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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".


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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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CERN proposes $17 billion particle smasher that would be 3 times bigger than the Large Hadron Collider

Ben Turner
Thu, February 8, 2024 

A schematic map showing a possible location for the Future Circular Collider.

Researchers at the world's biggest particle accelerator have put forward proposals to build a new, even larger atom smasher.

The $17 billion Future Circular Collider (FCC) would be 57 miles (91 kilometers) long, dwarfing its predecessor, the 16.5-mile-long (27 kilometers) Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva.

Physicists want to use the FCC's increased size and power to probe fringes of the Standard Model of particle physics, the current best theory that describes how the smallest components of the universe behave. By smashing particles at even higher energies (100 tera electron volts, compared with the LHC's 14), the researchers hope to find unknown particles and forces; discover why matter outweighs antimatter; and probe the nature of dark matter and dark energy, two invisible entities believed to make up 95 percent of the universe.

Related: Our universe is merging with 'baby universes,' causing it to expand, new theoretical study suggests

"The FCC will not only be a wonderful instrument to improve our understanding of the fundamental laws of physics and nature," Fabiola Gianotti, CERN's director-general, said at a news conference Monday (Feb. 5). "It will also be a driver of innovation, because we will need new advanced technologies, from cryogenics to superconducting magnets, vacuum technologies, detectors, instrumentation — technologies with a potentially huge impact on our society and huge socioeconomic benefits."

Atom smashers like the LHC collide protons together at near light speed while looking for rare decay products that could be clues to new particles or forces. This helps physicists scrutinize their best understanding of the universe's most fundamental building blocks and how they interact, described by the Standard Model of physics.

Though the Standard Model has enabled scientists to make remarkable predictions — such as the existence of the Higgs boson, discovered by the LHC in 2012 — physicists are far from satisfied with it and are constantly looking for new physics that might break it.

This is because the model, despite being our most comprehensive one yet, includes enormous gaps, making it totally incapable of explaining where the force of gravity comes from, what dark matter is made of, or why there is so much more matter than antimatter in the universe.

To unlock these new frontiers, physicists at CERN will use the sevenfold increase in beam energy of the FCC to accelerate particles to even higher speeds.

But the detector, despite having taken a promising step forward, is far from built. The proposals put forward by CERN are part of an interim report on a feasibility study set to be finished next year. Once it's complete and if the detector plans go ahead, CERN — which is run by 18 European Union member states, as well as Switzerland, Norway, Serbia, Israel and the U.K. — will likely look for additional funding from nonmember states for the project.

Despite the high hopes for what the new collider could find, some scientists remain skeptical that the expensive machine will encounter new physics.

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"The FCC would be more expensive than both the LHC and LIGO [Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory] combined and it has less discovery potential," Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, wrote in a 2019 post on the platform X, formerly Twitter. "It would, at the present state of knowledge and technology, not give a good return on investment. There are presently better avenues to pursue than high energy physics."

Member states will meet in 2028 to decide whether to greenlight the project. Then, the first phase of the machine — which would collide electrons with their animatter counterparts, positrons — would come online in 2045. Finally, in the 2070s, the FCC would begin slamming protons into one another.

How the Large Hadron Collider's successor will hunt for the dark universe

Robert Lea

SPACE.COM
Thu, February 8, 2024 

Planning is well underway for the successor to the world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The new "atom smasher," named the Future Circular Collider (FCC), will dwarf the LHC in size and power. It will smash particles together with so much energy, in fact, that scientists say it may be capable of investigating our universe's most mysterious entities: Dark energy and dark matter.

LHC operators at CERN revealed the results of a "midterm review" of their FCC Feasibility Study to the press on Monday (Feb. 5). The feasibility study began in 2021 and is set to conclude in 2025. The findings thus far constitute three years of work, with scientists and engineers from across the globe determining the placement of the new accelerator's ring, the implementation of the FCC facility, concepts for detectors and funding aspects.


The FCC will run under the jurisdiction of France and Switzerland, just like the LHC currently does, but the future accelerator will stretch 56.5 miles (90.7 kilometers), making it over three times the length of CERN's current particle accelerator, which is 16.8 miles (27 kilometers) long. The LHC is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world.

