New Particle Discovered at LHC: the Chi-b(3P)

For the first time since the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was opened in 2009, physicists from the UK think they've detected their first new subatomic particle.

Researchers from the University of Birmingham and Lancaster University analysed data from the ATLAS experiment, where particles of matter are shot at each other at close to the speed of light, in the hopes that interesting new particles will appear in the resulting subatomic carnage.

The data shows a clear indication of a particle called Chi-b(3P), which is pronounced kye-bee-three-pee. It's a forge of the bottom quark (also known as the beauty quark) and its antiquark.

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Quarks are the building blocks of protons and neutrons, which in turn are the building blocks of atoms. Quarks come in a number of flavours like up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top. This newly found particle tells us more about the strong nuclear forces that bind the quark and the antiquark.

The lighter partners of the Chi-b(3P) were observed in previous collision experiments around 25 years ago. This is a more excited state of Chi particle.

"Our new measurements are a great way to test theoretical calculations of the forces that act on fundamental particles, and will move us a step closer to understanding how the universe is held together," said Miriam Watson, a research fellow working in the Birmingham group .

Chi-b(3P) is also a boson, which are subatomic particles that obey Bose-Einstein statistics. A far more famous boson, the Higgs, is also being hunted for by the LHC. This theoretical field of particles is thought to give subatomic particles their mass as they wade through it. Earlier this month, physicists from the Cern research lab in Geneva announced that they have made significant progress in the hunt for the Higgs boson, but the result does not provide definitive evidence for the long-sought particle.With significantly more data to be gathered next year, "we can look forward to resolving this puzzle in 2012," said Atlas experiment spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti.

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Closer for Higgs Boson, but Particle still Remains Elusive

Physicists from the Cern research lab in Geneva announced that they have made significant progress in the hunt for the Higgs boson, but the result does not provide definitive evidence for the long-sought particle.

The teams announced signals consistent with the appearance of the Higgs boson, and the results suggest a Higgs particle mass of about in the range of 115 to 130 gigaelectronvolts (GeV). However, the signals could also be explained if the Higgs field doesn't exist -- it could just be background fluctuation.

More data will be needed to establish the existence of the Higgs with confidence. The Atlas and CMS experiments will gather significantly more data in 2012 -- but until then, a definitive answer to the question "does the Higgs boson exist" is still out of reach.

"Given the outstanding performance of the LHC this year, we will not need to wait long for enough data and can look forward to resolving this puzzle in 2012," said Atlas experiment spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti.

Two teams of physicists working with Cern's Large Hadron Collider in Geneva are expected to announce that they have found the best evidence yet for the hypothetical elementary particle: the Higgs boson.

The teams -- Atlas and CMS -- have been working independently to hunt for signs of the elusive particle. But what is the Higgs boson, and why do you need to recreate events a fraction of a second after the Big Bang to find it?

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It's named after Edinburgh University physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed that atoms receive their mass from an invisible field that's spread throughout the cosmos. Like wading through treacle, atoms pick up mass as they whizz through the Higgs field.

The Higgs is an answer to the physics conundrum of why the building blocks of matter have a mass at all. This stops them from zipping about the universe at the speed of light, and allows them to bind together to form planets, humans, kangaroos and asteroids.

Its existence is essential for the Standard Model, which is the universally-accepted scientific theory to explain the dynamics of subatomic particles. The Higgs boson has always been the one missing ingredient to this model, but if it doesn't exist then the Standard Model shatters into pieces.

To find evidence for its existence, physicists built the LHC: a $10 billion (£6bn) particle accelerator that's housed in a 18-mile tunnel, deep beneath near the French-Swiss border. This monstrous physics laboratory can recreate conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

The collider makes beams of protons move at close to the speed of light, before smashing them into each other. This spectacular head-on collision causes other types of particles to splinter off -- hopefully including the Higgs boson.

If it exists, the Higgs is so unstable that it would rapidly decay into more stable, and lighter subatomic particles. But that decay would leave behind a telltale fingerprint, showing up on the physicists' graphs as a very exciting bump.

CERN is to hold a seminar at 13:00 UTC on 13 December, "at which the ATLAS and CMS experiments will present the status of their searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson." The conference and a follow-up questions and answers session will be streamed over the web, here.

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A Higgs Boson Announcement be Imminent from the LHC?

Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider could be getting an early Christmas present: the Higgs boson. According to the latest rumours, scientists at the LHC are seeing a signal that could correspond to a Higgs particle with a mass of 125 GeV (a proton is slightly less than 1 GeV).

Public talks are scheduled to discuss the latest results from Atlas and CMS, two of the main LHC experiments, on 13 December. This follows one day after a closed-door Cern council meeting where officials will get a short preview of the findings, whatever they may be.

