Greetings all! Since I don't have much going on in my life that is worth reporting other than a trip to New York, going home, relaxing, eating food, working out, playing Starcraft, and writing my thesis, I will write today on other things going on at CERN that are both neat and almost as important as my work in rho particles. Possibly even more so!
I'll start with those things on the LHC (Large Hardon Collider for those of you familiar with fun typos) that I am most familiar with.
ALICE! The experiment I work for, ALICE or A Large Ion Collider Experiment, is unique from other experiments on the LHC in that it isn't looking for the Higgs Boson. For those uninformed, this is an elusive particle tied into, you guessed it, the spontaneous breaking of electroweak symmetry. Beyond that physicsy nonsense implied in that porker of a description, this has to do with explaining why certain particles have mass. ALICE does not look for this. We are a more specialized kind of detector looking at something called quark-gluon plasma which is what you get when you take two atoms (or protons) and hurl them violently into each-other at very very close to the speed of light. Basically EVERYTHING evaporates into the most basic bits of matter (quarks and gluons) and you get a very very hot soup that is similar to conditions just after the big bang (like 10^-14 seconds after. A very short time). That's what we're interested in (among other things): studying the early universe. We're most useful during the brief but exciting heavy ion run. This is when the LHC is smashing lead ions into lead ions (just the nuclei in fact, no electrons to throw off our groove).
ATLAS! A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS. More evidence that scientists can bend language to their acronym whims, this is the money experiment. If you watched angels and demons you saw the ATLAS experiment and it's control room (though there isn't a window from the control room into the experiment as the experiment has lots of radiation and is deep underground). If you've heard about something going on at CERN, it is probably ATLAS that was discussed (and possibly CMS which I'll get to in a minute). Though this experiment also does some work with this early universe plasma, the main point is searching for the aforementioned higgs boson. Recently ATLAS and CMS had a press release stating their lastest results. It continues to be "compelling" but thus far they have only managed to narrow down the mass range that the Higgs can be in. (The main way you "see" a particle is calculate the E=mc^2 mass which doesn't change no matter how fast the particle is going). It is designed to measure a very broad range of particle properties (higher energy that ALICE is capable of) to be sure to find the Higgs (as well as other things).
CMS! The Compact Muon Solenoid, this is like ATLAS in that it is a general purpose detector (it can look at a lot of things) that also look for the Higgs boson at high energies. It also has a good PR group and gets into the news more often than ALICE. Pretty much everything said about ATLAS applies here.
LHCb: Large Hadron Collider beauty, this is a specialized experiment that specifically studies particles that contain a b quark. The b is either for bottom (if you don't care about hurting the quark's feelings) or beauty (if you do) and corresponds, shockingly, to the top quark! This is one of the six known kinds of quarks. What they do is complex and less exciting to read about than what I do and what ATLAS and CMS do, so you can wiki it if you like!
Other stuff that goes on at CERN! Yes there is more to CERN than the Hardons. One of the cooler things happening is research in antimatter, that substance that if you hug it, you will explode! Among things that go on here, a space based detector called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer was launched last may and mounted on the international space station. This one looks at cosmic rays (particles that comes from spaaaace!). Another experiment, ALPHA, which I don't care to look up what it stands for, in June trapped anti-hydrogen for a reasonably long period of time, thus showing it is reasonably stable. This is like regular hydrogen expect with a positron and an anti-proton (similar to an electron and proton except that they have opposite charge and annihilate when they collide).
Other items are the CLOUD experiment which studies how clouds form, ISOLDE which study how heavy nuclii break up (what goes on when particles collide rather than what is produced), and OPERA which you may have heard of, if not by name. OPERA was the one that found neutrinos that seemed to be traveling faster than light. They were able to do the experiment again and got the same faster than light result. This is very VERY strange, especially because this would likely break all of physics if it turned out that things can move faster than light, so I'm excited that this might happen. More likely there's some hitherto unknown glitch in the experiment, but one can hope!
So, hope that wasn't too terribly dull and was reasonably understandable. I'm having a blast at home and am looking forward to seeing family in Boise over Christmas.
Caio!
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