Related: Dark matter may be hiding in the Large Hadron Collider's particle jets

A small stretch of the near 17-mile-long LHC particle accelerator which will be dwarfed by the FCC. (Image credit: Robert Lea)

The FCC will operate in the same way as the LHC, accelerating charged particles around a loop, using superconducting magnets, then smashing them together as they approach the speed of light.

Scientists can probe fundamental physics by observing showers of secondary particles created when particles like protons slam together. But whereas the LHC can attain energies of around 13 terra electronvolts (TeV) when operating at full power, CERN says the FCC should be able to reach energies as great as 100 TeV.

"Our aim is to study the properties of matter at the smallest scale and highest energy," CERN director-general Fabiola Gianotti said at the interim report presentation in Geneva on Tuesday (Feb 6.)
Why do particle accelerators need more power?

The crowning achievement of the LHC thus far is undoubtedly the discovery of the Higgs Boson, the force-carrying particle of a field called the Higgs Field, which permeates the universe and dictates most other particles' masses.

The breakthrough sighting of the Higgs Boson by two LHC detectors was announced on July 4, 2012, and is credited with completing the Standard Model of particle physics, which is humanity's best description of the universe, its particles and their interactions on a subatomic scale.

Yet, the Standard Model still requires some tweaking — and, since 2012, scientists have been using the LHC to search for physics beyond the model to make those adjustments. Success has been limited. This search will get a boost when the LHC's high luminosity upgrade is completed, which will mean the particle accelerator can perform more collisions and offer scientists more opportunities to spot exotic physics.

THE GOD DAMN PARTICLE

A Higgs boson decays recorded in a particle collision recorded by the ATLAS detector at the LHC on May 18, 2012. (Image credit: ATLAS)



The two main outliers of the Standard Model (aka, why some of those tweaks are necessary) are dark matter and dark energy.

Sometimes collectively known as the "dark universe," these phenomena constitute such large mysteries for scientists because dark energy accounts for around 68% of the universe's energy and matter, while dark matter accounts for around 27% of these continents. But neither can be seen because they don't interact with light, and no one has been able to pin them down through other forms of direct detection, either. That means that the matter and energy we understand and can account for comprise no more than 5% of the universe's contents, and we have little idea what around 95% of the universe actually is.

And probing these aspects of the universe may require smashing particles together with much more energy than the high-luminosity LHC is capable of.

To begin with, dark matter can't be "standard matter" like the atoms that make up the stuff we see around us on an everyday basis, like stars, planets and our bodies. Remember how it doesn't interact with light? Well, protons, neutrons and electrons — collectively known as "baryons" — do. So, dark matter must be something else.

Currently, the only way scientists can infer the presence of dark matter is via its interaction with gravity and the effect this has on baryonic matter and, in turn, light.

Dark energy is even more problematic. It's the force that scientists see driving the acceleration of the universe's expansion.

It concerns a period of expansion separate from the universe's initial inflation, which was triggered by the Big Bang. After that early expansion slowed to a near halt, in a later epoch, the universe unexplainably started to expand again. This expansion rate is actually speeding up to this day, with dark energy used to account for that action.

Yet, as we've discussed, scientists don't actually know what dark energy is.

To see why that is troubling, imagine pushing a child on a swing. The Big Bang is akin to your first and only push that gets the swing in motion. The swing may keep going for a short while, even without any action from you, then it will come to a half. Then, imagine that it suddenly begins motion again despite you just standing there. And not only that, but it swings faster and faster, reaching higher and higher points. This is similar to what dark energy is doing to the very fabric of space.

CERN hopes the high-energy collisions of the FCC could reveal the nature of this ongoing, late-universe push and the particles that make up dark matter.

However, it will be some time before this future particle accelerator is ready to embark on its investigation of the dark universe.
The timeline and cost of the Future Circular Collider

In 2028, three years after the completion of the FCC feasibility study, CERN member states will convene to decide if the FCC will get the go-ahead. Should the future collider get greenlit, CERN says, construction will begin in the mid-2030s.

The FCC will be completed in stages. The first stage is a electron-positron collider (FCC-ee) that will slam together negatively charged electrons, their positive antiparticle counterparts, known as positrons, and other light particles. CERN adds that FCC-ee should start operations in 2045.

The second machine of the FCC will be a proton colliding accelerator (FCC-hh) sitting alongside the FCC-ee in the same evacuated tunnel buried under the French-Swiss Alps and Lake Geneva. This part would come online no sooner than 2070, according to CERN.

