New ATLAS data event displays can be seen at http://atlas-live.cern.ch/
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@particularphysics-blog
New ATLAS data event displays can be seen at http://atlas-live.cern.ch/
Today the CERN Control Centre announced that we have stable 13 TeV beams ready to be delivered to the experiments for physics analyses! CERN are running a live blog and a webcast which can be accessed through the posted link and will do a much better job of describing that I can ;-) It is big news though after such a long wait, the experimental physicists can restart on the task of collection and analysing data and peeling the mask off of Nature and staring into the eyes of God/God-like-being/Nature.
I was reading the CERN reddit IAMA (which if you haven’t heard about, can be found here) and read this short blog post which is simultaneously amusing and bizarre.
The end result...?
Fermions are discovered in the US, whereas bosons are discovered in Europe.
The bizarre part comes from the fact it was written in 2008 (4 years before the actual discovery of the Higgs boson). Now the chances are back in 2008 that if the Higgs boson was going to be found, the LHC would be the machine to do it, and the options to find it within a lifetime in the US would have been nigh-on impossible as the SSC was cancelled, but still...
We will have to see if this holds true for the 13 TeV Run 2 data. The implication would be that we will find the supersymmetric parters of the fermions (as these particles are bosons).
If we discover a stop quark in the coming years, I will be sure to point back to this webpage ;-)
Caveat: The electron, neutron and proton/nucleus fail to conform to this listing given they were all discovered in the UK (which is part of Europe despite what the state of British politics might indicate to an outsider...). We do speak the same language as American’s though, so perhaps its still holds ;-)
Some fantastic news from the LHC!
After a two year shutdown and vast quantities of man-hours spent by engineers, physicists and management, the LHC has finally collided two proton beams at a centre of mass energy of 13 TeV. Once again, breaking the record for the highest energy manmade collisions on Earth!
These fantastic images released by CERN from the ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb experiments show real proton-proton collision data recorded literally last night. There is still work to be done before any data can be recorded and analysed for physics purposes. The beam quality still needs to be tracked and improved before we can be certain that all systems are safe to be used and then the detectors need some time to check the performance of all the upgrades which have been implemented.
If everything is successful, we should see the commencement of Run 2 of the LHC in the Summer!
Who knows what we will find? With the increased energy, the reach of some exotic searches will be much improved. There may be heavy gauge bosons hiding just out of reach of the current data, or supersymmetric particles, or maybe even additional Higgs bosons.
What we do know is that Run 2 will open the door to much higher luminosity, much larger amounts of data and much larger physics potential. It is certainly an exciting time for experimentalists and theorists alike to see what lies just beyond the horizon.
More information
CERN Press Release 1 CERN Press Release 2 BBC News
The next step to collisions has been taken at the LHC. A beam of protons has now been circulated at 6.5 TeV. This represents a factor ~1.6 increase in the beam energy from before the shutdown. Once two beams of this energy can be circulated, it should mean the path is clear to a set run of data taking!
Source: http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2015/04/first-successful-beam-record-energy-65-tev
Beam Circulating at the LHC after Two Year Shutdown
Whilst the LHC has been turned off for two years to replaces detector and collider components to allow a doubling of the collision energy, the physics output has not stopped.
Today marks a milestone in the LHC history. A single beam of protons had been circulated through the LHC after turn-on was delayed by a bit over a week due to a short-circuit in the coupling of one of the superconducting magnet links. The short was fixed by melting away the piece of metal which had become lodged in an unhelpful place by pumping a high current through the connection which caused the metal to heat up.
The additional beam will likely be circulated in the coming days and the beam energy will be ramped up to allow collisions at a centre of mass energy of 13 TeV sometime in May.
Update: You can follow a live blog here - http://run2firstbeam.web.cern.ch
Happy Easter!
