LHC nears restart after repairs

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could restart as early as this weekend after more than a year of repairs.

But officials have avoided giving an exact date for sending beams of protons around the 27km (17 mile) circular tunnel which houses the collider.

The LHC was first switched on in 2008, but had to be shut down when a faulty electrical connection caused one tonne of helium to leak into the tunnel.

The vast machine is located 100m below the French-Swiss border.

Operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), the LHC will recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang.

Two beams of protons will be fired around the tunnel. These beams will travel in opposite directions around the main “ring” at close to the speed of light.

At allotted points around the tunnel, the proton beams will cross paths, smashing into one another with enormous energy.

Scientists hope to see new particles in the debris of these collisions, revealing fundamental new insights into the nature of the cosmos.

But the first beams to circulate around the collider will be injected at a low energy of about 450 billion electron volts.

For the restart, engineers are determined to take things one step at a time, and officials are not setting hard and fast deadlines.

Once the collider is circulating two beams in opposite directions, engineers will attempt low-intensity collisions.

This will provide scientists with data they can use for calibration purposes.

After this, the beams’ energy will be increased so that the first high-energy collisions can take place.

These will mark the real beginning of the LHC’s research programme.

via BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | LHC nears restart after repairs.

See you in the next universe.

Mystery ‘dark flow’ hints of another universe, a BIG one.

SOMETHING big is out there beyond the visible edge of our universe. That’s the conclusion of the largest analysis to date of over 1000 galaxy clusters streaming in one direction at blistering speeds. Some researchers say this so-called “dark flow” is a sign that other universes nestle next door.

Last year, Sasha Kashlinsky of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and colleagues identified an unusual pattern in the motion of around 800 galaxy clusters. They studied the clusters’ motion in the “afterglow” of the big bang, as measured by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). The photons of this afterglow collide with electrons in galaxy clusters as they travel across space to the Earth, and this subtly changes the afterglow’s temperature.

The team combined the WMAP data with X-ray observations and found the clusters were streaming at up to 1000 kilometres per second towards one particular part of the cosmos (The Astrophysical Journal Letters, vol 686, p L49).

Many researchers argued the dark flow would not turn up in later observations, but now the team claim to have confirmed its existence. Their latest analysis reveals 1400 clusters are part of the flow, and that it continues to around 3 billion light years from Earth, a sizeable fraction of the distance to the edge of the observable universe (arxiv.org/abs/0910.4958). This is twice as far as seen in the previous study.

The dark flow appears to have been caused shortly after the big bang by something no longer in the observable universe. It has no effect today because reaching across this horizon would involve travelling faster than light.

One explanation for the flow would be the gravity of a huge concentration of matter, but this is very unlikely. Within the standard big bang picture, massive cosmic structures were “seeded” by random quantum fluctuations, so overall, matter should be spread evenly.

There could be an exotic explanation. Laura Mersini-Houghton of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, thinks the flow is a sign of a neighbouring universe.

via Mystery ‘dark flow’ extends towards edge of universe – space – 16 November 2009 – New Scientist.

What the LHC is really looking for

AS DAMP squibs go, it was quite a spectacular one. Amid great pomp and ceremony – not to mention dark offstage rumblings that the end of the world was nigh – the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s mightiest particle smasher, fired up in September last year. Nine days later a short circuit and a catastrophic leak of liquid helium ignominiously shut the machine down.

Now for take two. Any day now, if all goes to plan, proton beams will start racing all the way round the ring deep beneath CERN, the LHC’s home on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland.

Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg is worried. It's not that he thinks the LHC will create a black hole that will engulf the planet, or even that the restart will end in a technical debacle like last year’s. No: he’s actually worried that the LHC will find what some call the “God particle”, the popular and embarrassingly grandiose moniker for the hitherto undetected Higgs boson.

“I’m terrified,” he says. “Discovering just the Higgs would really be a crisis.”

Why so? Evidence for the Higgs would be the capstone of an edifice that particle physicists have been building for half a century – the phenomenally successful theory known simply as the standard model. It describes all known particles, as well as three of the four forces that act on them: electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces.

It is also manifestly incomplete. We know from what the theory doesn’t explain that it must be just part of something much bigger. So if the LHC finds the Higgs and nothing but the Higgs, the standard model will be sewn up. But then particle physics will be at a dead end, with no clues where to turn next.

Hence Weinberg’s fears. However, if the theorists are right, before it ever finds the Higgs, the LHC will see the first outline of something far bigger: the grand, overarching theory known as supersymmetry. SUSY, as it is endearingly called, is a daring theory that doubles the number of particles needed to explain the world. And it could be just what particle physicists need to set them on the path to fresh enlightenment.

via In SUSY we trust: What the LHC is really looking for – physics-math – 11 November 2009 – New Scientist.

