“A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.”
If the Higgs Boson doesn’t want to be found, it won’t be found, even if it’s right in front of your face.
Too clandenstine.
ATLAS Built in One Minute (via TheATLASExperiment)
Introduction and tour of the LHC, given by Prof. Brian Cox
For the past two weeks, Bram Conjaerts, a Belgian filmmaker, has been touring the CERN sites and surrounding countryside conducting research for his new documentary. The film will follow the entire 27 km length of the LHC ring, but unlike most documentaries about the LHC, it will take place mostly above ground!
While working towards his film degree in 2008, Bram Conjaerts won an award at the International Documentary Festival for his documentary “Henri and the Islands”, an anthropological documentary about the smallest village in Belgium. In an unlikely change of subject matter he decided to use the prize money to make a film about the LHC.
“With the money granted by the Flemish government, I wanted to create a documentary about something adventurous and something that I did not know about, ” explains Conjaerts. “I started doing research about the LHC and CERN and I came across the fantasy of black holes and all the conspiracies revolving around CERN.”
However, the proposed documentary will not focus on black holes. Conjaerts plans on taking a tour of the countryside under which the LHC ring is laid, in order to gain perspectives from those who inhabit the local surroundings. “We will follow the path of the ring above ground. So we’ll interview scientists, but also meet locals who have formed their own opinions about what is going on at CERN,” says Conjaerts. “We might also meet the priests of churches on the route, who have special ideas about religion and science. And also the Chateau Voltaire is near the top of the ring, so there are ideas about incorporating philosophical perspectives of science and the history of the chateau.”
Conjaerts, who is only beginning his career as a filmmaker, will be conducting research for three weeks before starting preliminary filming in September. The rest of the filming will be completed before December 2010.
Particle plushie designer digs Fermilab
The creator of plushie me got to visit Fermilab, one of the labs looking for yours truly.
There are Beanie Babies, plush, tiny stuffed animals with heart-shaped tags. And then there are subatomic particle plushies, the stuffed versions of the constituents of Beanie Babies–soft, cuddly representations of the hadrons and leptons that make up all matter in the universe.
Really, what budding young scientist wouldn’t want to take one to bed instead of a Teddy bear?
That’s what Julie Peasley was betting on, sort of, when she designed the Particle Zoo line of plushies after seeing hand-made stuffed animals at craft shows.
“I love physics and I love crafts, so I thought why not combine them,” she says. “I was sure someone had done it already, but they hadn’t.”
To maintain the scientific accuracy of her artwork, she strives to learn about particle physics and the people that make it their livelihood. So recently, she visited two of the top-ranking high-energy particle detectors in the world: the CMS experiment at CERN and the CDF experiment at Fermilab. While at Fermilab, she also got a tour of the NuMI tunnel, where a neutrino beam starts its path to the underground MINOS detector in Minnesota.
The observation of the production of single top quarks (rather than the easier-to-see production of top-antitop quark pairs) has been a goal of the Tevatron experiments for years. The success of this analysis demonstrates that extremely complex dissections of the data like this can be undertaken, and reveal faint signals like that of single top. The search for the Higgs boson is more difficult still.
But is the race for the Higgs boson heating up? Is there a race at all? Can the Tevatron see it before the LHC, given that the LHC has been delayed a year due to the quench incident last September?
It all hinges on the mass of the Higgs boson. In different mass ranges it decays to different final states, changing the experimental approach and changing the sensitivity of the Tevatron and LHC experiments. The new measurement of the W mass by D0 adds a bit more knowledge about what the Higgs boson mass might be, since it depends on the mass of the W boson (the carrier of the weak force, which governs nuclear beta decay) and the mass of the top quark directly.