"Chances are high (but not strictly 100%) that the talks will either announce a (de facto or de iure) discovery or some far-reaching exclusion that will be really qualitative and unexpected," wrote theoretical physicist Lubos Motl on his blog.

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...........................................................................................................................................................Motl also mentioned that an internal email sent to the Cern community suggests that results on the elusive Higgs -- which is required under the Standard Model of particle physics to provide mass to different particles -- will be inconclusive. This could mean that the finding is below the five-sigma threshold needed to definitively declare a discovery in physics.

But if the rumours are true, and the Higgs has been seen at 125 GeV, it could bolster the idea that there is physics beyond the Standard Model that describes the behaviour of subatomic particles. A 125 GeV Higgs is lighter than predicted under the simplest models and would likely require more complex theories, such as supersymmetry, which posits the existence of a heavier partner to all known particles.

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LHC Laser Will Tear Apart the Fabric of Space

The Large Hadron Collider didn't destroy Earth, so physicists are  having another go. A team is planning to build an enormously powerful laser that could rip apart the fabric of space.

The Extreme Light Infrastructure Ultra High-Field laser will be 200 times more powerful than the most powerful lasers that currently exist on the planet, says John Collider, a member of the team and the director of the Central Laser Facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot. "At this kind of intensity we start to get into unexplored territory, as it is an area of physics that we have never been before," he  told the Telegraph.Environment Clean Generations

The aim is to boil a vacuum. Vacuums are normally thought of as empty space, but physicists believe they actually contain  tiny particles that pop in and out of existence, so fast that it's difficult to prove they exist. By focusing the ELI Ultra-High-Field laser on an area of space, the team believes that the fabric of the vacuum can be pulled apart, revealing these particles for the first time.

The laser will be made up of 10 beams, each providing 200 petawatts of power for less than a trillionth of a second. As 200 petawatts is more than 100,000 times the amount of power produced by the world, the energy will need to be stored up over time in huge capacitors. At the crucial moment, that energy will be released to form metre-wide laser beams that will then be combined and focused down onto a tiny point. At that point, the intensity of the light will be greater than at the centre of the Sun.

In these conditions, it's hoped that these pairs of matter-antimatter particles -- which normally annihilate each other almost as soon as they form -- will be pulled apart, leaving tiny electrical charges, which the team hope to measure. Environment Clean Generations.The research could yield some insight into why the Universe appears to contain far more matter than we've so far been able to detect.

 The location of the laser hasn't yet been decided, but the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory's Central Laser Facility is in the running. Three prototypes for the laser will be constructed in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania, each costing £200 million and scheduled to become operational in 2015. If successful, the final laser will be built -- costing around £1 billion -- in either Britain, Russia, France, Hungary, Romania or the Czech Republic.

Wolfgang Sandner, coordinator of the Laserlab Europe network and president of the German Physics Society,  said: "There are many challenges to be over come before we can do that, but it is mainly a matter of scaling up the technology we have so we can produce the powers needed."

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Particles Faster Than Speed Of Light At CERN

Enormous underground detectors are needed to catch neutrinos, that are so elusive as to be dubbed "ghost particles".

A meeting at Cern, the world's largest physics lab, has addressed results that suggest subatomic particles have gone faster than the speed of light. 

The team presented its work so other scientists can determine if the approach contains any mistakes.

If it does not, one of the pillars of modern science will come tumbling down.

Antonio Ereditato added "words of caution" to his Cern presentation because of the "potentially great impact on physics" of the result.

The speed of light is widely held to be the Universe's ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics - as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity - depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it.

Thousands of experiments have been undertaken to measure it ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a particle breaking the limit.

"We tried to find all possible explanations for this," the report's author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration told BBC News on Thursday evening.

"We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't.

"When you don't find anything, then you say 'well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this'."

Friday's meeting was designed to begin this process, with hopes that other scientists will find inconsistencies in the measurements and, hopefully, repeat the experiment elsewhere.

"Despite the large [statistical] significance of this measurement that you have seen and the stability of the analysis, since it has a potentially great impact on physics, this motivates the continuation of our studies in order to find still-unknown systematic effects," Dr Ereditato told the meeting.

"We look forward to independent measurement from other experiments."

Neutrinos come in a number of types, and have recently been seen to switch spontaneously from one type to another.

The Cern team prepares a beam of just one type, muon neutrinos, and sends them through the Earth to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy to see how many show up as a different type, tau neutrinos.

In the course of doing the experiments, the researchers noticed that the particles showed up 60 billionths of a second earlier than they would have done if they had travelled at the speed of light.

This is a tiny fractional change - just 20 parts in a million - but one that occurs consistently.

The team measured the travel times of neutrino bunches some 16,000 times, and have reached a level of statistical significance that in scientific circles would count as a formal discovery. 

