Collaborate Disseminate
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is designed to probe the fringes of known physics, and now the facility has found particles not behaving as predicted. While it’s still early days, the discovery hints at the existence of new particles or forces beyon… Continue reading CERN anomaly hints at new particle physics Standard Model can’t explain
After an almost two-year shutdown for repairs and upgrades, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is beginning to fire back up for its next phase of probing the mysteries of physics. Its newest particle accelerator, Linac 4, completed its first test run o… Continue reading CERN’s powerful new linear accelerator fires up ahead of LHC upgrade
An extensive search for a hypothetical particle has turned up empty. The sterile neutrino is a proposed subatomic particle that could even be a candidate for the mysterious dark matter, and although previous studies have hinted at its existence, two ne… Continue reading Neutrino experiments find no sign of expected new subatomic particle
When it comes to building particle accelerators the credo has always been “bigger, badder, better”. While the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) with its 27 km circumference and €7.5 billion budget is still the largest and most expensive scientific instrument ever built, it’s physics program is slowly coming to an end. …read more
Continue reading Smashing the Atom: A Brief History of Particle Accelerators
If you were asked to imagine a particle accelerator, you would probably picture a high-energy electron beam contained within a kilometers-long facility, manned by hundreds of engineers and researchers. You probably wouldn’t think of a chip smaller than a fingernail, yet that’s exactly what the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s Accelerator …read more
If you watch Star Trek, you will know one way to get rid of pesky aliens is to vent antimatter. The truth is, antimatter is a little less exotic than it appears on TV, but for a variety of reasons there hasn’t been nearly as much practical research done with it. There are well over 200 electron accelerators in labs around the world, but only a handful that work with positrons, the electron’s anti-counterpart. [Dr. Aakash Sahai] would like to change that. He’s got a new design that could bring antimatter beams out of the lab and onto the desktop. …read more
Continue reading Creating Antimatter On The Desktop — One Day
Performing high-energy physics experiments can get very expensive, a fact that attracts debate on public funding for scientific research. But the reality is that scientists often work very hard to stretch their funding as far as they can. This is why we need informative and entertaining stories like Gizmodo’s How Physicists Recycled WWII Ships and Artillery to Unlock the Mysteries of the Universe.
The military have specific demands on components for their equipment. Hackers are well aware MIL-SPEC parts typically command higher prices. That quality is useful beyond their military service, which lead to how CERN obtained large quantities …read more
Continue reading Military Surplus Repurposed for High Energy Physics
Hold out your hands in front of you, palms forward. They look quite similar, but I’m sure you’re all too aware that they’re actually mirror images of each other. Your hands are chiral objects, which means they’re asymmetric but not superimposable. This property is quite interesting when studying the physical properties of matter. A chiral molecule can have completely different properties from its mirrored counterpart. In physics, producing the mirror image of something is known as parity. And in 1927, a hypothetical law known as the conservation of parity was formulated. It stated that no matter the experiment or physical …read more
If you need a high voltage, a voltage multiplier is one of the easiest ways to obtain it. A voltage multiplier is a specialized type of rectifier circuit that converts an AC voltage to a higher DC voltage. Invented by Heinrich Greinacher in 1919, they were used in the design of a particle accelerator that performed the first artificial nuclear disintegration, so you know they mean business.
Theoretically the output of the multiplier is an integer times the AC peak input voltage, and while they can work with any input voltage, the principal use for voltage multipliers is when very …read more
What happens when a beam of subatomic particles traveling at nearly the speed of light meets the flesh of the human body? Continue reading We Can Stop Worrying and Love the Large Hadron Collider
