Free Republic

The world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator is set smash protons together on April 8 to search for invisible particles secretly powering our universe. Theories have suggested there are 17 different particle groups and the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, confirmed the existence of one using its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012. Now, the team has restarted the LHC with hopes of unraveling more mysteries of the universe - specifically dark matter. Scientists began preliminary tests by sending billions of protons around the LHC's ring of superconducting magnets to boost their energy and ensure...

Elon Musk is back again, tweeting out a meme calling CERN's Large Hadron Collider "demonic technology" and that should totally, totally not surprise us at this point. For those unaware of what the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is, it's the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator located underground in Geneva, Switzerland. The Large Hadron Collider was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research with over 10,000 scientists, hundreds of universities and laboratories, with the collaboration of over 100 countries. CERN recently turned the Large Hadron Collider back in 6 weeks ago, with Elon tweeting out the meme 6...

The collaboration has observed a new kind of “pentaquark” and the first-ever pair of “tetraquarks” The international LHCb collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has observed three never-before-seen particles: a new kind of “pentaquark” and the first-ever pair of “tetraquarks”, which includes a new type of tetraquark. The findings, presented today at a CERN seminar, add three new exotic members to the growing list of new hadrons found at the LHC. They will help physicists better understand how quarks bind together into these composite particles. Quarks are elementary particles and come in six flavours: up, down, charm, strange, top...

Starting Tuesday it will run around the clock for nearly four years at a record energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts..."We aim to be delivering 1.6 billion proton-proton collisions per second"...This time around the proton beams will be narrowed to less than 10 microns - a human hair is around 70 microns thick - to increase the collision rate...

[T]he teams at CERN were able to make a number of updates and improvements to the particle accelerator to support new, next-generation science during the scheduled shutdown. As the most powerful accelerator in the world, the LHC can generate hundreds of millions of particle collisions every second. Although the LHC has led to new physics research throughout both of its previous, successful runs, teams at CERN hope to push their explorations with the new upgrades implemented during the shutdown. Included in these improvements, CERN has increased the power of the LHC's injectors, which feed the beams of accelerated particles into...

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 today 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.

Update (24 March 2021): The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment is still insisting there's a flaw in our best model of particle physics. As explained below, previous results comparing the collider's data with what we might expect from the Standard Model threw up a curious discrepancy by around 3 standard deviations, but we needed a lot more information to be confident it truly reflected something new in physics. Newly released data have now pushed us closer to that confidence, putting the results at 3.1 sigma; there's still a 1 in 1,000 possibility that what we're seeing is the result...

LHCb experiment cavern at LHC. Credit: CERN Imperial physicists are part of a team that has announced ‘intriguing’ results that potentially cannot be explained by our current laws of nature. The LHCb Collaboration at CERN has found particles not behaving in the way they should according to the guiding theory of particle physics – the Standard Model. The Standard Model of particle physics predicts that particles called beauty quarks, which are measured in the LHCb experiment, should decay into either muons or electrons in equal measure. However, the new result suggests that this may not be happening, which could point...

Scientists are celebrating the long-sought discovery of the odderon, a strange phenomenon that appears only rarely when protons collide at high energies, such as inside particle accelerators. Though the odderon was first predicted to exist in the early 1970s, it wasn’t until recently that physicists finally gathered the data they needed at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider to confirm a true discovery. The discovery contributes to physicists’ understanding of how all the matter in the universe interacts at the smallest levels. Unlike the famous Higgs boson, which was officially discovered in 2012, the odderon isn’t a particle exactly. Instead, it’s the...

As pointed out by Dr. Thomas Horn and “Into the Multiverse” host Josh Peck in the internationally-acclaimed books On The Path Of The Immortals (FREE IN OFFER HERE) and Abaddon Ascending, when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) first started up on September 10, 2008, director for research and scientific computing at CERN, Sergio Bertolucci, provoked a whirlwind of speculation with his enigmatic remark that the LHC might open a door to another dimension. During a regular briefing at CERN headquarters, he told reporters, “Out of this door might come something, or we might send something through it.”[i] The notion of...

