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Hadron collider quest for the God particle – Daily News & Analysis
Here under the rolling hills on the French-Swiss border near Geneva, the biggest machine ever built is preparing for a new assault on its elusive quarry. Because it is now make-or-break time for the scientists at Cern, Europe’s nuclear research laboratory, as their titanic Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful atom smasher in the world, gears up for a frantic rush to corner the elusive Higgs boson, better (if inaccurately) known as the God Particle.
Cern made a tentative announcement last year that it had found “hints” of the Higgs; in the next six months, it will either pin down the elusive particle or force physicists back to the drawing board. The LHC has been repaired and fettled over the winter, and is this week completing a series of test firings before starting high-energy collisions next week.
For almost half a century the particle, whose existence was first predicted by the British physicist Peter Higgs in 1964, has escaped detection – the tools at our disposal were simply not powerful enough to smoke it out. But in the ring of tunnels and caverns buried deep below the Geneva suburbs, engineers are readying their machine for a last, turbo-charged offensive.
Physicists believe not only that the Higgs is there, but that its properties fall between certain parameters. If it turns out not to be there, or to have wildly different properties to what the theories say, the equations will have to be torn up – a prospect that fills physicists with dread and nervous anticipation in equal measure.
With a major overhaul of the LHC due this year, which will see the £6 billion machine shut down for 18 months, the atmosphere at Cern is intense. Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director-general, has instructed his scientists to confirm or rule out the existence of a Higgs boson (or more precisely a Higgs with the mass predicted by science) before the autumn.
The challenge has been accepted with such gusto that Sergio Bertolucci, Cern’s ebullient, motorbike-mad chief scientist, has told the teams analysing the data from the LHC collisions that he is not interested in painstakingly combining their data (as usually happens) and ordered each to find a cast-iron result on the strength of their measurements alone.
To give their physicists a fighting chance, engineers agreed last month to increase the power of the LHC for the duration of 2012 from seven teraelectronvolts (TeV) of energy to eight, giving each microscopic beam the energy of a Eurostar train travelling at full speed.
One way or the other, Prof Heuer says, 2012 will be the year the Higgs nut is finally cracked. “We plan to have around four times as many statistics this year, and that should settle the question of the standard-model Higgs by the end of the summer. We will have an answer to the Shakespeare question: to be or not to be.”
The Higgs is the embodiment of an ether-like field that, according to the “Standard Model” of physics, endows all other particles with their mass and is a major missing piece in the physics jigsaw puzzle. Without the Higgs mechanism a major part of the Standard Model, a series of equations that describe how the basic particles and forces interact, will be incomplete.
Exploring the physics of the impossibly small requires some gargantuan engineering. From the cathedral-sized chambers where the enormous Atlas and CMS detectors – the two biggest “stations” on the LHC ring – are housed, the sense of urgency among engineers putting the final touches to their eye-wateringly expensive equipment is palpable.
The optimism is reassuringly upbeat, because it is fair to say the LHC did not get off to the most auspicious start. The 17-mile underground ring, through which beams of particles thinner than a human hair are fired in opposing directions, took 10 years to construct and twice as long to design.
But shortly after being launched amid great fanfare in 2008, the machine was brought to a halt by a power cut when a pigeon dropped a piece of bread onto an electrical component.
Days later an electrical fault caused a magnet to fail, sparking a gas leak inside the tube which knocked the entire apparatus out of service for a whole year.
Since it was restarted in 2009 two years’ worth of collisions have brought us closer than ever to finding the truth about the Higgs, but have only uncovered tantalising hints of the particle itself.
Now there is a growing sense that the search may at last be coming to an end – a belief strengthened by the final analysis of data from the American Tevatron, the now-defunct forerunner of the LHC, which found strikingly similar “blips” in its results – terabytes of statistical data generated by the debris resulting from particle collisions.
Cern knows that public – and political – expectation is mounting that a “Higgs result”, which will probably mean Nobel Prizes all round, is needed soon. The LHC costs pounds 690 million a year to run and in a cash-strapped Europe, esoteric research like this is always vulnerable to budget cuts.
But the engineers are also thinking ahead to a new phase in the life of the LHC – when the machine can be ramped up to full power and perhaps open up a new window of post-Higgs, super-high-energy physics. The machine will enter a longer period of hibernation at the end of 2012 for its final upgrade. The LHC is designed to handle 14TeV of energy, but before turning it up to full power, engineers must pull the massive detectors apart and test and repair 10,000 connections along the entire length of the accelerator to make sure they will not buckle under the strain.
Scientists say earth makeup differs from sun – Daily News & Analysis
pc(1670411);Published: Monday, Apr 2, 2012, 11:28 IST
Place: Sydney | Agency: IANS art_imgs = 0; cur_art_img = 1; function prev(){ for (i=1;iScientists are rejecting a century-old assumption that the earth has the same chemical makeup as the sun.
“This theory is based on the idea that everything in the solar system in general has the same composition,” said Hugh O’Neill, professor at the Research School of Earth Sciences at The Australian National University and study co-author.