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At the CERN press conference, Gianotti laid out some of the costs of the FCC, saying that the first FCC-ee stage alone would cost an estimated $17 billion USD.

CERN's Director general justified the cost by adding that the FCC is the only machine that would allow humanity to make the big jump in studying matter needed to crack the secrets of the dark universe.

A four-legged ‘Robodog’ is patrolling the Large Hadron Collider

Mack DeGeurin
Thu, February 8, 2024 

CERT’s four-legged Robodog can maneuver through cramped spaces and use sensors to spot fires, leaks, or other hazards.


Traversing through the dark, underground areas of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland isn't for the faint of heart. The world’s most powerful particle accelerator violently smashes protons and other subatomic particles together at nearly the speed of light, which can emit radiation at levels potentially harmful to humans. If that weren't enough, long stretches of compact, cluttered areas and uneven surface areas throughout the facility make stable footing a necessity.

Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) are turning to four-legged, dog-inspired robots to solve that problem. This week, CERN showed off its recently developed CERNquadbot robot which they said successfully completed its first radiation survey in CERN’s North Area, the facility's largest experimental area. Looking forward, CERN plans to have its “Robodog” trot through other experiment caves to analyze areas and look for hazards.

Why does CERT need a robot dog?

The hazardous, sometimes cramped confines of the LHC’s experiments caverns pose challenges to both human workers and past robot designs alike. Temporary radiation levels and other environmental hazards like fires and potential water leaks can make some areas temporarily inaccessible to humans. Other past CERT robots, while adept at using strong robotics arms to carry heavy objects over distance, struggle to traverse over uneven ground. Stairs, similarly, are a nonstarter for these mostly wheeled and tracked robots.

That’s where CERT’s robot dog comes in. CERTquadbot’s four, dog-like legs allow it to traverse up and down and side to side, all while adjusting for slight changes on the ground's surface. A video of the robot at work shows it tic-tacking its four metal legs up and down as it navigates through what looks like pavement and a metal grated floor, all the while using onboard sensors to analyze its surroundings. A human operator can be seen nearby directing the robot using a controller. For a touch of added flair, the robot can also briefly stand up on its two hind legs. The Robodog had to use all of its various maneuverability during its recent test-run up the North area, which was reportedly filled with obstacles.

“There are large bundles of loose wires and pipes on the ground that slip and move, making them unpassable for wheeled robots and difficult even for humans,” CERN’s Controls, Electronics and Mechatronics robotics engineer Chris McGreavy said in a statement.

Thankfully for the CERN scientists, the Robodog rose to the occasion. And unlike other living dogs, this one didn’t need a tasty treat for a reward.

“There were no issues at all: the robot was completely stable throughout the inspection,” McGreavy added.

https://youtu.be/cbcpJZicJ2w?si=35A_xHeZ7si6lhtX

Now with the successful test completed, CERN says it's upgrading the robot and preparing it and its successors to deploy in experiment caves, including the ALICE detector which is used to study quark-gluon plasma. These areas often feature stairs and other complex surfaces that would stump CERN’s other, less maneuverable robots. Once inside, the robot dogs will monitor the area for hazards like fire and water leaks or quickly respond to alarms.

CERN directed PopSci to this blog post when we asked for more details regarding the robot.

Dog-inspired dogs are going where humans can’t

Four-legged quadruped robots have risen in popularity across numerous industries in recent years for their ability to nimbly access areas either too cumbersome or dangerous for humans and larger robots to access. Boston Dynamics’ “Spot,” possibly the most famous quadruped robot currently on the market, has been used to inspect dangerous offshore oil drilling sites, explore old abandoned mining facilities, and even monitor a major sports arena in Atlanta, Georgia. More controversially, law enforcement officials in New York City City and at the southern US border have also turned to these quadruped style robots to explore areas otherwise deemed too hazardous for humans.

Still, CERN doesn’t expect its new Robodog to completely eliminate the need for the other models in its family of robots. Instead, the various robots will work together in tandem, using their respective strengths to fill in gaps with the ultimate goal of hopefully speeding up the process of scientific discovery.

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.

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SEE 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for LHC 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for CERN 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for QUANTUM 

 

'Ghost Particles' Were Detected at the Large Hadron Collider For the First Time

Bringing us closer to uncovering the role of these 'elusive particles' in the universe.