The astoundingly complex LHC “atom smasher” at the CERN center in Geneva, Switzerland, are fired up to its maximum energy levels ever in an endeavor to identify - or perhaps generate - tiny black holes. If successful a very new universe is going to be exposed – modifying completely not only the physics books but the philosophy books too. It is even probable that gravity from our own universe may “transfer” into this parallel universe, researchers at the LHC say. The experiment is assured to accentuate alarmist critics of the LHC, many of whom initially warned the high energy particle...

Last year, the ATLAS experiment at the LHC observed two photons, particles of light, ricocheting off one another and producing two new photons. This year, they've taken that research a step further and discovered photons merging and transforming into something even more interesting: W bosons, particles that carry the weak force, which governs nuclear decay.

Scientists will use the break in operations to beef up the accelerator’s energy. The world’s most powerful particle accelerator has gone quiet. Particles took their last spin around the Large Hadron Collider on December 3 before scientists shut the machine down for two years of upgrades.Located at the particle physics laboratory CERN in Geneva, the accelerator has smashed together approximately 16 million billion protons since 2015, when it reached its current energy of 13 trillion electron volts. Planned improvements before the machine restarts in 2021 will bring the energy up to 14 trillion electron volts — the energy it was...

-snip- Alessandro Strumia, the physicist in question and a professor at Pisa University in Italy, gave his presentation to a crowd at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), one of the word's most important nuclear physics organizations. The topic of the day was gender in physics, and the crowd was mostly composed of women, according to The Guardian. Over the course of several slides of his presentation, which are available online, Strumia laid out an IQ-based argument for disparities between men and women in physics. "Physics graduates have top IQ," he wrote. "It's needed." He pointed to a study that...

A senior scientist has given what has been described as a "highly offensive" presentation about the role of women in physics, the BBC has learned. At a workshop organised by Cern, Prof Alessandro Strumia of Pisa University said that "physics was invented and built by men, it's not by invitation". He said male scientists were being discriminated against because of ideology rather than merit. He was speaking at a workshop in Geneva on gender and high energy physics. Prof Strumia has since defended his comments, saying he was only presenting the facts . . .

The newly-discovered particles, named Σb(6097)+ and Σb(6097)-, are predicted by the quark model, and belong to the same family of particles as the protons that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerates and collides: baryons, which are made up of three quarks. But the type of quarks they contain are different: whereas protons contain two up quarks and one down quark, the new particles are bottom baryons composed of one bottom quark and two up quarks or one bottom quark and two down quarks respectively.The LHCb researchers found these particles using the classic particle-hunting technique of looking for an excess of...

"Maybe a black hole could form, and then suck in everything around it," he wrote. "The second scary possibility is that the quarks would reassemble themselves into compressed objects called strangelets." "That in itself would be harmless. However under some hypotheses a strangelet could, by contagion, convert anything else it encounters into a new form of matter, transforming the entire earth in a hyperdense sphere about one hundred meters across." As if this wasn't bad enough, the atom smasher might even be capable of destroying space itself. "Some have speculated that the concentrated energy created when particles crash together could...

Ten years ago, the world's largest scientific instrument was turned on and the start of a research dynasty began. On Sept. 10, 2008, a beam of protons was shot for the first time around the entire 16.5-mile-long (27 kilometers) ring of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the world's largest and highest energy atom smasher ever constructed. Located at the CERN laboratory, just outside Geneva, Switzerland, the LHC was constructed to smash highly energetic beams of protons together at near the speed of light. The stated goal was to create and discover the Higgs boson, the last missing piece of...

That's a big deal, because it could lead to much smaller and cheaper particle accelerators than the ones we currently rely on. Right now, if you want to install a Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator in your back garden, you need a concrete tunnel about 27 kilometres (nearly 17 miles) long and US$5 billion in spare change. But this new experiment uses something known as plasma wakefield acceleration – and it takes up just 10 metres or 33 feet of space. The team behind the Advanced Proton Driven Plasma Wakefield Acceleration Experiment (AWAKE) at CERN in Geneva has been...

Eight months after raising hopes that they may have found an intriguing new particle that cannot be explained by the existing main physics theory, disappointed scientists are saying: Never mind. It was just a statistical burp, not a breakthrough, researchers reported Friday. […] Early unconfirmed readings of a new particle in December by physicists at the center, called CERN, set the physics world abuzz. Scientists there had discovered the Higgs boson or “God particle” in 2012, and two new readings from the Large Hadron Collider made it seem as though they may had found a revolutionary new particle. …