‘Something may come through’ dimensional ‘doors’ at LHC

… the titanic machine may possibly create or discover previously unimagined scientific phenomena, or “unknown unknowns” – for instance “an extra dimension”.

“Out of this door might come something, or we might send something through it,” said Sergio Bertolucci, who is Director for Research and Scientific Computing at CERN, briefing reporters including the Reg at CERN HQ earlier this week.

The LHC, built inside a 27-km circular subterranean tunnel deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border outside Geneva, functions like a sort of orbital motorway for extremely high-speed hadrons – typically either protons or lead ions.

The differences are, firstly, that the streams of particles are moving at velocities within a whisker of light speed – such that each stream has as much energy in it as a normal car going at 1000mph. Secondly, the beams are arranged in such fashion that the two streams swerve through one another occasionally, which naturally results in huge numbers of incredibly violent head-on collisions.

These collisions are sufficiently violent that they are expected to briefly create conditions similar to those obtaining countless aeons ago, not long after the Big Bang, when the entire universe was still inconceivably small – it was smaller than a proton for quite some time, seemingly, still with all the stuff that nowadays makes up all the supra-enormity of space and galaxies and so forth packed in somehow.

Naturally, some extremely strange phenomena are to be expected when one mangles the very fabric of space-time itself in this fashion.

via ‘Something may come through’ dimensional ‘doors’ at LHC • The Register.

Hellboy?

Bird saves planet by dropping baguette that shuts down LHC

The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, just cannot catch a break. First, a coolant leak destroyed some of the magnets that guide the energy beam. Then LHC officials postponed the restart of the machine to add additional safety features. Now, a bird dropping a piece of bread on a section of the accelerator has, according to the Register, shut down the whole operation.

The bird dropped some bread on a section of outdoor machinery, eventually leading to significant over heating in parts of the accelerator. The LHC was not operational at the time of the incident, but the spike produced so much heat that had the beam been on, automatic failsafes would have shut down the machine.

This incident won’t delay the reactivation of the facility later this month, but exposes yet another vulnerability of the what might be the most complex machine ever built. With freak accident after freak accident piling up over at CERN, the idea of time traveling particles returning from the future to prevent their own discovery is beginning to seem less and less far fetched.

[via The Register]

via Baguette Dropped From Bird’s Beak Shuts Down The Large Hadron Collider (Really) | Popular Science.

If you believe, as a few do, that the LHC will create a black hole which will devour the earth, then thank the bird.

Beatle Ringo Starr’s face seen in water droplet on lotus leaf

A team researching water-repellent leaf behaviour at Duke University in North Carolina took the high-speed images, showing water drops bouncing on the surface of a leaf.

James Dacey, a reporter for Physics World, wrote the story up for the magazine’s website – and noticed the Octopus’s-Garden-composing, Thomas-The-Tank-Engine-narrating 1960s icon staring back at him.

Under the picture, captioned “The Starkey Effect: Ringo keeps psychedelia alive”, Mr Dacey says: “Bizarrely, everybody’s favourite mop-topped Liverpudlian seems to reveal himself in the high-speed photo images of water-droplets being ejected from the leaf surface.”

Starr’s features and mop-top haircut can indeed be seen in the images, even though they distort as the droplet bounces.

Mr Dacey told the Telegraph that this is the first time he has seen the image of a Beatle in a physics experiment.

There is some argument over whether the image is actually of George Harrison, rather than Ringo. Harrison is quoted as saying “Life is like a raindrop on a lotus leaf”, when talking about his battle with throat cancer.

via Beatle Ringo Starr’s face seen in water droplet on lotus leaf – Telegraph.

Definitely one of the more interesting cases of pareidolia.  The point to take home here is that priming causes people to see things. This is used to great effect in criminal trials by lawyers who understand how the mind works. I see a white helicopter image trapped in the water droplets.  Water, just add meaning.

Three Words That Could Overthrow Physics: “What Is Magnetism?”

… as Isaac Newton pointed out in his Principia, the notion “that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.”

Me neither. But it would appear that guys like Einstein, Newton, and myself —guys who see Thing A controlling Thing B at a distance and wonder about it—are all of a sudden rather thin on the ground. You see, at the end of last year, while vacationing with my family at an undisclosed rural location, I found myself reclining by a fireplace with a book titled Electronics for Dummies by Gordon McComb and Earl Boysen.

On page 10 of that volume, I read that electrons repelled each other without touching, in the same way that two magnets will if you align them with their like poles facing. At this point, realizing that I must have either slept through or forgotten the high school physics class where it was explained how magnets manage that singular feat of interacting with each other at a distance, I set out on what I assumed would be a minutes-long odyssey to understand the phenomenon. Seventy-one days later, I am here with astonishing findings.

For one thing, as far as I can tell, nobody knows how a magnet can move a piece of metal without touching it. And for another—more astonishing still, perhaps—nobody seems to care.