Nov 26, 2021By  Chris Young

The FASER equipment at the LHC.UCI

Physicists from the University of California, Irvine (UCI) found never-before-seen "ghost particles", or neutrinos, in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) during an experiment called FASER, a report from New Atlas reveals. 

Neutrinos are electrically neutral elementary particles with a mass close to zero. The reason they're known as ghost particles is that, though they are incredibly common, they have no electric charge, meaning they are difficult to detect as they rarely interact with matter.

'Ghost particles' could carry immense amounts of information

Alongside the FASER experiments at the LHC, a series of in-development neutrino observatories, designed to detect neutrino sources in space, have the potential to reveal many of the universe's mysteries. Despite their name, ghost particles might actually provide a wealth of information due to the fact that they don't interact with other matter as they travel through the universe — unlike light particles, photons, which are distorted by interactions as they traverse space. The problem, so far, has been our ability to detect these ghost particles or neutrinos.

Neutrinos are produced in stars, supernovae, and quasars, as well as in human-made sources. It has long been believed, for example, that particle accelerators such as LHC should also produce them, though they have likely gone undetected. Now, a paper published in the journal Physical Review D, provides the first evidence of neutrinos, in the form of six neutrino interactions, at the LHC.

"Prior to this project, no sign of neutrinos has ever been seen at a particle collider," study co-author Jonathan Feng said in a press statement. "This significant breakthrough is a step toward developing a deeper understanding of these elusive particles and the role they play in the universe."

The FASER experiment will be expanded by 2022

Back in 2018, the FASER experiment installed an instrument to detect neutrinos, some 1,575 ft (480 m) down from where particle collisions occur in the LHC. The instrument uses a detector composed of plates of lead and tungsten, which are set apart by layers of emulsion. When neutrinos smash into nuclei in the metals, they produce particles that then travel through the layers of emulsion. This creates marks that are visible following a processing procedure that's somewhat similar to film photography. During the experiments, six of these marks were spotted after processing.

According to Feng, the team is "now preparing a new series of experiments with a full instrument that's much larger and significantly more sensitive," so as to collect more data. This larger version will be called FASERnu. It will weigh 2,400 lb (1,090 kg) — a lot more than the first version's 64 lb (29 kg) — allowing it to detect many more of the elusive ghost particles. David Casper, another co-author of the study, says the UCI team expects FASERnu to "record more than 10,000 neutrino interactions in the next run of the LHC, beginning in 2022."

For the First Time Ever, Physicists Detect Signs of Neutrinos at Large Hadron Collider

By UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - IRVINE NOVEMBER 27, 2021

Scientific first at CERN facility a preview of upcoming 3-year research campaign.

The international Forward Search Experiment team, led by physicists at the University of California, Irvine, has achieved the first-ever detection of neutrino candidates produced by the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN facility near Geneva, Switzerland.

In a paper published on November 24, 2021, in the journal Physical Review D, the researchers describe how they observed six neutrino interactions during a pilot run of a compact emulsion detector installed at the LHC in 2018.

“Prior to this project, no sign of neutrinos has ever been seen at a particle collider,” said co-author Jonathan Feng, UCI Distinguished Professor of physics & astronomy and co-leader of the FASER Collaboration. “This significant breakthrough is a step toward developing a deeper understanding of these elusive particles and the role they play in the universe.”

He said the discovery made during the pilot gave his team two crucial pieces of information.

The FASER particle detector that received CERN approval to be installed at the Large Hadron Collider in 2019 has recently been augmented with an instrument to detect neutrinos. The UCI-led FASER team used a smaller detector of the same type in 2018 to make the first observations of the elusive particles generated at a collider. The new instrument will be able to detect thousands of neutrino interactions over the next three years, the researchers say. Credit: Photo courtesy of CERN

“First, it verified that the position forward of the ATLAS interaction point at the LHC is the right location for detecting collider neutrinos,” Feng said. “Second, our efforts demonstrated the effectiveness of using an emulsion detector to observe these kinds of neutrino interactions.”

The pilot instrument was made up of lead and tungsten plates alternated with layers of emulsion. During particle collisions at the LHC, some of the neutrinos produced smash into nuclei in the dense metals, creating particles that travel through the emulsion layers and create marks that are visible following processing. These etchings provide clues about the energies of the particles, their flavors – tau, muon or electron – and whether they’re neutrinos or antineutrinos.