More info - Large Hadron Collider restart is under way http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32160755
Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking and the Higgs Mechanism - Some Notes
One of the things I have always found interesting in Particle Physics is Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking. When I was in Sixth Form, it was articles on the unification which I enjoyed reading the most.
As I have done a couple of courses now on the Standard Model and the unification within it, I thought I would try my hand at writing up some notes which try to explain the methodology behind the Higgs mechanism, because in truth, it is not too difficult.
There are some parts that people may not be able to fully comprehend as I have probably assumed to much knowledge of quantum field theory nomenclature.
If you are vaguely aware of index notation, it should be straight forward to follow.
If you understand differentiation, and not index notation, it should still be accessible.
If you want an overview of the maths behind the Higgs mechanism, instead of just reading Higgs boson everywhere and not understanding why there is even a boson, please have a read.
I have tried to explain things clearly as I have gone along.
As always, if you have questions about this, please ask, as I would be more than willing to expand on some points if people want to learn more.
(Note: the video is actually an embeded pdf and you should be able to download it via issuu if you desire.)
I'm currently attending a summer school at Fermilab (which is awesome, I know) and means I am getting to experience American culture for the first time.
I can only assume self-reblogging is frowned upon, but I came upon an article I wrote explaining some of the mathematics behind the Higgs mechanism a couple of years ago. After attending some lectures on spontaneous symmetry breaking (and general Standard Model theory) I think the explanation still holds true, so good going past-me :)
Thought I'd share it anyway. I'll post some pictures of Fermilab (FNAL) some point soon too :)
If you've ever wanted to get involved with a particle physics analysis but not had the opportunity to work with one of the largest scientific collaborations in the world, your luck has changed!
The ATLAS experiment is running a machine learning challenge to try and gain input and expertise from people all over, who might have a new way of looking at our data to discover the Higgs particle.
Machine learning encompasses the branch of computer science where you use clever algorithms (such as boosted decision trees and neural networks) which learn from known data to help classify unknown data.
Here in the particle physics community, the known data falls into two categories (a binomial problem) - signal and background. The signal is the process we want to discover. The background is all the other processes which look almost identical to the process we really want to see.
If our signal was so unique and different from the background continuum then we would not need to work out ways to discriminate between the two. Sadly Nature is not that kind to us, and often if we are looking for one particle physics process to produce a final state of particles, there will always be other ways (other Feynman diagrams) which could produce the same outcome.
The challenge here has simulated data from Higgs to di-tau events as the signal. From a statistical standpoint, if you can correctly categorise the signal and background into their respective categories then you can evaluate the discovery sensitivity or discovery significance. Information is provided on calculating this, and this will be the marker with which to rank the entrants.
People wishing to participate have until the 15th September 2014 to submit an application, and you can submit a limited number per day. Further information about the machine learning tools which are freely available is provided on the webpages and the tutorial pages.
If you are good enough you could win up to $7000. Not a bad prize for doing some coding. Already there have been over 800 entrants and the great thing about this is that you don't need to understand the physics involved to manipulate the data, extract information from the variables, and combine it all together to correctly classify data. The only benefit particle physicists get is knowing what kind of correlations to expect between these variables, but in fact, a perfect machine learning algorithm should be able to find and exploit these correlations anyway.
Additional Links
CERN Blog Post Extra Information From LAL
Nature: No Photoshop required.
1. Lenticular Clouds 2. Anvil Clouds 3. Cirrus Kelvin-Helmholtz Clouds 4. Fallstreak Hole 5. Mammatus Clouds 6. Polar Stratospheric Cloud 7. Roll Cloud 8. Undulatus Asperatus 9. Mammatus Clouds 10. Undulatus Asperatus
Physicists have figured out how colossal rainstorms are formed in the Sun’s atmosphere, and it’s surprisingly similar to how we get our rain:bit.ly/1rwHBra Image: Paisan Changhirun/Shutterstock
source
In 2011, Dublin-based physics student David Whyte began a Tumblr called Bees & Bombs where he posted humorous images and quirky GIFs of his own creation, borrowing heavily from videos and pop culture icons. One day he decided to start playing with Processing, a popular open source progr
A monograph of the Trochilidæ, or family of humming-birds ; By Gould, John, 1804-1881 on Flickr.