… When you get right down to it, the mystery of magnets interacting with each other at a distance has been explained in terms of virtual photons, incredibly small and unapologetically imaginary particles interacting with each other at a distance. As far as I can tell, these virtual particles are composed entirely of math and exist solely to fill otherwise embarrassing gaps in physics, such as the attraction and repulsion between magnets. And as far as I can tell, because I’ve had it repeatedly and rather pityingly told to me, to want to pursue the matter any further is an impulse that marks its sufferer out as a man who doesn’t know an awful lot about physics, or science, or the pursuit of truth in general.

via Three Words That Could Overthrow Physics: “What Is Magnetism?” | Subatomic Particles | DISCOVER Magazine.

Laptops may run at room temperature with new technology

“Our research looks at the spin of electrons, tiny particles that naked eyes cannot detect,” the Texas A&M professor explains. “The directions they spin can be used to record and process information.”

 

To process information, Sinova says, it is necessary to create information, transmit the information and read the information. How these are done is the big question.

 

“The device we designed injects the electrons with spin pointing in a particular direction according to the information we want to process, and then we transmit the electrons to another place in the device but with the spin still surviving, and finally we are able to measure the spin direction via a voltage that they produce,” Sinova explains.

 

The biggest challenge to creating a spin-based device is the distance that the spins will survive in a particular direction.

 

“Transmission is no problem. You can think for comparison that if the old devices could only transmit the information to several hundred feet away, with our device, information can be easily transmitted to hundreds of miles away,” he says. “It is very efficient.”

 

Talking about its practical application, Sinova is very optimistic. “This new device, as the only all-semiconductor spin-based device for possible information processing, has a lot of real practical potential,” he says. “One huge thing is that it is operational at room temperature, which nobody has been able to achieve until now. It may bring in a new and much more efficient way to process information.”

via Technology May Cool The Laptop – Texas A&M University News & Information.

Feeling Small and Mixed Up? Blame Sandia researchers and their magnets.

Sandia researchers have developed a process that can mix tiny volumes of liquid, even in complicated spaces.

Researchers currently use all types of processes to try and create mixing, with only “mixed” success. “In small devices,” says Sandia materials scientist Jim Martin “people have tried all kinds of pillars and mixing cells to initiate mixing, but these approaches don’t work well.” Researchers need simpler and more reliable ways to mix in tiny places such as micrometer-sized channels, Martin said.

“Mixing liquids in tiny volumes,” Martin said, “is surprisingly difficult.” When fluid is pushed down a big pipe, eddies are generated that create mixing. But if fluid is pushed down a small pipe no eddies are generated and mixing does not occur unless you subject the fluid to tremendous pressure, which isn’t usually easy or feasible, he said.

Martin’s discovery of how to mix tiny liquid volumes arose from LDRD-funded research directed at improving the sensitivity of the chemical sensors developed in his lab. That project, “Field-Structured Composite Studies,” was a joint effort with Rod Williamson (now retired). While their LDRD project did not lead to the expected results, Martin and Williamson were surprised by the wide variety of physical effects they discovered along the way, including magnetic mixing. These effects, Martin said, ended up being much more interesting and important than the original goal.  …

In the new method of mixing, when one turns on a particular kind of magnetic field, the magnetic particles suspended in the fluid form chains like strings of pearls. The chains start swirling around and that’s what does the mixing. The particles are then removed magnetically, leaving a nice mixed-up liquid.

via Magnetic mixing creates quite a stir – Sandia News Releases.

Rolled-up metamaterial could act as hyperlens

Hyperlensing is a neat trick. For more on the limits of how light works when used to view very small objects, check out my Rife article.

Physicists in Germany have devised a new way to make metamaterials that could be used to boost the resolution of optical microscopes. The technique involves depositing alternating layers of semiconductor and metal on a flat surface and then rolling up the layers into a tube that resembles a hollow Swiss or jelly roll.

Because the metamaterial is a cylinder, the path taken by light moving outward along a radius of the tube (and therefore the permittivity) is very different the path taken by light moving tangentially to the layers. For light at the plasma frequency radial light experiences a relatively large permittivity, while light moving tangentially experiences a relatively small permittivity. As a result, the light is focussed into the radial direction. …

Capturing evanescence
This means that the tube could be used as a hyperlens, which captures “evanescent” light from tiny objects and focuses it into an image that can be further magnified by conventional optics. Evanescent light can resolve features much smaller than wavelength-limited conventional optics – however, it does not travel far from the surface of the object and cannot be seen by a conventional microscope.

Mendach told physicsworld.com that the magnification of the tubes was not great enough to confirm that they could be used as hyperlenses. Instead, they fed their optical measurements into computer simulations, which suggested that they could.

According to Mendach, the magnification can be boosted by creating tubes with a greater ratio of outer and inner diameter – something that the team is working on, along with an invisibility cloak.

via Rolled-up metamaterial could act as hyperlens – optics.org.