Tevatron Beams Turn On At FermiLab 39
skwang writes: "This press release at Fermi National Accerator Labratory (FermiLab) announces the start of "Collider Run II." FermiLab collides protons and anti-protons in order to study high-energy phyisics (HEP). One of the labs goals is to find the Higgs Boson, an elementary particle that couples with mass. More information about Run II Physics can be found at the FermiLab Web site or at the detector Web Sites: D-Zero (D0) and
Collider Detector at FermiLab(CDF)"
Bad Link (Score:1)
Re:too bad the Standard Model just got clobbered! (Score:1)
Re:too bad the Standard Model just got clobbered! (Score:1)
Re:Collider Run II (Score:1)
Re:Fermilab (Score:1)
--SONET
Fermilab (Score:1)
Anyway, those plans were such a pain that they brought me to quitting AutoCAD completely. Even though they paid me quite well, it just wasn't worth the hassle. heh
--SONET
Re:tevatron? (Score:1)
Paris: Captain, the Borg are trying to pull us in with a tractor beam!
Janeway: Direct a Tevatron pulse through the deflector grid, that should disable their tractor beams.
Obligatory reference: (Score:1)
Interesting stuff (Score:1)
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Re:Fermilab (Score:1)
Re:Linux at FermiLab (Score:1)
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Re:Shut up you whiney bitches (Score:1)
Re:too bad the Standard Model just got clobbered! (Score:1)
Re:too bad the Standard Model just got clobbered! (Score:1)
FP.
(if I have to say '+1 funny not -1 troll', then it probably wasn't funny, was it? Ooops)
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Tevatron?! (Score:1)
While I'm sure it kicks the ass of the tree-hugging Birkatron [birkenstock.com], I have to believe that something like the Nikatron [nike.com] will eventually replace it due to reduced, off-shore labour costs.
Re:Imagine... (Score:1)
Layer (Score:1)
Dave
Re:Imagine... (Score:1)
But what about foreseeable practical uses? (Score:1)
Then again, an army of hundreds of thousands of railcampers is never good.
Oh boy... (Score:1)
Re:too bad the Standard Model just got clobbered! (Score:1)
Thanks,
Fred Gray
Re:Fermilab (Score:1)
On the other hand, this might be the result of a generic DoE policy that no one has taken the time to review for appropriateness to the facility.
Re:Linux at FermiLab (Score:1)
About railguns (Score:1)
Unfortunately the muzzle velocity never reached what the military concidered a pratical level, but imagine if it had! Railguns used in World War II? What a concept!
too bad the Standard Model just got clobbered! (Score:2)
Re:too bad the Standard Model just got clobbered! (Score:2)
>to explain mass. Even in a dead model!
I don't believe this is "unfortunate" and it certainly isn't a bad thing for Fermilab. In addition to looking for the Higgs, there will be searches for new physics (i.e. physics beyond the standard model) in Fermilab run 2 data, just as in run 1. SUSY (supersymmetric) Higgs possibilities will be examined as well as the standard model Higgs. And in general, most physicists have thought that the standard model was inadequate, hence all of the theoretical work on SUSY, superstring theory, additional extended spatial dimensions, and other ways of going beyond the standard model.
You said "boson precession measurements." I assume you're alluding to the muon g-2 experiment? I believe they claim 99% confidence for a value that does not match the standard model. While that is compelling, it's just not enough sigmas to be decisive.
A couple of other notes... I'm just an undergrad, so people with more experience in physics can feel free to correct me:
Don't expect to see an announcement of the Higgs discovery right away. It will take time to collect enough data for a "discovery," although I suppose Higgs-like events could show up relatively soon. Also, I think the Higgs is harder to detect in p-pbar collisions than in e+ e- collisions (as at LEP) because the decay modes leading to the Higgs are closer to some background processes. But perhaps someone who knows more about this could explain.
And last, a technical note for all the Slashdotters who think every article should relate to Linux. Most of the work being done at Fermilab is on Linux, specifically Fermilab Linux, which is based on RedHat. For the CDF experiment, the Run 1 code was written in Fortran, but most Run 2 code is in C++. There are a number of modules which process event data, and TCL scripts are used to set module parameters and the order in which modules are run. ROOT is used to interactively run C++ scripts for data analysis based on the output of these modules. I don't know much about how D0 operates but I believe it's similar.
Re:Luminosity (Score:2)
Luminosity (Score:2)
Collider Run II (Score:2)
Did this go through anybody else's head when the read "Collider Run II"?
Re:Interesting stuff (Score:2)
See this link for the real story on this... http://www.hep.anl.gov/ndk/hypertext/numi.html [anl.gov]
Re:too bad the Standard Model just got clobbered! (Score:2)
(Although, since AFAIK GNU/Linux wasn't used by the scientists, it's not big enough news for Slashdot, I guess.)
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Re:Oh boy... (Score:2)
press release text (Score:2)
Batavia, Ill-Officials at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory today (March 1) announced the start of Collider Run II at the Tevatron, the highest-energy particle accelerator now operating in the world. Researchers at Fermilab hope that high-energy particle collisions at the Tevatron in Run II will yield significant, long-awaited discoveries about the fundamental nature of matter in the universe.
Fermilab Director Michael Witherell expressed satisfaction at the culmination of the laboratory's decade-long preparations for Run II and anticipation of the scientific opportunities it will provide.
"I am delighted that we are starting Run II on time," Witherell said. "Now we can look forward to the excitement of seeing new physics results. We can't predict what Nature has in store for us. All we can guarantee is the opportunity for discovery."
