ambulatory surgery," said Dr. Wyatt Decker, the CEO of Optum Health, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth.

LHC Group chairman and CEO Keith G. Myers said in a joint statement with Optum Health that "working together as organizations committed to caring for the most vulnerable in society will help us more effectively and efficiently deliver high quality and increasingly value-based care in the home.

Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice sued UnitedHealth in an antitrust action to block its $13 billion acquisition of Change Healthcare, Inc. The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia along with the attorney generals from New York and Minnesota.

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QUANTUM WAR

Atom-smashing CERN lab ratchets up measures against Russia


A technician works in the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) tunnel of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, during a press visit in Meyrin, near Geneva, Switzerland, Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2016. CERN, the sprawling Geneva-area research center that houses the world’s largest atom smasher, is grappling with how to best join international action against Russia for its allegedly inhumane invasion of Ukraine without sacrificing science that serves humanity. A decision on the right balance to strike looms this week because CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is about to get running again after a more than three-year hiatus.

 (Laurent Gillieron/Keystone via AP, File) 


Fri, March 25, 2022, 12:24 PM·2 min read

GENEVA (AP) — The sprawling European science lab that houses the world’s largest atom smasher is taking new steps that will further limit its cooperation with Russian research institutes in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The CERN Council, the governing body of the Geneva-based lab with 23 member states, announced Friday that its scientists will suspend participation in all scientific committees in Russia and neighboring Belarus, a Russian ally that facilitated the Feb. 24 invasion.

CERN, the historic acronym for what is now the European Organization for Nuclear Research, had grappled with its response to the invasion because nearly 7% of its 18,000-odd researchers from around the world are linked to Russian institutions. On March 8, the council suspended new collaborations with Russia and stripped Russia of its observer status at the organization.

The issue of whether to further sanction Russia became pressing because the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, is set to start its third-ever run next month.

The machine propels particles through an underground, 27-kilometer (17-mile) ring of superconducting magnets in and around Geneva, generating science that can help elucidate mysteries like dark matter or the standard model of particle physics. Russian scientists have been involved in planning multiple experiments.

Under the new measures approved Friday, CERN will suspend all joint events with Russian institutes and pause considering any new candidates from Russia and Belarus to join the organization's staff.

The council also announced that it will suspend all collaboration with the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, an international grouping of 19 member nations based in Dubna, Russia. More than half of the members are former Soviet republics, including Ukraine, but they also include Cuba, the Czech Republic, Poland, North Korea, and Vietnam.

Pakistan: River Ravi project draws ire from environmental activists

The Pakistani government wants to spend billion of dollars on the Ravi River Urban Development Project. But the plan has left opponents counting the cost to the environment in nearby Lahore.


Farmers protest the Ravi River Urban Development Project at Sheikhupura, Punjab


Pakistan's Ravi River Urban Development Project (RRUDP) is envisioned by the current ruling government, Pakistan Tekreef-i-Insaf, as an innovative and efficient solution to the country's exponentially growing population in one its major urban center's ⁠— Lahore. However, the project has been met with criticism from environmentalists and activists as well as being involved in a legal tussle between the provincial Punjab Judiciary and the country's apex judiciary, the Supreme Court.

The Ravi River is a 720-kilometer transboundary river crossing northwestern India and eastern Pakistan.

The RRUDP is envisioned as a 41,308-hectare (102,074-acre) planned city, which would make it Pakistan's second planned city after the country's capital, Islamabad. The project boasts rehabilitation of the Ravi River into a perennial freshwater body and is expected to be the largest riverfront of the world when finished.
An idea dating back 75 years

The idea of an urban development on the Ravi riverfront was first conceived in 1947 and in 2013, the Government of Punjab began considering the project but it was not inaugurated until August 2020 by the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan. While construction began in December 2020, not much progress has been made since as the project has been embroiled in legal cases

Watch video 03:07Pakistan: Child activist goes on a climate education mission

The provincial judiciary and Supreme Court have been at odds when it comes to judgments regarding RRUDP.

On January 25 of this year, the Lahore High Court (LHC) scrapped the ambitious RRUDP, declaring several provisions of the Ravi Urban Development Authority (RUDA) Act 2020 unconstitutional.

In an uncharacteristically quick-fire response, just six days later the Supreme Court suspended the LHC's initial order to halt the RRUDP until RUDA rectified and amended their legal lacunas. The RRUDP has, in-effect, been given the green-light for implementation, which has garnered a range of criticism from environmentalists, human rights activists and the farming community that reside along the Ravi River.
Pakistan's Land Acquisition Act pushes boundaries

In Pakistan the government can purchase and acquire land from residents for public interest projects. However, the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 is seen by many as antiquated and against article 9 of the Constitution (Security of person. No person shall be deprived of life or liberty save in accordance with law).

This point was raised by the LHC in the hearing regarding RRUDP and advised that the government should elaborate further on farming and agricultural land in the Act to protect vulnerable farmers, the country's food security and ecological health.

