Physics Gossip Overload: The Higgs

finally, the people over at fermilab are telling the rest of the world to CALM DOWN and wait for official results from the D0 collaboration to be released before gossiping their mouths off about a potential sighting of the higgs. sounds like good advice to me. as sagan said, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." read this article from wired. (image credit: abc news. for the record, i'm not buying into the whole "god particle" terminology. but the picture is quite cool.)

Delay of the LHC

the original plan was that the lhc would do a test run in november this year, in which a proton beam would have run through the accelerator without actually being accelerated. however, because of the failure of the quadrupole magnets earlier this year, the lhc probably won't run until 2008. official notification of any delay will be made later this month. this nice article ends on the upnote that fermilab may be able to find the higgs before the lhc turns on. well, we can always hope. it sure would be a nice thing for fermilab to accomplish before the tevatron shuts down.

Philandering String Theorist Can Explain Everything

The Hunt for the Sterile Neutrino

listen to university of chicago's scott dodelson (who incidentally is also the acting director of the theoretical astrophysics group at fermilab) talk about the search for sterile neutrinos using miniboone as a new scientist podcast (scott starts talking around 18:55). a quick summary: miniboone has been searching for the sterile neutrino, a fourth type of neutrino (beyond the three neutrinos already included in the standard model of particle physics) that doesn't interact via the interactions in the standard model (electromagnetic, strong, and weak interactions). however, since this hypothetical particle possesses mass, if it exists it would interact with other particles via gravitational interactions, thereby making it a candidate for dark matter. yeah, scott rocks. the image above shows the interior of the miniboone tank, which is covered with 1280 photomultiplier tubes. there are plenty of smart people you can ask about the setups of these experiments, here are some of the details. (image credit: fermilab)

LHC Magnet Failure

this is not the sort of thing we'd like to see happening so soon before the LHC is expected to start running: on tuesday, a test of one of the accelerator's quadrupole magnets, which are used to focus the particle beam, failed miserably. here is an explanation of what happened from fermilab's john conway at cosmicvariance:

"The failure occured during a test which simulated what the magnet might experience during a “quench” which is when some part of the superconducting cable inside the magnet suddenly goes “normal” and then resists the flow of the huge current in it. This releases heat, of course, causing the rest of the superconducting material to go normal. Liquid helium boils rapidly, creating large asymmetric pressures inside the magnet cryostat. These pressures can reach 20 bar, and it was during a 20-bar test that this particular magnet failed. No one was in the LHC tunnel when it happened - it must have been quite a sight, and sound, though."

apparently, four reviews of the magnets were carried out at fermilab (where they were built) between 1998 and 2002 by experts from a number of different laboratories, yet apparently these reviews didn't address the issue of asymmetric pressures. read more about this in the fermilab statement. oh and i like this: why do physicists want to study particles? (a crucial question to ask given LHC's 3.8 billion dollar price tag.) the image above shows one of the quadrupoles being installed in 2006. (image credit: fermilab)