Like Witherell, many Fermilab scientists stressed that, while they have models and theories, they do not know what new physics Run II will reveal. Nevertheless, world attention has focused on Fermilab's two collider detectors at the Tevatron, CDF and DZero, as the next possible venue for discovery of the Higgs boson, an as-yet-unseen particle that physicists believe may determine the property of mass. Late last year, experiments at the Large Electron Positron collider at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, detected hints of what might have been signals of the Higgs. However, the LEP accelerator shut down before scientists there could either confirm or rule out a Higgs sighting. If the Higgs boson does exist at a low enough mass, Fermilab experiments may be able to detect it during Run II.
Run II also has the potential for revealing much more new physics, including evidence for a theoretical model known as supersymmetry, signals of possible extra dimensions in the universe, new insight into the asymmetry between matter and antimatter and a better understanding of the top quark, discovered at Fermilab in 1995 during Collider Run I. All are subjects with profound implications for modern particle physics and for the understanding of the fundamental physical workings of the universe.
"Two recent results from other experiments add to the excitement of Run II," said Fermilab theorist Joseph Lykken. "The results from Brookhaven's g-minus-two experiments with muons have a straightforward interpretation as signs of supersymmetry. The increasingly interesting results from BABAR at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center add to the importance of B physics in Run II, and also suggest new physics. I will be shocked and disappointed if we don't have at least one major discovery."
During Run II, beams of protons at an energy of 980 billion electron volts will collide with beams of antiprotons at the same energy, for a total energy of 1.96 trillion electron volts at the collision point, a 10 percent increase over the energy of Run I. However, the greatest enhancement of the Tevatron's capability will come from the use of a new injection accelerator, the $260 million Main Injector, completed in 1999. The Main Injector and other improvements will permit a much greater rate of high-energy collisions in the Tevatron, providing more than a 20-fold increase in the number of particle collisions observed and recorded at the particle detectors. Because the new phenomena that physicists are seeking occur extremely rarely in particle collisions, the increased collision rate is critical to making discoveries.
Although Collider Run II officially began on March 1, it will take some weeks before Fermilab physicists begin seeing physics results from the upgraded and newly configured Tevatron.
"Turning on the Tevatron is not like turning on a toaster," said Fermilab Operations Chief Robert Mau, whose department operates Fermilab's accelerators. "Besides the approximately seven miles of particle beam enclosures, the accelerator complex includes 44,000 controllable devices and more than a hundred thousand readbacks. Millions of components, circuits and parts all have to work together. The Tevatron is one of the most complex devices on earth. It takes a while to get it up and running."
Mau expects to see proton beams in the Tevatron within a few days. Experiment collaborations at the CDF and DZero detectors should begin observing proton-antiproton collisions later in March. The collaborations, each comprising about 550 physicists from universities and laboratories throughout the nation and the world, have each completed five-year, $100-million upgrades to take advantage of the Tevatron's enhanced capabilities.
"Our sensitivity to new physics comes not only from the big increase in numbers of collisions," said CDF collaborator Rob Roser. "We gain an additional factor due to beam energy and a further increase due to the improvements in our detector. For top-quark physics, for example, we are looking at about a 50-fold improvement over Run I."
Run II will continue, with a mid-course interruption for further upgrades and improvements to accelerators and detectors, until 2007. At about that time, results will begin to emerge from a new accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which will have seven times the Tevatron's energy and will overtake the Tevatron at the high-energy frontier. Fermilab scientists are eager to make the most of the opportunities now before them.
Experimenter Robin Erbacher expressed the prevailing sentiment among physicists at the laboratory after five years of work and preparation for Run II.
"I'm ready to get my hands on some data and analyze it," Erbacher said.
Fermilab is operated by Universities Research Association, Inc., under contract with the U.S. Department of Energy, whose Office of Science funds more than 90 percent of the federally supported research in high-energy physics in the United States.
A few comments on the Higgs and g-2... (Score:2)
Linux at FermiLab (Score:3)
Linux at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory [fnal.gov]
tevatron? (Score:3)
Tevatron? How did they get electronics into my sandles? ;) Gives new meaning to going for a power walk, too!
(cf http://www.Teva.com [teva.com])
Re:too bad the Standard Model just got clobbered! (Score:4)
First things first, he experiment to which you refer is the g-2 experiment at Brookhaven [http] ; it is an experiment to measure the anomolous magnetic moment of the muon (which is a fermion, not a boson).
The anomolous magnetic moment of the muon is a physical quantity predicted by the SM (a prediction which is itself a paramaterization of other measured quantities, and thus has some uncertanty). The g-2 experiment yielded a value which is 2.5 standard deviations away from the SM prediction.
This is a good thing for physicists (specifically the ones at Fermilab)! For one thing, no serious physicist has ever believed that the standard model is a complete description of nature. There are aspects of the universe for which the standard model cannot account (for example the obvious matter-antimatter asymmetry...).
The really exciting thing about the g-2 result and it's potential impact on the physics about to happen at Fermilab is that it is highly suggestive of new physics (i.e. supersymmetry... susy).
Think of the progress of scientific thought in the past 600 years. Newton's gravitation is a good theory; it makes predictions which mach quite well with observation (experiment). However, it is incorrect... along came Einstien's theory of gravitation, (General Relativity, which itself is a good theory, but not the correct one) which reproduces all of the predictions of Newtonian gravity, and and "does one better" by getting right what Newton got wrong (i.e. precession of the orbit of Mercury; the deflection of light by massive objects...).
So we have the standard model, which is by far the most successful physical model in human history. Yet we know it's wrong. But untill we find a better description of nature, it'll have to do.
The standard model is far from dead. It will evolve, in some sense, into a better description of nature.
Re:too bad the Standard Model just got clobbered! (Score:4)
I'm a graduate student who works on the experiment to which this thread is alluding. It is the muon g-2 experiment [bnl.gov].
The post to which I am responding contains several factual errors:
Thanks,
Fred Gray
Aha! (Score:5)