Publication info London :Printed by Taylor and Francis ;1861 BHL Collections: Book of the Week Collection Smithsonian Libraries
Voyager 1 is still sending data back, very slowly. Your cellphone sends and receives data at least 1000x faster. http://space-pics.tumblr.com/
Fun fact: The reason why the Deep Space Network antennae are in Madrid, Goldstone, and Canberra is so that they can always be in touch with distant craft like Voyager 1, no matter which side of Earth is facing the spacecraft.
Physicists have exploited the laws of quantum mechanics to generate random numbers on a Nokia N9 smartphone, a breakthro…
This work looks genuinely interesting for cyber-security. Using inherently quantum processes (generating photons and recording the number entering each pixel detector) has been shown to be able to produce random numbers. The tests to check how "random" such number strings are, appear to be very convincing.
It wouldn't be a huge step to imagine this technology implemented within new range of mobile phones, as well as within specific tools for banks (such as those used often by banks for users to access their online services) and governments (to encrypt information).
The linked article gives a very interesting review.
#lonelychairsatcern #b32 emergency chairs #CERN
O lonely chair, I knew you well
The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) collaboration today announced results that confirm the existence of exotic hadrons – a type of matter that cannot be classified within the traditional quark model.
Following on from the excitement of the IOP conference, the LHCb experiment at CERN has today released results which appear to conclusively reveal a four-quark state of matter in the Universe.
This resonance had been seen back in 2008 by the BELLE Collaboration, and LHCb has unambiguously confirmed that the resonance is a particle with four quarks inside. This confirmation is very important as it has been found by two independent groups and datasets.
Our current understanding of hadrons, that is to say bound quark states confined by the nature of the strong nuclear force, is that they are composed of a quark-antiquark pair (meson) or are composed of three quarks (or three antiquarks) (baryons). This state of matter has been shown to have four quarks which will either hint at a bound state of two mesons, or some hitherto undefined state of two quarks and two antiquarks bound together by the strong nuclear force.
The interesting result here is that the quark structure has been probed by LHCb to show the particle consists of a charm, an anti-charm, a down and an anti-up quark.
For more information: - http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2014/04/lhcb-confirms-existence-exotic-hadrons - http://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch/lhcb-public/
Blog - IOP Conference
Things have been super busy this week for the Royal Holloway particle physics department. We were honoured with the opportunity (read: it was our turn) to host the annual Institute of Physics (IOP) Conference on High Energy Particle Physics (HEPP) and Astro Particle Physics (APP).
It is a large UK conference attended by members of our community. This year we had around 250 people registered to attend. Everyone in our department was on hand to help in the smooth running of the whole conference, and this was my first experience of a conference from the inside. Whilst I was only helping out in the day-to-day running (registration/ AV) the stress levels were clearly high amongst the organising academics. Indeed, this was an opportunity to showcase Royal Holloway to people around the UK such that in years to come they will look back on our venue and on the event with find memories.
The conference is split into the normal plenary and parallel sessions over the course of three days. Normally, third year PhD students with research council funding are expected to give a talk on their own research and field some questions. I was no exception to this, and I was naturally quite nervous over the whole experience! I'm pleased to say that I think my talk went quite well (the feedback I received was positive and I even received some constructive questions which is always nice!).
The conference dinner is always looked forward to, when attending these events, and I think we did ourselves proud by hosting a dinner event at Ascot Racecourse. The venue was superb and certainly something different and to remember.
If you want to see the talks, all are publicly available at our group site - www.pp.rhul.ac.uk/iop2014.
Now it is all over, and I think normality will slowly descend back upon us within our department, but it has been an awesome experience!