Professor Peter Higgs stands in front of a photograph of the Large Hadron Collider at the Science Museum’s ‘Collider’ exhibition in London: Data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s biggest atom smasher, have greatly increased what physicists know about the Higgs boson, which is responsible for giving other elementary particles mass.
WHAT IS THE LHC?
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, located in a 27-kilometer (16.8-mile) tunnel beneath the Swiss-French border, was instrumental in the discovery of the Higgs boson. The subatomic particle had long been theorized but wasn’t confirmed until 2013.
The collider was recently given a $150 million upgrade that allows atoms to be smashed together with even greater force, allowing it to recreate conditions similar to those during the earliest moments of the universe.
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All the measured properties match the predictions of the Standard Model, the theory encompassing all of nature’s subatomic particles, forces and interactions that has stood the test of time since the 1970s.
The missing Higgs boson was a yawning gap in the Standard Model until the discovery of a particle with its properties was dramatically announced by LHC scientists in 2012.
Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, which operates the LHC – a massive particle accelerator straddling the French and Swiss border – later confirmed that the particle was a Higgs boson.
Without the Higgs boson the universe would be cold, dark and lifeless. Because of its fundamental importance, the Higgs was nicknamed the ‘God particle’.
Its discovery won a share of the Nobel prize for physics for Professor Peter Higgs, the University of Edinburgh scientist who predicted the existence of the particle in the 1960s and lent it his name.
Data from two of the LHC’s giant particle collision detectors, CMS and Atlas, were combined to provide the new Higgs boson profile.
Cern director general Professor Rolf Heuer said: ‘The Higgs boson is a fantastic new tool to test the Standard Model of particle physics and study the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles.
‘There is much benefit in combining the results of large experiments to reach the high precision needed for the next breakthrough in our field.
‘By doing so, we achieve what for a single experiment, would have meant running for at least two more years.’
LARGE HADRON COLLIDER: THE GREAT SWITCH ON
The LHC was restarted on April 5 this year, having been turned off for two years during a major renovation project that cost £100 million.
The world’s largest atom-smashing machine is most famous for proving the existence of the Higgs boson.
Physicists at Cern, the Geneva-based organisation which runs the LHC, are aiming to see dark matter for the first time ever thanks to the device’s upgrade.
Instead, they have discovered the pentaquark, for now.
The LHC is situated underground below the border between Switzerland and France, and consists of nearly 17 miles of circular tunnels.
It was shut down so that its energy levels could be almost doubled, allowing scientists to carry out more extreme experiments.
The LHC (pictured) was restarted on April 5 this year, having been turned off for two years during a major
The LHC (pictured) was restarted on April 5 this year, having been turned off for two years during a major renovation project that cost £100 million
The LHC, which cost nearly £4 billion, ran at a low ‘injection’ energy of 450 giga-electron volts (GeV) when it restarted, but its power has now been increased to a record-breaking 13 tera-electron volts (TeV) – up from 7 TeV at the time it managed to detect the Higgs boson in 2013.
British scientist Peter Higgs was awarded the Nobel Prize after the discovery of the particle, which he and others predicted would exist but which had never been seen until the construction of the LHC.
Physicists have set their sights on finding dark matter, the undetectable material that makes up 84 per cent of matter in the universe and binds galaxies together yet whose nature is unknown.
If they are able to detect and describe dark matter, it will mark a huge leap forward in our understanding of the universe.
Cern spokesman Arnaud Marsollier said: ‘The LHC will be running day and night. When we will get results we don’t know. What is important is that we will have collisions at energies we’ve never had before.
‘…It took 50 years to find the Higgs boson and 20 years to build this machine, and it will be running at least until 2035, so we can be patient.’
Now scientists will be able to use the Higgs boson as a reference for further study, opening up the possibility of discovering new physics phenomena.
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, located in a 27-kilometer (16.8-mile) tunnel beneath the Swiss-French border, was instrumental in the discovery of the Higgs boson.
The subatomic particle had long been theorized but wasn’t confirmed until 2013.
The collider was recently given a $150 million upgrade that allows atoms to be smashed together with even greater force, allowing it to recreate conditions similar to those during the earliest moments of the universe.
Last Updated Sep 2, 2015 9:23 AM EDT
In a spectacular dawn climb to space, a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket boosted a high-power Navy communications satellite into orbit Wednesday, the fourth of five planned relay stations providing high-speed smartphone-like capabilities to troops around the world.
Running two days late because of concerns about then-Tropical Storm Erika, the Atlas 5’s Russian-built RD-180 first stage engine roared to life at 6:18 a.m. EDT (GMT-4) followed by ignition of five solid-fuel strap-on boosters that quickly pushed the rocket away from pad 41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
Liftoff was delayed 19 minutes because of problems with a gaseous nitrogen supply, but the remainder of the countdown proceeded smoothly to launch, and after briefly climbing straight up on 2.5 million pounds of thrust, the 206-foot-tall rocket arced over onto an easterly trajectory and accelerated toward space.
The strap-on boosters burned out and fell away about one minute and 50 seconds after liftoff. Then, climbing into sunlight, the rocket put on a jaw-dropping sky show with an expanding, brilliant white exhaust plume briefly visible that looked like a giant comet streaking toward the horizon.
The RD-180 fired for four minutes and 24 seconds before it shut down as planned and the first stage fell away. A hydrogen-burning Aerojet Rocketdyne RL10C-1 engine in the rocket’s Centaur second stage then fired up to continue the climb to orbit.
The second-stage engine shut down a little more than 12 minutes after launch, putting the vehicle into a preliminary orbit. Two additional second-stage firings were needed to put the payload into the required elliptical “geostationary transfer” orbit with a low point of some 2,370 miles and a high point of around 22,236 miles.
The Navy’s fourth Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) satellite was expected to be released from the Centaur stage about two hours and 54 minutes after launch.
If all goes well, the satellite’s on-board propulsion system will be used over the next nine days or so to raise the low point, or perigee, of the orbit, putting MUOS-4 into a circular orbit 22,300 miles above the equator. At that geosynchronous altitude, satellites take 24 hours to complete one orbit and thus appear stationary in the sky.
Flight controllers then will oversee deployment of the satellite’s solar arrays and two main antennas. A 17-foot-wide gold mesh dish will send and receive signals from ground terminals that currently send voice and data through older Ultra High Frequency Follow-On, or UHF, satellites.
A much larger 46-foot-side antenna will provide the equivalent of 3G-class cellular network-type communications.
“MUOS will provide crystal-clear voice communications where the users on a line will be able to recognize each other’s voices,” Iris Bombelyn, a Lockheed Martin vice president, told reporters in a pre-launch conference call. “It is better than your cell phone and … this is very important for our war fighters.”
The newest MUOS satellite will provide “beyond-line-of-sight communications” with “smartphone-like features,” she said, so “our mobile forces will not only be able to talk, they’ll be able to use those simultaneously with text, exchange videos, transfer mission data or do conference calls. And we have a prioritization system so the most urgent message will get through.”
Built by Lockheed Martin, MUOS-4 will complete the core of an operational network with a fifth spacecraft, scheduled for launch next year, serving as an orbital spare. The new satellites eventually will replace the Navy’s older UHF comsats.
“We’re looking forward to … completing the Navy’s initial constellation of four satellites in orbit,” Bombelyn said. “With all ground stations now in place, the MUOS network will have near-global coverage allowing mobile forces to communicate from almost anywhere in the world.”
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