“Since the sun comprises 99 percent of the solar system, this composition is essentially that of the Sun,” O’Neill said.
As it is easier to measure the chemical makeup of chondritic (stony) meteorites, geologists have long used these to more precisely determine the sun’s composition – and therefore the composition of the earth, the journal Nature reported.
From this, scientists have concluded that the earth has a ‘chondritic’ composition,according to a university statement.
“Recent discoveries have shown that the ratio of two of the rare earth elements in earth’s volcanic rocks is higher than in chondritic meteorites,” said Ian Campbell, professor and study co-author from Research School of Earth Sciences.
Campbell spent 20 years researching mantle plumes – columns of hot rock that rise from the boundary of the earth’s core and are the mechanism that removes heat from the earth’s centre.
“However, mantle plumes simply don’t release enough heat for these reservoirs to exist. As a consequence the earth simply does not have the same composition as chondrites or the sun,” he added.
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PSO takes part in Earth Hour 2012 – Pakistan Daily Times
PSO takes part in Earth Hour 2012
KARACHI: Pakistan State Oil (PSO) joined the Earth Hour campaign 2012 to play a part in spreading awareness about climate change. On March 31, 2012, unnecessary lights were switched off between 8:30 and 9:30 pm at the PSO Head Office and at selected PSO retail outlets in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. Naeem Yahya Mir, Managing Director PSO, said, ?Environmental conservation has been a key focus of PSO to address pressing issues the planet is facing?. At PSO we recognise we should take on the responsibility to reduce the environmental footprint of our products and operations. Today we also urge employees and stakeholders to limit their use of energy for one hour to help save this planet, he added. prHome | Business
Black holes `eat binary star partners` to grow – Daily News & Analysis
Researchers have come up with a new explanation for the growth of supermassive black holes in the centre of most galaxies asserting that they constantly capture and swallow single stars from pairs of stars that wander too close.
Using new calculations and previous observations of our own Milky Way and other galaxies, “we found black holes grow enormously as a result of sucking in captured binary star partners,” said physics and astronomy Professor Ben Bromley, lead author of the study.
“I believe this has got to be the dominant method for growing supermassive black holes,” he said.
“There are two ways to grow a supermassive black hole: with gas clouds and with stars. Sometimes there’s gas and sometimes there is not. We know that from observations of other galaxies. But there are always stars.”
“Our mechanism is an efficient way to bring a star to a black hole,” Bromley said.
“It’s really hard to target a single star at a black hole. It’s a lot easier to throw a binary at it,” just as it’s more difficult to hit a target using a slingshot, which hurls a single stone, than with a bola, which hurls two weights connected by a cord.
A binary pair of stars orbiting each other “is essentially a single object much bigger than the size of the individual stars, so it is going to interact with the black hole more efficiently,” he explained.
“The binary doesn’t have to get nearly as close for one of the stars to get ripped away and captured.”
But to prove the theory will require more powerful telescopes to find three key signs: large numbers of small stars captured near supermassive black holes, more observations of stars being “shredded” by gravity from black holes, and large numbers of “hypervelocity stars” that are flung from galaxies at more than 1 million mph when their binary partners are captured.
Bromley, a University of Utah astrophysicist, refers to the process of a supermassive black hole capturing stars from binary pairs as “filling the bathtub.”
Once the tub ” the area near the black hole ” is occupied by a cluster of captured stars, they go “down the drain” into the black hole over millions of years.
His study shows the “tub” fills at about the same rate it drains, meaning stars captured by a supermassive black hole eventually are swallowed.
The study has been recently published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
How to spot if someone is lying to you? Just ask your computer – Daily Mail
By David Gerges
PUBLISHED: 17:51 GMT, 31 March 2012 | UPDATED: 17:51 GMT, 31 March 2012
Trying to tell whether someone is lying to you can often prove difficult.
But now with the aid of a computer, the need to look for tell-tale signs could soon be made redundant.
Scientists have developed a new software that focuses solely on the subject’s eyes, monitoring the movements of the pupils, which determines if someone is telling you the truth or attempting to pull the wool over your eyes.
Eye can see you: Rapid movement in the pupils is a certain way to detect if someone is lyingResearchers at the University of Buffalo recorded a series conversations in which a number of lies were told.
And having tested their program against a trained human interrogator, they found that the software had a higher success rate.
While the specially-trained examiner correctly identify 65% of false statements, the computer recorded an impressive 82.5% reading.
Assistant professor Ifeoma Nwogu said: ‘What we wanted to understand was whether there are signal changes emitted by people when they are lying, and can machines detect them?’
Human touch: The software was better at spotting a lie than a trained interrogator The study centred around conversations in which subjects could chose whether or not to steal a cheque, before later being questioned on their decision.
A wide range of individuals were selected, with varying skin colours, age and height with someone even wearing glasses in an attempt to conceal their lies.
Despite most of those interviewed being caught out, there were a select number who managed to keep their eye movements to a bare minimum, which consequently resulted in the wrong conclusions.
Now scientists plan to carry out additional studies on a larger scale, with a long-term view to developing a system that could work alongside human interrogators.
OMICS 