boson
esiegel | March 15, 2013"If you're a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring." -David Halberstam
It was only a few months ago that both collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN -- CMS and ATLAS -- announced the discovery of a new particle at about 125-126 GeV of energy: something that looked an awful lot like what the Standard Model predicted the Higgs Boson should be.
Image credit: the CMS detector at CERN, 2009.
This was the result of decades of…
sciencepunk | July 9, 2012
This three-story-tall mural was painted by international artist Josef Kristofoletti on the side of the ATLAS control room directly above the detector:
This project was inspired by the same questions that physicists are trying to answer; where did we come from, what does it mean to be human, and what is our place in the universe? The artist worked closely with physicists at CERN over the course of a year to create the mural. It depicts the artist's interpretation of what the Higgs boson might look like.
This short, time-lapse video was finished June 2012, using photos that were taken during…
esiegel | July 5, 2012"We knew that we had indeed done something that was very different and very exciting, but we still didn't expect it to have something to do with physical reality." -Gerald Guralnik, co-developer of the Higgs mechanism
Might as well make this entire week "Higgs week" here on Starts With A Bang, given how important yesterday's discovery/announcement was! It isn't every day, after all, that you see a theoretical physicist on the 7PM news. (Video here.)
Image credit: KGW.com.
(So proud of Portland, OR's local TV station, KGW NewsChannel 8, for being willing to promote science to the whole city…
esiegel | July 4, 2012"This is evidently a discovery of a new particle. If anybody claims otherwise you can tell them they have lost connection with reality." -Tommaso Dorigo
You've probably heard the news by now: the Higgs boson -- the last undiscovered fundamental particle of nature -- has been found.
The fundamental types of particles in the Universe, now complete.
Indeed the news reports just keep rolling in; this is easily the discovery of the century for physics, so far. I'm not here to recap the scientific discovery itself; I wrote what to expect yesterday, and that prediction was pretty much exactly what…
esiegel | July 3, 2012"Give me a coin. <Takes Coin.> All right. Uh... heads, I win, tails, you lose. Right? <Flips coin.> Tails, you lose." -Ralph Kramden
All things being equal, you're well aware that if you flipped a completely fair coin, you'd have a 50% chance of it landing on heads, and a 50% chance of landing on tails (ignoring the side, of course).
Image credit: C. Nolan, A. Eckhart and Warner Bros. Pictures, retrieved from http://explow.com/Two-Face.
So let's imagine that you flip the coin ten times, and you get seven heads and three tails. Are you worried? You shouldn't be; in order to tell…
esiegel | April 3, 2012"...the publisher wouldn't let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing."
-Leon Lederman, author of The God Particle
The Higgs Boson: you know the deal. It's the last undiscovered particle in our current picture of all the fundamental particles in the Universe.
Image credit: Fermilab, retrieved from eurekalert.org.
If we can find it, we'll either have a big clue as to what the next step to take in physics will be, or we'll be forced to admit that physics works too well, and many of the great…
esiegel | May 5, 2008Hector writes in and asks about someone from Sheffield in the UK who says that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will create Dark Matter:
The massive ATLAS detector will measure the debris from collisions occurring in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which recreates the conditions found in the early universe during the Big Bang when Dark Matter was first created. If the LHC does indeed create such particles then it will be the first time that the amount of Dark Matter in the universe has increased since the Big Bang - the LHC will effectively be a Dark Matter 'factory'.
Well, Hector basically…