Speaking to DW, environmental lawyer Rafay Alam, who was one of the petitioners on behalf of the farmers against RRUDP, commented: "This project is ​​an unashamedly green-washed land grab. There needs to be a limit and regulation to the government's acquisition of agricultural land otherwise where does it end?"

A farmer couple sowing and tilling the land for potato crop

In rebuttal, the CEO of RUDA, Imran Amin maintains that the RRUDP project is well within the purview of the constitution as it is the government's duty to provide amenities and housing to its population, and if it was not for the Land Acquisition Act, the government would not be able to proceed with planned urbanization and development.

Is RRUDP going to endanger Ravi's agriculture?

In 2021, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) launched a fact-finding report on RRUDP and one of the primary concerns was the impact the project may have on Punjab's ecology, food security and farmers' livelihoods.

According to the report, almost 77% of the site area is agricultural land while the remainder comprises of a delicate ecosystem of community and flora. The HRCP fears that the agricultural land of over 76,000 acres could be affected under the 30-year project.

The HRCP'S Chairperson, Hina Jilani, told DW: "Such so-called development projects are favoring concrete over agricultural land which is problematic as the land around Ravi is supplying much of Lahore's fruits and vegetables and especially the farmers themselves, who live and feed off this land, this project is impinging on their social and economic rights."

Watch video 03:10 Offsetting polluted air in Karachi

Mazhar Abbas, a spokesperson for the Ravi Farmers' Movement, who have been protesting the RRUDP's actions, told DW that there are several reasons farmers who are skeptical about the project.

"Farming is all these people know, they don't want to give up their lands because it is their livelihood and community," said Abbas. Further, he shared that even if farmers were amenable to giving up their land, under the Land Acquisition Act, farmers receive very little settlement rates per acre (€1,008) which gives them less security.

However, RUDA CEO Imran Amin maintains that the RRUDP is a means to conserve the Ravi river and increase agricultural efficiency. "There is a misconception that we want to remove all farmers and agriculture from the area. In our plan we have given a 40% allotment to forest cover and agriculture. Right now, the Ravi river is acidic and we are not producing crops, fruits and vegetables we could be. As this project helps improve the river and ecology that we are committed to, we will also improve farmer livelihoods and produce."

Conflicting urbanization strategies

At the center of the RRUDP debate between opponents and proponents is conflicting strategies to tackle urban sprawl. According to Alam, the RRUDP represents a "a fixed housing template" that favors the more affluent and adds distances and vehicular use in the city, further exacerbating Lahore's smog crisis.

However, Amin argues that Lahore and many of Pakistan's urban areas are in trouble because cities have not been planned and views the RRUDP as an antidote to Pakistan's rampant "housing society boom" and urbanization problem.

"RRUDP is not a housing society, we are making a planned city that is anticipating the population rise taking into consideration economic factors, pollution air index, forest cover, etc. We are planning for all segments of society and low cost housing is a compulsion in the plan."

Amin shared that in the initial plan, they are making a labor colony of 3000 apartments that will increase on need basis. This housing model, Amin hopes, will lead to a less informal sprawl and bad living conditions for the labor class.
Feasibility studies controversy

Another criticism hurled at the RRUDP is that the feasibility study is not robust, as per the LHC's ruling. In 2014, the Lahore Development Authority hired Singapore based urban development firm Meinhardt Group to run a feasibility study. This study also formed a significant part of the Environmental Protection Authority's Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA).

However, eyebrows have been raised regarding the efficacy of the study as Meindhart Group was allegedly blacklisted by the Lahore Development Authority (LDA) in early 2022. The group has publicly denied this and is pursuing arbitration/defamation cases against the LDA.

Also, Amin, now CEO of RUDA, served as Director Operations at Meinhardt Pakistan from 2012-2020 which petitions against RRUDP, and this has been deemed as a "conflict of interest."

Amin shared with DW, that the conflict of interest claims are baseless as he was not involved with RUDA at the time Meinhardt was consulted. "When anyone goes to a job interview, having experience and knowledge with the project is an asset. Since I was already experienced with the Ravi project, I had an added advantage and relevant experience. How is that a conflict of interest?" said Amin.

Edited by: John Silk

Kerstin Perez is searching the cosmos for signs of dark matter

“There need to be more building blocks than the ones we know about,” says the particle physicist.

Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office
Publication Date: January 2, 2022
PRESS INQUIRIES

“We measure so much about the universe, but we also know we’re completely missing huge chunks of what the universe is made of,” Kerstin Perez says.
Credits:Photo: Adam Glanzman


Kerstin Perez is searching for imprints of dark matter. The invisible substance embodies 84 percent of the matter in the universe and is thought to be a powerful cosmic glue, keeping whole galaxies from spinning apart. And yet, the particles themselves leave barely a trace on ordinary matter, thwarting all efforts at detection thus far.

Perez, a particle physicist at MIT, is hoping that a high-altitude balloon experiment, to be launched into the Antarctic stratosphere in late 2022, will catch indirect signs of dark matter, in the particles that it leaves behind. Such a find would significantly illuminate dark matter’s elusive nature.