But the group understands that what are known as "systematic errors" could easily make an erroneous result look like a breaking of the ultimate speed limit.

That has motivated them to publish their measurements.

"My dream would be that another, independent experiment finds the same thing - then I would be relieved," Dr Ereditato told BBC News.

But for now, he explained, "we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy".

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Higgs Boson Exists Or Not?

Fermilab’s Tevatron collider runs out of money and time at the end of this month, but physicists there say that they are on track to establish whether the Higgs can exist within the most likely predicted mass range before their September 30 deadline. 

That’s not the same as actually finding the Higgs boson of course, but physicists say they’ll either rule out the possibility of its existence or not by month’s end.

The Higgs boson, also known as the “God particle,” is the most important missing piece in the Standard Model of particle physics and the theoretical particle thought to imbue all other particles with mass (that’s important). 

Tevatron has been in competition with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider to find the Higgs first--if it really exists, that is--but so far the God particle eludes physicists at both facilities.

However, the Higgs window is narrowing. Through trillions of particle collisions at varying energy levels, physicists have explored much of the range where the Higgs is predicted to be hiding. 

And that’s what Fermilab researchers are saying--that by month’s end, they’re pretty sure they will have the information they would need to rule out the existence of a Higgs with a mass within the most likely range. 

That means physicists will have to get creative in the way they think about what the Higgs really is, or perhaps begin considering alternative theories of how things came to be.

But if it turns out the Higgs does appear to be present within that mass range, it will still be too late for Tevatron to actually find it. With no funding beyond the end of the month it will have to step aside and watch the LHC continue to search for the elusive particle within that range.

The LHC has its own set of deadlines for finding the Higgs, though none are set in stone. CERN’s director general thinks that the LHC’s data should be able to come to a preliminary conclusion about whether or not the Higgs is real by year’s end, and that hard scientific proof one way or the other should emerge next year.

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LHC and Theory Of Everything Don't Match

The latest news from the Large Hadron Collider: scientists still cannot explain why we’re all here. In the most detailed analysis of strange beauty particles — that’s what they’re really called — physicists cannot find supersymmetric particles, which are shadow partners for every known particle in the standard model of modern physics. This could mean that they don’t exist, which would be very interesting news indeed.

Physicists at CERN have been studying a class of particle called B mesons, which are heavy objects made up of two different quarks (one antimatter and one regular matter) that decay into other particles. Their heaviness gives them several decay options, which makes them useful for studying matter-antimatter asymmetry.

This asymmetry explains why everything exists — which, from a mathematical point of view, it should not. Equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created in the Big Bang, and the two types would have annihilated each other, leaving nothing behind. But somehow matter won out, meaning there was an imbalance between matter and antimatter at some point. Supersymmetry is one way to explain this.

Supersymmetric particles, which have names like squarks and selectrons, exist for every particle and have slightly different characteristics than their counterparts.

 Strange Beauty Decays The purple tracks show the decay of a "strange beauty" B meson, composed of a beauty antiquark and a strange quark. The composite particle decays into a pair of muons. The LHCb experiment has been studying B mesons in extreme detail and so far has not found any evidence for supersymmetry, which is one theory that explains why the universe has more matter than antimatter. LHCb/CERN

Last year, physicists at the Tevatron said B mesons seemed to have had an affinity for becoming matter rather than antimatter. This decay preference suggested some other particle or force may be at work — a deviation from the standard model, possibly the work of supersymmetric particles.

But now the LHC data, which physicists say are more precise than Tevatron’s, does not show this matter-decay deviation. This, in turn, could mean there is no supersymmetry; no squarks or selectrons. We are not going to attempt to delve into the physics of this — check out the LHCb experiment and Quantum Diaries posts if you’re interested in the nuts and bolts.

This will be disappointing to some theorists, because supersymmetry provides a handy answer to many troubling physics questions. At high energies, it unifies electromagnetism with the weak and strong nuclear forces, and in some iterations, the theory provides a candidate for dark matter, in the form of a stable heavy particle like a neutralino. Supersymmetry is also an essential characteristic of string theory, which for now is the only widely accepted theory that unifies quantum mechanics and relativity.

In a story about this over at the BBC, Nobel Prize-winning physicist George Smoot called supersymmetry “an extremely beautiful model.”

“It’s got symmetry, it’s super and it's been taught in Europe for decades as the correct model because it is so beautiful,” he said. “But there's no experimental data to say that it is correct.”

So what does this mean? It’s not entirely over, as the BBC points out — there are a few versions of supersymmetry, which are more complex than the basic mass-energy level version that has apparently just been ruled out. So different flavors of supersymmetry could still be true. But it could also mean supersymmetry is just wrong, and if that’s the case, physicists will have to come up with some big new ideas.

          

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