It's official: CERN is claiming a five sigma result in the search for the Higgs Boson - with both ATLAS and CMS reporting a signal in the same region, 126 GeV, consistent with the last missing piece of the Standard Model. This fills in the last major gap in our understanding of the universe at the particle level, which will of course be rewritten ( Read more... )

In other news, the Kyoto Symposium came out with their findings last week, forcing an updated CERN press release. The final verdict is that all four Gran Sasso experiments, including OPERA, now measure the maximum velocities of neutrinos to be consistent with the theory of relativity. That means an end to the dreams of faster-than-light ( Read more... )

We are gathered here today to witness the last hours of what was once the world's highest energy particle accelerator. A long-running pioneer in the field of hadron physics, and the discoverer of the top quark, the Tevatron has been America, and the world's, premiere source of particle collision data for most of its long and illustrious life, and ( Read more... )

Rolf Heuer has now stated that the LHC could have beam injection tonight. Beam run should be an injection probe at 450 GeV, magnets are ready, detectors are standing by. Hopefully they'll pass this test with flying colors and get to collisions within the month (I think the betting pool is centered on Thanksgiving).

ETA: Beam has passed Point 5.

There's been a theory in the physics community, the high-energy physics community in particular, for the last year, a feeling of guilt, that comes from one central suspicion that we, quants in general, but ex-high energy physicists in particular, caused the Great Recession. For many years, those of us who couldn't cut it in HEP jumped ship from ( Read more... )

Dropped by a short, but somewhat interesting concert on Wednesday. Well, it wasn't much of a concert, because it was short, and I'm not sure whether all the music was actually music, but the instruments were... unique ...and (at least to me) visually impressive. They had some technical problems with the pitch though which I'm sure they're working ( Read more... )

Today is "watch the LHC on the Daily Show" day, also known as "watch John Ellis get discomforted on the Daily Show" day at work. Also, it's "make fun of ATLAS because their detector still looks like it's in pieces" day.

Well, we didn't get off so well either, but what the hell. We laugh at ourselves all the time.

But the hardhats are still

In other physics related new, the International Space Station is now officially screwed. Apparently, due to a bit of a funding problem, the Space Shuttle is due to be retired in 2010. Our new spaceplane won't be ready until 2015. Our only chance of getting to the ISS between now and then is to borrow some of the Russian Soyuz capsules. However ( Read more... )

So we have successfully tested the LHC. Which means that, contrary to popular opinion, we did not suffer a magnet failure. Or at least not one at the current injection energy, which is rather low ( Read more... )

So, if you believe that the LHC will destroy the world, you now have only about six hours before first beam enters the ring (9am CERN local time). Make your plans wisely ( Read more... )