http://phys.org/ en-us Phys.org internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. You may have heard in the recent media that the world was going to end. Uh, again. Worse still, the devastation wasn't limited to Earth; the whole universe might end. Bad news, right? And you thought 2012 was the year to mark on your calendar. http://phys.org/news281254620.html Physics Thu, 28 Feb 2013 06:17:18 EST news281254620 (Phys.org)—Although the LHC has often been called the largest machine in the world, that title may be more appropriately given to something much more familiar: power grids. Consisting of thousands of generators and substations linked across thousands of miles, these networks form the backbone of society in developed countries. Yet most of the grids that power our modern economy are based on technology from the 1960s, even though power demands have changed dramatically since then. As a result of the additional strain, power grids have been failing more often, causing billions of dollars in business losses. http://phys.org/news280749451.html Physics Fri, 22 Feb 2013 10:20:02 EST news280749451 In 2011, CMS presented early evidence that Upsilon (Υ) particles produced in lead-lead collisions "melt" as a consequence of interacting with the hot nuclear matter created in these heavy-ion interactions. CMS has since updated and extended this result using additional data collected in the 2011 heavy-ion run, and the observation now has a significance of greater than 5σ (or 5 standard deviations), the gold standard for claiming a discovery in high-energy physics. http://phys.org/news275209634.html Physics Thu, 20 Dec 2012 07:07:37 EST news275209634 (Phys.org)—The latest research findings from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN show that the CMS and ATLAS experiments are now reporting that the significance of their observation of the Higgs-like particle is standing close to the 7 sigma level, well beyond the 5 required for a discovery, and that the new particle's properties appear to be consistent with those of a Standard Model Higgs boson. http://phys.org/news274965814.html Physics Mon, 17 Dec 2012 11:23:44 EST news274965814 How many matter particles exist in nature? Particle physicists have been dealing with this question for a long time. The 12 matter particles contained in the standard model of particle physics? Or are there further particles with too high a mass to be produced by the experiments performed so far? These questions are now answered by researchers of KIT, CERN, and Humboldt University in the current issue of the Physical Review Letters. http://phys.org/news274619210.html Physics Thu, 13 Dec 2012 11:07:04 EST news274619210 Collisions between protons and lead ions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have produced surprising behavior in some of the particles created by the collisions. The new observation suggests the collisions may have produced a new type of matter known as color-glass condensate. http://phys.org/news273220389.html Physics Tue, 27 Nov 2012 06:33:23 EST news273220389 (Phys.org)—Physicists led by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have smashed yet another series of records for data-transfer speed. The international team of high-energy physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers reached a transfer rate of 339 gigabits per second (Gbps)—equivalent to moving four million gigabytes (or one million full length movies) per day, nearly doubling last year's record. The team also reached a new record for a two-way transfer on a single link by sending data at 187 Gbps between Victoria, Canada, and Salt Lake City. http://phys.org/news272873931.html Technology Fri, 23 Nov 2012 06:19:13 EST news272873931 Heavy ion collisions at CERN should be able to produce the shortest light pulses ever created. This was demonstrated by computer simulations at the Vienna University of Technology. The pulses are so short that they cannot even be measured by today's technological equipment. Now, a method has been proposed to create the world's most precise stopwatch for the world's shortest light pulses, using a detector which is going to be installed at CERN in 2018. http://phys.org/news271871550.html Physics Mon, 12 Nov 2012 04:00:02 EST news271871550 Amongst all known elementary particles, the top quark is peculiar: weighing as much as a Tungsten atom, it completes the so-called 3rd generation of quarks and is the only quark whose properties can be directly measured. Owing to its mass, the top quark is unstable and, in CMS, decays much before it can interact with the proton remnants through the strong interaction and form hadrons (the bound states of quarks). It decays mostly to a W boson and a bottom (b) quark, and can therefore be identified from final states which involve the complete usage of the CMS detector; electrons, muons, jets, missing transverse energy—almost all