According to Feng, the emulsion operates in a fashion similar to photography in the pre-digital camera era. When 35-millimeter film is exposed to light, photons leave tracks that are revealed as patterns when the film is developed. The FASER researchers were likewise able to see neutrino interactions after removing and developing the detector’s emulsion layers.

“Having verified the effectiveness of the emulsion detector approach for observing the interactions of neutrinos produced at a particle collider, the FASER team is now preparing a new series of experiments with a full instrument that’s much larger and significantly more sensitive,” Feng said.

The FASER experiment is situated 480 meters from the ATLAS interaction point at the Large Hadron Collider. According to Jonathan Feng, UCI Distinguished Professor of physics & astronomy and co-leader of the FASER Collaboration, this is a good location for detecting neutrinos that result from particle collisions at the facility. Credit: Photo courtesy of CERN

Since 2019, he and his colleagues have been getting ready to conduct an experiment with FASER instruments to investigate dark matter at the LHC. They’re hoping to detect dark photons, which would give researchers a first glimpse into how dark matter interacts with normal atoms and the other matter in the universe through nongravitational forces.

With the success of their neutrino work over the past few years, the FASER team – consisting of 76 physicists from 21 institutions in nine countries – is combining a new emulsion detector with the FASER apparatus. While the pilot detector weighed about 64 pounds, the FASERnu instrument will be more than 2,400 pounds, and it will be much more reactive and able to differentiate among neutrino varieties.

“Given the power of our new detector and its prime location at CERN, we expect to be able to record more than 10,000 neutrino interactions in the next run of the LHC, beginning in 2022,” said co-author David Casper, FASER project co-leader and associate professor of physics & astronomy at UCI. “We will detect the highest-energy neutrinos that have ever been produced from a human-made source.”

What makes FASERnu unique, he said, is that while other experiments have been able to distinguish between one or two kinds of neutrinos, it will be able to observe all three flavors plus their antineutrino counterparts. Casper said that there have only been about 10 observations of tau neutrinos in all of human history but that he expects his team will be able to double or triple that number over the next three years.

“This is an incredibly nice tie-in to the tradition at the physics department here at UCI,” Feng said, “because it’s continuing on with the legacy of Frederick Reines, a UCI founding faculty member who won the Nobel Prize in physics for being the first to discover neutrinos.”

“We’ve produced a world-class experiment at the world’s premier particle physics laboratory in record time and with very untraditional sources,” Casper said. “We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the Heising-Simons Foundation and the Simons Foundation, as well as the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and CERN, which supported us generously.”

Reference: “First neutrino interaction candidates at the LHC” by Henso Abreu et al. (FASER Collaboration), 24 November 2021, Physical Review D.
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.104.L091101

Savannah Shively and Jason Arakawa, UCI Ph.D. students in physics & astronomy, also contributed to the paper.

OPENING THE QUANTUM UNIVERSE

Rice nuclear physics team tapped to lead $15 million Large Hadron Collider upgrade project

Wei Li directing U.S. build of massive timing components for CMS experiment

Grant and Award Announcement

RICE UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: 

NICOLE LEWIS, MIKE MATVEEV, PROF. WEI LE, AND FRANK GEURTS. PHOTO COURTESY OF RICE UNIVERSITY.

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CREDIT: PHOTO COURTESY OF RICE UNIVERSITY

A team of physicists at Rice University led by Wei Li has been awarded a five-year, $15.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Nuclear Physics, marking a significant leap forward in the realm of high-energy nuclear physics.

This prestigious grant will pave the way for a new frontier of scientific discoveries within the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) program.

The CMS experiment is one of two large general-purpose particle physics detectors built on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European organization for nuclear research located on the border of France and Switzerland.

The team from Rice includes co-principal investigator Frank Geurts and researchers Nicole Lewis and Mike Matveev.

Under Li’s guidance, a collaborative effort between Rice, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oak Ridge National Lab, University of Illinois Chicago, and University of Kansas will embark on the development of an ultra-fast silicon timing detector named the endcap timing layer (ETL). This cutting-edge technology forms a crucial component of the CMS experiment’s upgrades and is poised to revolutionize our understanding of fundamental physics.

“The ETL will enable breakthrough science in the area of heavy ion collisions, allowing us to delve into the properties of a remarkable new state of matter called the quark-gluon plasma,” said Li, a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice. “This, in turn, offers invaluable insights into the strong nuclear force that binds particles at the core of matter.”

