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- ATLAS dives deeper into di-HiggsATLAS dives deeper into di-Higgs An event display of a di-Higgs candidate event taken in 2017. (Image: ATLAS collaboration/CERN) Remember how difficult it was to find one Higgs boson? Try finding two at the same place at the same time. Known as di-Higgs production, this fascinating process can tell scientists about the Higgs boson self-interaction. By studying it, physicists can measure the strength of the Higgs boson’s “self-coupling”, which is a fundamental aspect of the Standard Model that connects the Higgs mechanism and the stability of our Universe. Searching for di-Higgs production is an especially challenging task. It’s a very rare process, about 1000 times rarer than the production of a single Higgs boson. During the entire Run 2 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), only a few thousand di-Higgs events are expected to have been produced in ATLAS, compared with the 40 million collisions that happened every second. So how can physicists find these rare needles in the data hays…
- Instruments of Vision opens in Santiago de Compostela as a collaboration between Arts at CERN and IGFAEInstruments of Vision opens in Santiago de Compostela as a collaboration between Arts at CERN and IGFAE The exhibition Instruments of Vision comprises photographs and videos taken by Armin Linke during visits to experimental facilities, such as CERN or the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (L'Aquila, Italy), or the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (Vienna, Austria), since 2000. For this occasion, Armin Linke has produced images that portray some of the work pursued by staff from the Galician Institute of High Energy Physics (IGFAE) at CERN. The photographs show how the scientific community has generated very complex instruments that allow us to observe and understand how the most fundamental elements of matter work. These photographs are enriched by the unique location of the exhibition, which is on display at Igrexa da Universidade, a baroque church at the heart of the old town. In the exhibition, Linke invites visitors to witness spaces of research, where…
- Bringing black hole jets down to EarthBringing black hole jets down to Earth Dive into the heart of an active galaxy and you’ll find a supermassive black hole gobbling up material from its surroundings. In about one out of ten such galaxies, the black hole will also shoot out jets of matter at close to the speed of light. Such relativistic black hole jets are thought to contain, among other components, a plasma of pairs of electrons and their antimatter equivalents, positrons. This relativistic electron–positron plasma is believed to shape the dynamics and energy budget of the black hole and its environment. But how exactly this happens remains little understood, because it’s difficult both to measure the plasma with astronomical observations and to simulate it with computer programmes. In a paper just published in Nature Communications, Charles Arrowsmith and colleagues from the Fireball collaboration report how they have used the HiRadMat facility at CERN to produce a relativistic beam of electron–positron plasma that a…
- How can AI help physicists search for new particles?How can AI help physicists search for new particles? One of the main goals of the LHC experiments is to look for signs of new particles, which could explain many of the unsolved mysteries in physics. Often, searches for new physics are designed to look for one specific type of new particle at a time, using theoretical predictions as a guide. But what about searching for unpredicted – and unexpected – new particles? Trawling through the billions of collisions that occur in the LHC experiments without knowing exactly what to look for would be a mammoth task for physicists. So, instead of sifting through the data and looking for anomalies, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations are letting artificial intelligence (AI) do the job. At the Rencontres de Moriond conference on 26 March, physicists from the CMS collaboration presented the latest results obtained by using various machine learning techniques to search for pairs of “jets”. These jets are collimated sprays of particles originating from…
- LHC tunnel named as one of the 50 most iconic tunnels in the worldLHC tunnel named as one of the 50 most iconic tunnels in the world The LEP/LHC tunnel in 1985. Three tunnel-boring machines started excavating the tunnel in February 1985 and the ring was completed three years later. (Image: CERN) Construction work for the tunnel of the world’s most iconic particle accelerator began in 1983. The tunnel was initially home to the Large Electron–Positron Collider, which ran from 1989 to 2000, and now houses the Large Hadron Collider. During construction of the tunnel, the team had to overcome multiple engineering challenges, including boring a 27-km circular tunnel with a constant radius and dealing with numerous geological challenges. From 1998 to 2005, it was majorly upgraded to prepare it for the LHC. These civil engineering works included constructing new transfer tunnels from the SPS to the LHC and giant underground caverns to house the ATLAS and CMS detectors. Now, this feat has been recognised by the International Tunnelling and Underground Spac…
- CERN welcomes International Year of Quantum Science and TechnologyCERN welcomes International Year of Quantum Science and Technology 100 years ago, a handful of visionary physicists upturned notions about nature that had guided scientists for centuries. Particles can be point- or wave-like, depending on how you look at them. Their behaviour is probabilistic and can momentarily appear to violate cherished laws such as the conservation of energy. Particles can be entangled such that one feels the change of state of the other instantaneously no matter the distance between them, and, as befalls Schrödinger's famous cat, they can be in opposite states at the same time. Today, thanks to pioneering theoretical and experimental efforts to understand this complex realm, physicists can confidently navigate through such apparently irrational concepts. Quantum theory has not only become foundational to physics, chemistry, engineering and biology, but underpins the transistors, lasers and LEDs that drive modern electronics and telecommunications -- not to menti…
- Accelerator Report: Setting the stage for a productive summerAccelerator Report: Setting the stage for a productive summer On 5 June, the first period of luminosity production at the LHC came to an end and we began our second machine development (MD) session. The MD studies continued until 10 June, when the last MD beams were dumped ahead of the scheduled technical stop. Luminosity production is expected to resume on 17 June for a period of nine weeks of uninterrupted production, until the next MD session, which is scheduled to start on 19 August. When production beams were dumped on 5 June, the counter for the integrated luminosity showed 30.4 fb-1 for ATLAS and CMS, 2.5 fb-1 for LHCb and 17.3 fb-1 for ALICE, exactly as expected. The scheduled (green line) and achieved (black dots) integrated luminosity for ATLAS and CMS for the 2024 proton–proton run. The blue shaded areas indicate the MD sessions, the green shaded areas indicate the technical stops, the red shaded areas represent special physics runs and, finally, the yellow shaded area rep…
- Shaking the box for new physicsShaking the box for new physics CMS candidate collision event for a B0 meson decaying into a K*0 meson and two muons (red lines). The K*0 meson decays into a K+ meson (magenta line) and a π- meson (green line). (Image: CERN) When you receive a present on your birthday, you might be the kind of person who tears off the wrapping paper immediately to see what’s inside the box. Or maybe you like to examine the box, guessing the contents from its shape, size, weight or the sound it makes when you shake it. When physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) analyse their datasets in search of new physics phenomena such as new particles, they usually take one of two different approaches. They either perform a direct search for a specific new kind of particle, equivalent to tearing off the wrapping paper immediately, or use an indirect strategy based on quantum mechanics and its subtle wonders, similar to shaking the box and guessing what’s inside. At the annual LHCP conference that took pl…