particles or experimental signatures one can think of may be produced in top-quark events. http://phys.org/news271323678.html Physics Mon, 05 Nov 2012 07:41:34 EST news271323678 (Phys.org)—Although quantum theory can explain three of the four forces in nature, scientists currently rely on general relativity to explain the fourth force, gravity. However, no one is quite sure of how gravity works at very short distances, in particular the shortest distance of all: the Planck length, or 10-35 m. So far, the smallest distance accessible in experiments is about 10-19 m at the LHC. http://phys.org/news269510423.html Physics Mon, 15 Oct 2012 09:30:01 EST news269510423 (Phys.org)—World records have been broken this year not only in sports by Olympic athletes in London, but also in high temperature superconducting magnet technology by the Superconducting Magnet Division (SMD) staff at BNL. http://phys.org/news268987939.html Physics Tue, 09 Oct 2012 07:52:28 EST news268987939 Protons to the right, ions to the left: the basic principle of proton-ion collisions at the LHC might seem straightforward. However, this is an almost unprecedented mode of collider operation, certainly unique at the energy provided by the LHC. In addition to being a remarkable technical achievement, this interaction between a proton and an ion can potentially contribute a lot to the understanding of the properties of matter in its primordial state. http://phys.org/news267954728.html Physics Thu, 27 Sep 2012 08:52:44 EST news267954728 (Phys.org)—The art of data mining is about searching for the extraordinary within a vast ocean of regularity. This can be a painful process in any field, but especially in particle physics, where the amount of data can be enormous, and 'extraordinary' means a new understanding about the fundamental underpinnings of our universe. Now, a tool first conceived in 2005 to manage data from the world's largest particle accelerator may soon push the boundaries of other disciplines. When repurposed, it could bring the immense power of data mining to a variety of fields, effectively cracking open the possibility for more discoveries to be pulled up from ever-increasing mountains of scientific data.  http://phys.org/news267256012.html Physics Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:47:04 EST news267256012 (Phys.org)—At the LHC accelerator at CERN, collisions between protons and lead nuclei were established last week, for the first time in the ALICE detector. http://phys.org/news267089964.html Physics Mon, 17 Sep 2012 08:39:34 EST news267089964 (Phys.org)—At 1.26am today the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) collided protons with lead ions for the first time. http://phys.org/news266744033.html Physics Thu, 13 Sep 2012 08:34:13 EST news266744033 Scientists who searched for the famous Higgs Boson concluded a three-day brainstorming session on Wednesday for mapping a long-term global strategy for particle physics. http://phys.org/news266672539.html Physics Wed, 12 Sep 2012 12:43:58 EST news266672539 (Phys.org)—You may think you've heard everything you need to know about the origin of mass. After all, scientists colliding protons at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe recently presented stunning evidence strongly suggesting the existence of a long-sought particle called the Higgs boson, thought to "impart mass to matter." But while the Higgs particle may be responsible for the mass of fundamental particles such as quarks, quarks alone can't account for the mass of most of the visible matter in the universe—that's everything we see and sense around us. http://phys.org/news265277020.html Physics Mon, 27 Aug 2012 09:20:06 EST news265277020 (Phys.org) -- Experiments using heavy ions at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are advancing understanding of the primordial universe. The ALICE, ATLAS and CMS collaborations have made new measurements of the kind of matter that probably existed in the first instants of the universe. They will present their latest results at the Quark Matter 2012 conference, which starts today in Washington DC. The new findings are based mainly on the four-week LHC run with lead ions in 2011, during which the experiments collected 20 times more data than in 2010. http://phys.org/news264088486.html Physics Mon, 13 Aug 2012 14:55:22 EST news264088486 (Phys.org) -- A group of physicists is looking beyond the usefulness of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to a new collider that would sit in the tunnel still occupied by the LHC, to an updated version of what was there before, the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP). The new one would be called, aptly enough, LEP3. The group, from the UK, Russia, Japan, Switzerland and the US, say the collider would be used to study the Higgs boson. http://phys.org/news263633822.html Physics Wed, 08 Aug 2012 08:37:27 EST news263633822 