LHC
Could the Large Hadron Collider really act as telephone for talking to the past?
Spurs-a-jingle boffins in America say that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), most puissant matter-rending machine ever assembled by humanity, may also turn out to be the first time machine ever built. According to the physicists’ calculations, instruments at the mighty particle-smasher may soon detect signs of “singlets” which it has not yet generated, sent back from their creation in the future.
“Our theory is a long shot,” admits physics prof Tom Weiler, “but it doesn’t violate any laws of physics or experimental constraints.”
According to calculations by Weiler and his colleague Chui Man Ho, if the LHC manages to generate the long-theorised but never actually seen Higgs Boson (aka “the god particle” – confirmation of its existence was a major reason for the Collider’s construction) it should also create another mysterious particle dubbed the “Higgs singlet”*. These singlets, according to Weiler and Ho, might be able to move in a fifth dimension transverse to our existing four-dimensional continuum – thus they could pop out of our universe and subsequently re-enter it elsewhere in time.
This thinking relies on the idea that the 4-D continuum we can perceive exists within a 10- or 11-dimensional universe, rather as a flat two-dimensional membrane could float suspended in normal three-d space. Versions of the so-called “M-theory” in physics hold that this is the case, but that almost all kinds of forces, waves, particles etc are stuck to the four-dimensional membrane, aka the “brane” for short.
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LHC experiments bring new insight into primordial universe
Geneva, 26 November 2010. After less than three weeks of heavy-ion running, the three experiments studying lead ion collisions at the LHC have already brought new insight into matter as it would have existed in the very first instants of the Universe’s life.
The ALICE experiment, which is optimised for the study of heavy ions, published two papers just a few days after the start of lead-ion running. Now, the first direct observation of a phenomenon known as jet quenching has been made by both the ATLAS and CMS collaborations. This result is reported in a paper from the ATLAS collaboration accepted for publication yesterday in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters.
A CMS paper will follow shortly, and results from all of the experiments will be presented at a seminar on Thursday 2 December at CERN. Data taking with ions continues to 6 December.
Read the full article from CERN here
Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are getting set to create the Big Bang on a miniature scale.
Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are getting set to create the Big Bang on a miniature scale.
Since 2009, the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator has been smashing together protons, in a bid to shed light on the fundamental nature of matter.
But now the huge machine will be colliding lead ions instead.
The experiments are planned for early November and will run for four weeks.
The LHC is housed in a 27km-long tunnel on the Franco-Swiss border and is managed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern).
The collider consists of four different experiments and one of them, ALICE, has been specifically designed to smash together lead ions.
The goal of these collisions is to investigate what the infant Universe looked like. Colliding protons at high energies was aimed at other aspects of physics, such as finding the elusive Higgs boson particle and signs of new physical laws, such as a framework called supersymmetry.
Cern’s spokesman James Gillies told BBC News that besides ALICE, the ATLAS and Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiments will also be temporarily colliding ions.
Big Bang
He said the tests could provide an insight into the conditions of the Universe some 13.7 billion years ago, just after the Big Bang.
They will look at the Universe fractions of a second after a tiny but very dense ball of energy exploded to create the cosmos as we know it today.
“Start Quote
At the temperatures generated, even protons and neutrons will melt, resulting in a hot dense soup of quarks and gluons”
End Quote David Evans University of Birmingham, UK
Scientists believe that it was back then that a special state of matter existed, different from the matter the Universe is formed of now.
“Matter exists in various states: you can take a material like water and if you deep freeze it, it’ll be solid, and if you put it on a table, it’ll turn into a liquid, and if you put it into a kettle, it’ll turn into a gas,” said Dr Gillies.
“It’s all the same stuff, but those are different states of matter. And if you take materials into laboratories, you can pull the electrons off the atoms and you have another state of matter which is called plasma.”
But at the very beginning of the Universe, there might have been yet another state of matter. Physicists have dubbed this “stuff” the quark-gluon plasma.
“And this is the state of matter you have if you’re able to effectively melt the nuclear matter that makes up atoms today, releasing the things that are inside, which are quarks and gluons,” Dr Gillies explained.
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CERN – potential new discovery spotted by Atom smasher scientists
GENEVA — Scientists at the world’s biggest atom smasher said Tuesday they appeared to have discovered a previously unobserved phenomenon in their quest to unravel the deepest secrets of the universe.
Results from one of the detectors in the Large Hadron Collider experiment indicated that “some of the particles are intimately linked in a way not seen before in proton collisions,” the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said on its website.
“The new feature has appeared in our analysis around the middle of July,” physicist Guido Tonelli told fellow CERN scientists at a seminar to present the findings from the collider’s CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) detector.
“We have today submitted a paper to expose our findings to the wider (scientific) community,” he added, underlining caution and the need for the peer review outside CERN.
Nonetheless, Tonelli, a physicist from Italy’s University of Pisa and scientific spokesperson for the CMS detector, underlined that during weeks of cross-checks and critical debate among the team, “we didn’t succeed to kill it.”
The phenomenon showed up as a “ridge-like structure” on computer mapping graphs based on data from billions of proton collisions in the 3.9-billion-euro (5.2-billion-dollar) machine.
The 27-kilometre (16.8-mile) circular particle accelerator buried under the French-Swiss border is recreating powerful but microscopic bursts of energy that mimic conditions close to the Big Bang that created the universe.
The CMS, one of six experiments around the accelerator, is designed to search for for the elusive and so far theoretical Higgs Boson, commonly nicknamed the “God Particle”.
It is also aimed at shedding light on components of dark matter, the mysterious invisible void that makes up 26 percent of the universe.
MIT physicist Gunther Roland, one of the authors of the paper submitted for review, described the latest observation as a “a subtle effect in a complex environment — careful work is needed to establish its physical origin.”
“What we really hope to get is not just ideas, but how to test it,” he added during the seminar at CERN’s headquarters on the edge of Geneva.
The organisation said it bore “some similarity” with observations in a smaller Ion collider at the US Department of Energy?s Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Despite applause from their peers at CERN, the CMS team’s interpretation of the observation on Tuesday was vigorously challenged during the meeting as scientists bounced suggestions off each other.
“We are stating facts, facts that there is something that we have not seen before,” Tonelli responded, as they began the process of seeking endorsement and an explanation for the observation.