Image of the Day - CERN Still Looking

Today's Image of the Day for 8/10/11 - CERN Still Looking

CERN detector courtesy of zastavki

The long-sought after Higgs boson particle will be found in the next 12 months if it exists, said the leader of the CERN facility in Geneva. The three scientists, one from each of CERN, the U.S. Fermilab and Japan's KEK - also stated their scepticism of recent claims that particles had recently broken the speed of light in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). 'I think by this time next year I will be able to bring you either the Higgs boson or the message that it doesn't exist,' said Rolf Heuer, director general of CERN, whose LHC is at the focus of the search. He was echoed by KEK's Atsuto Suzuki and Pier Oddone of Fermilab, which last weekend shut off - after 26 years - its Tevatron accelerator, which has also been seeking the Higgs in the debris of billions of particle collisions. Oddone said analysis of the data gathered in the Tevatron, which for nearly a decade led the search, would be under analysis for several more months but at best could only now reveal where the Higgs was not hiding. Existence of the particle - believed to have given shape to the universe after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago - was proposed some four decades ago. 'Last month Guido Tonelli, a spokesman for the Compact Muon Solenoid Detector, a huge particle detector at CERN, said that even if the LHC was able to rule out the existence of the Higgs boson, that would be a major achievement in itself. Another CERN spokesman said that the Higgs boson was not the only solution to the mystery of the universe.But even if the elusive particle is not found, the experiments, which use the 'ring' to smash streams of protons together at nearly the speed of light, creating billions of 'miniature Big Bangs', will still expand human knowledge - even if it is simply by exposing flaws in the Standard Model of physics, accepted since the Seventies as a system to 'explain' matter. Speaking earlier this year, Tonelli said, 'We've reached the edge of the unknown. It's all new physics from now.'

Image of the Day - Tevatron

Today's Image of the Day for 3/10/11 - Tevatron

Tevatron courtesy of visualmedia.fnal

One of the world's most powerful "atom smashers", at the leading edge of scientific discovery for a quarter of a century, has been shut down. The Tevatron facility near Chicago fired its last particle beams on Friday after federal funding ran out. Housed in a 6km-long circular tunnel under the Illinois prairie, the Tevatron leaves behind a rich scientific legacy. Since 1985, engineers have been accelerating bunches of proton and antiproton particles around the Tevatron's main ring at close to the speed of light, then smashing them together in a bid to unlock the secrets of the Universe. This includes finding nature's heaviest elementary particle: the top quark. But the Tevatron has been superseded by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - located on the French-Swiss border - which is capable of getting to much higher energies than the US machine. The Tevatron's main ring is likely to be used in other experiments, and components may be transferred to other accelerators, with Fermilab concentrating on smaller-scale experiments such as Project X - an effort to develop ever more intense particle beams.