An important piece of news that almost got lost in the excitement of the Higgs update seminar on 4 July is that the 2012 LHC proton run is to be extended. http://phys.org/news263119331.html Physics Thu, 02 Aug 2012 09:42:22 EST news263119331 Heartened by a glimpse of what may be the Higgs boson, scientists at the CERN physics lab are smashing particles with new vigour in a quest to understand why matter has mass and other riddles of the natural universe. http://phys.org/news263014729.html Physics Wed, 01 Aug 2012 04:41:16 EST news263014729 (Phys.org) -- A review article appearing in the July 20, 2012, issue of the journal Science describes groundbreaking discoveries that have emerged from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, synergies with the heavy-ion program at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe, and the compelling questions that will drive this research forward on both sides of the Atlantic. With details that help enlighten our understanding of the hot nuclear matter that permeated the early universe, the article is a prelude to the latest findings scientists from both facilities will present at the next gathering of physicists dedicated to this research — Quark Matter 2012, August 12-18 in Washington, D.C. http://phys.org/news261938783.html Physics Thu, 19 Jul 2012 17:46:41 EST news261938783 Interview with Sandra Kortner of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, who heads a Minerva junior research group at the ATLAS experiment of the LHC and also coordinates an international group of researchers who are using ATLAS to look for the Higgs particle. http://phys.org/news260772353.html Physics Fri, 06 Jul 2012 05:46:01 EST news260772353 (Phys.org) -- CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, will hold a seminar early in the morning on July 4 to announce the latest results from ATLAS and CMS, two major experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that are searching for the Higgs boson. Both experimental teams are working down to the wire to finish analyzing their data, and to determine exactly what can be said about what they've found. http://phys.org/news260109445.html Physics Thu, 28 Jun 2012 13:37:31 EST news260109445 The Review of Particle Physics, a panorama of the world of high-energy and astroparticle physics, has been compiled and issued every two years since 1957 by the international Particle Data Group, now consisting of almost 200 scientists from 22 countries and based at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). http://phys.org/news259338590.html Physics Tue, 19 Jun 2012 15:30:15 EST news259338590 In just two weeks of operation in "stable beams" mode, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has aready reached 1380 proton bunches per beam, the maximum value set for this year. The number of bunches was increased in steps from 624 to then 840 bunches last week, and now from 1092 to 1380. http://phys.org/news254037988.html Physics Thu, 19 Apr 2012 07:06:41 EST news254037988 More than 200 members of the ATLAS collaboration gathered on the Stanford campus last week to discuss how to make one of the world's biggest and best particle detectors even better. http://phys.org/news252921953.html Physics Fri, 06 Apr 2012 09:07:10 EST news252921953 (PhysOrg.com) -- At 0:38 CEST (18:38 EDT) this morning, the LHC shift crew declared ‘stable beams’ as two 4 TeV proton beams were brought into collision at the LHC’s four interaction points. This signals the start of physics data taking by the LHC experiments for 2012. The collision energy of 8 TeV is a new world record, and increases the machine’s discovery potential considerably. http://phys.org/news252826088.html Physics Thu, 05 Apr 2012 06:28:33 EST news252826088 (PhysOrg.com) -- CERN today announced that the Large Hadron Collider will run with a beam energy of 4 TeV this year, 0.5 TeV higher than in 2010 and 2011. This decision was taken by CERN management following the annual performance workshop held in Chamonix last week and a report delivered today by the external CERN Machine Advisory Committee (CMAC). It is accompanied by a strategy to optimise LHC running to deliver the maximum possible amount of data in 2012 before the LHC goes into a long shutdown to prepare for higher energy running. The data target for 2012 is 15 inverse femtobarns for ATLAS and CMS, three times higher than in 2011. Bunch spacing in the LHC will remain at 50 nanoseconds. http://phys.org/news248422430.html Physics Tue, 14 Feb 2012 06:14:50 EST news248422430 In this month's Physics World, reviews and careers editor, Margaret Harris, visits the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) to explore what future projects are in the pipeline now that the Tevatron particle accelerator has closed for good. http://phys.org/news247248489.html Physics Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:00:10 EST news247248489