The experiment, which Perez co-leads, is the General AntiParticle Spectrometer, or GAPS, a NASA-funded mission that aims to detect products of dark matter annihilation. When two dark matter particles collide, it’s thought that the energy of this interaction can be converted into other particles, including antideuterons — particles that then ride through the galaxy as cosmic rays which can penetrate Earth’s stratosphere. If antideuterons exist, they should come from all parts of the sky, and Perez and her colleagues are hoping GAPS will be at just the right altitude and sensitivity to detect them.

“If we can convince ourselves that’s really what we’re seeing, that could help point us in the direction of what dark matter is,” says Perez, who was awarded tenure this year in MIT’s Department of Physics.

In addition to GAPS, Perez’ work centers on developing methods to look for dark matter and other exotic particles in supernova and other astrophysical phenomena captured by ground and space telescopes.

“We measure so much about the universe, but we also know we’re completely missing huge chunks of what the universe is made of,” she says. “There need to be more building blocks than the ones we know about. And I’ve chosen different experimental methods to go after them.”

Building up

Born and raised in West Philadelphia, Perez was a self-described “indoor kid,” mostly into arts and crafts, drawing and design, and building.

“I had two glue guns, and I remember I got into building dollhouses, not because I cared about dolls so much, but because it was a thing you could buy and build,” she recalls.

Her plans to pursue fine arts took a turn in her junior year, when she sat in on her first physics class. Material that was challenging for her classmates came more naturally to Perez, and she signed up the next year for both physics and calculus, taught by the same teacher with infectious wonder.

“One day he did a derivation that took up two-thirds of the board, and he stood back and said, ‘Isn’t that so beautiful? I can’t erase it.’ And he drew a frame around it and worked for the rest of the class in that tiny third of the board,” Perez recalls. “It was that kind of enthusiasm that came across to me.”

So buoyed, she set off after high school for Columbia University, where she pursued a major in physics. Wanting experience in research, she volunteered in a nanotechnology lab, imaging carbon nanotubes.

“That was my turning point,” Perez recalls. “All my background in building, creating, and wanting to design things came together in this physics context. From then on, I was sold on experimental physics research.”

She also happened to take a modern physics course taught by MIT’s Janet Conrad, who was then a professor at Columbia. The class introduced students to particle physics and the experiments underway to detect dark matter and other exotic particles. The detector generating the most buzz was CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. The LHC was to be the largest particle accelerator in the world, and was expected imminently to come online.

After graduating from Columbia, Perez flew west to Caltech, where she had the opportunity to go to CERN as part of her graduate work. That experience was invaluable, as she helped to calibrate one of the LHC’s pixel detectors, which is designed to measure ordinary, well-known particles.

“That experience taught me, when you first turn on your instrument, you have to make sure you can measure the things you know are there, really well, before you can claim you’re looking at anything new,” Perez says.

Front of the class

After finishing up her work at CERN, she began to turn over a new idea. While the LHC was designed to artificially smash particles together to look for dark matter, smaller projects were going after the same particles in space, their natural environment.

“All the evidence we have of dark matter comes from astrophysical observations, so it makes sense to look out there for clues,” Perez says. “I wanted the opportunity to, from scratch, fundamentally design and build an experiment that could tell us something about dark matter.”

With this idea, she returned to Columbia, where she joined the core team that was working to get the balloon experiment GAPS off the ground. As a postdoc, she developed a cost-effective method to fabricate the experiment’s more than 1,000 silicon detectors, and has since continued to lead the experiment’s silicon detector program. Then in 2015, she accepted a faculty position at Haverford College, close to her hometown.

“I was there for one-and-a-half years, and absolutely loved it,” Perez says.

While at Haverford, she dove into not only her physics research, but also teaching. The college offered a program for faculty to help improve their lectures, with each professor meeting weekly with an undergraduate who was trained to observe and give feedback on their teaching style. Perez was paired with a female student of color, who one day shared with her a less than welcoming experience she had experienced in an introductory course, that ultimately discouraged her from declaring a computer science major.

Listening to the student, Perez, who has often been the only woman of color in advanced physics classes, labs, experimental teams, and faculty rosters, recognized a kinship, and a calling. From that point on, in addition to her physics work, she began to explore a new direction of research: belonging.

She reached out to social psychologists to understand issues of diversity and inclusion, and the systemic factors contributing to underrepresentation in physics, computer science, and other STEM disciplines. She also collaborated with educational researchers to develop classroom practices to encourage belonging among students, with the motivation of retaining underrepresented students.

In 2016, she accepted an offer to join the MIT physics faculty, and brought with her the work on inclusive teaching that she began at Haverford. At MIT, she has balanced her research in particle physics with teaching and with building a more inclusive classroom.

“It’s easy for instructors to think, ‘I have to completely revamp my syllabus and flip my classroom, but I have so much research, and teaching is a small part of my job that frankly is not rewarded a lot of the time,’” Perez says. “But if you look at the research, it doesn’t take a lot. It’s the small things we do, as teachers who are at the front of the classroom, that have a big impact.”