Key features of the ETL include two disks on each side of the CMS detector accounting for half of the entire international ETL project and boasting a time resolution of 30 picoseconds per particle.

The detector will enable unprecedented particle identification capabilities through precise time-of-flight measurements, contributing to the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), an upgrade to the LHC that is scheduled to launch in 2029. The HL-LHC will operate at about 10 times the luminosity of the collider’s original configuration.

Increasing luminosity produces more data, allowing physicists to study known mechanisms in greater detail and observe rare new phenomena that might reveal themselves. For example, HL-LHC will produce at least 15 million Higgs bosons per year compared to around three million collected during LHC operation in 2017.

Upon completion, the ETL will enable the investigation of a wide range of physics, including not only the study of quark-gluon plasma and the search for the Higgs boson, but also for extra dimensions and particles that could make up dark matter.

Beyond its impact on the LHC, the results of the ETL project hold tremendous potential for synergy with other leading-edge facilities like the electron-ion collider at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York. The project is set to shape the scientific landscape in the coming decade.

Li received his Ph.D. in experimental particle and nuclear physics at MIT in 2009. Following a postdoc position at MIT working on the first relativistic heavy ion physics program on the CMS experiment at the LHC, he joined the Rice faculty in 2012. His work has been recognized with a White House Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, an Early Career Award from the DOE and a Sloan Research Fellowship.

This grant is administered by the DOE (DE-SC0024846).

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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European physicists boldly take small step toward

 100-kilometer-long atom smasher

RIGHT UNDER GENEVA WHAT COULD GO WRONG

Dig, if you will, a tunnel. A mammoth new collider would dwarf an existing machine at the CERN physics laboratory in Europe. © CERN

By Adrian Cho Jun. 19, 2020 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a physics laboratory with a world-leading scientific facility must have a plan for an even better machine to succeed it. So it is with the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, which is home to the world’s biggest atom smasher, the 27-kilometer-long Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Today, CERN’s governing council announced it will launch a technical and financial feasibility study to build an even bigger collider 80 to 100 kilometers long (actually two of them in succession) that could ultimately reach an energy seven times higher than the LHC. The first machine wouldn’t be built before 2040.

There is “some pride of the member states of CERN [that it is] the leading particle physics laboratory, and I think there is interest in CERN staying there,” says Ursula Bassler, a physicist and president of the CERN council, the panel of representatives from the 23 nations that support the lab. However, CERN Director-General Fabiola Gianotti emphasizes that no commitment has been made to build a new mammoth collider, which could cost $20 billion. “There is no recommendation for the implementation of any project,” she says. “This is coming in a few years.”

Physicists have been debating what collider to build next since well before the LHC started to take data in 2010. In the early 2000s, discussions centered on a 30-kilometer-long, straight-shot, linear collider that would smash electrons into positrons. Such a machine would complement the circular LHC, which smashes countercirculating beams of protons. The two types of machines have different strengths. A proton collider can generally reach higher energies and discover heavier new particles. But protons are made of other particles called quarks, so they make messy collisions. In contrast, electrons and positrons are indivisible fundamental particles, so they make cleaner collisions. Historically, physicists often have found new particles at proton colliders and studied them in detail at electron-positron colliders.

That’s the game particle physicists around the world are trying to play today. In 2012, the proton-smashing LHC blasted out the Higgs boson, the last particle predicted by physicists’ standard model and the linchpin to their explanation how all other fundamental particles get their mass. Many would now like to build an electron-positron collider and run it as a Higgs factory, to make the particle in large numbers and see whether it has exactly the predicted properties. Any deviation from the predictions would be signs of new physics beyond the 40-year-old standard model, something particle physicists are desperate to find. Physicists in Japan would like to host such a linear collider.

A few years ago, however, some physicists proposed another approach, building an 80- to 100-kilometer-long circular electron-positron collider to study the Higgs. That machine would have a major drawback: As light-weight electrons go around in circles, they radiate copious x-rays and lose energy, so such a machine is inefficient and limited in its energy reach. But it has a big practical upside: The tunnel it needs could also later be used to house a higher energy proton collider. This is exactly what CERN did with the LHC, which was built in an existing tunnel dug for the Large Electron-Positron Collider, which ran from 1989 to 2000. (It studied in detail particles called the W and Z bosons that had been discovered previously with a proton-antiproton collider at CERN.)

Now, CERN physicists envision a future in which, around 2040, they build a huge circular electron-positron collider to study the Higgs. Then, they would follow up with a more powerful proton collider to reach a new high-energy frontier. Today, the CERN council took a step in that direction, announcing an update to its long-range strategy, the first since 2013.

Just how much CERN’s plans have changed remains murky, however. Some physicists there have long been working on CERN’s own design for a linear collider. And it appears the new long-range strategy does not completely sideline that idea. “We also recommend continued accelerator R&D to ensure that we do not miss an opportunity to improve our accelerator technology,” said Halina Abramowicz, a physicist at Tel Aviv University who led the planning exercise, during an online question-and-answer session. “I think it’s important to convey this message very clearly.”

The feasibility study for the big new machine should be done by 2026 or 2027, when CERN will next update its long-term strategy. CERN may also have competition in the presumed collider arms race, as physicists in China have similar plans to build big circular colliders. Of course, all may depend on whether the LHC, which is now undergoing an upgrade and should run until the mid 2030s, finds anything beyond the Higgs boson to study. If it doesn’t, convincing the governments of Europe to spend $20 billion to study just the Higgs may prove a daunting political challenge.

Posted in:
Physics
Scientific Community

doi:10.1126/science.abd4212

Plan for Europe's huge new particle collider takes shape

Agence France-Presse
February 5, 2024

The FCC would form a new circular tunnel under France and Switzerland © HANDOUT / European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)/AFP/File

Europe's CERN laboratory revealed more details Monday about its plans for a huge new particle accelerator that would dwarf the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), ramping up efforts to uncover the underlying secrets of the universe.

If approved, the Future Circular Collider (FCC) would start smashing its first particles together around the middle of this century -- and start its highest-energy collisions around 2070.

Running under France and Switzerland, it would be more than triple the length of CERN's LHC, currently the largest and most powerful particle accelerator.

The idea behind both is to send particles spinning around a ring to smash into each at nearly the speed of light, so that the collisions reveal their true nature.

Among other discoveries, the LHC made history in 2012 when it allowed scientists to observe the Higgs boson for the first time.

But the LHC, which cost $5.6 billion and began operating in 2010, is expected to have run its course by around 2040.

The faster and more powerful FCC would allow scientists to continue pushing the envelope. They hope it could confirm the existence of more particles -- the building blocks of matter -- which so far have only been theorised.

Another unfinished job for science is working out exactly what 95 percent of the universe is made of. About 68 percent of the universe is believed to be dark energy while 27 percent is dark matter -- both remain a complete mystery.

Another unknown is why there is so little antimatter in the universe, compared to matter.

CERN hopes that a massive upgrade of humanity's ability to smash particles could shed light on these enigmas and more.

"Our aim is to study the properties of matter at the smallest scale and highest energy," CERN director-general Fabiola Gianotti said as she presented an interim report in Geneva.

The report laid out the first findings of a FCC feasibility study that will be finalised by 2025.

$17 billion first stage

In 2028, CERN's member states, which include the UK and Israel, will decide whether or not to go through with the plan.

If given the green light, construction on the collider would start in 2033.

The project is split into parts.

In 2048, the "electron-positron" collider would start smashing light particles, with the aim of further investigating the Higgs boson and what is called the weak force, one of the four fundamental forces.

The cost of the tunnel, infrastructure and the first stage of the collider would be about 15 billion Swiss Francs ($17 billion), Gianotti said.

The heavy duty hadron collider, which would smash protons together, would only come online in 2070.

Its energy target would be 100 trillion electronvolts -- smashing the LHC's record of 13.6 trillion.

Gianotti said this later collider is the "only machine" that would allow humanity "to make a big jump in studying matter".

After eight years of study, the configuration chosen for the FCC was a new circular tunnel 90.7 kilometres (56.5 miles) long and 5.5 metres (feet) in diameter.

The tunnel, which would connect to the LHC, would pass under the Geneva region and its namesake lake in Switzerland, and loop round to the south near the picturesque French town of Annecy.

Eight technical and scientific sites would be built on the surface.

CERN said it is consulting with the regions along the route and plans to carry out impact studies on how the tunnel would affect the area.

© 2024 AFP