CERN Announces Collider Startup Delay 98
perturbed1 writes "The 142nd session of the CERN Council saw Organizational Director General Robert Aymar announcing a delay in the activation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The installation will start up in May 2008, taking 'the first steps towards studying physics at a new high-energy frontier.' Such a delay was foreseen due to the quadrupole accident, which we've previously discussed. This gives extra time for Fermilab physicists to try to understand the latest interesting hints of the Higgs boson, as well as give much needed extra-time for the detectors at CERN to get ready for data taking. Given that it will be fall before the LHC detectors take any useful data from collisions at 14TeV, could Fermilab collect enough data for a 5-sigma discovery by then?"
Time is running out for Fermilab (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd love for the scientists at Fermilab to make this sort of breakthrough before the LHC goes live, as it'd be a huge morale booster for American physicists. Such a high-profile discovery would also attract the attention necessary to help solve the NSF's funding woes.
Re:Time is running out for Fermilab (Score:4, Interesting)
It was just reported within the last month if I recall correctly. I apologize, but I just don't find the citation. I Know I read the article though.
Maybe it was in Scientific American?
Re:Time is running out for Fermilab (Score:5, Informative)
What you are referring to is the 4th related article: "Search for Higgs 'God Particle' gets interesting." It had been rumored that Fermilab had seen something that they were keeping under wraps for the summer publication cycle. Speculation was that it was the Higgs Boson but turns out it was the Cascade B. [slashdot.org]
Re:Time is running out for Fermilab (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Time is running out for Fermilab (Score:5, Informative)
Something interesting to note, as an experiment winds down, it tends to "discover" something, recently this tends to be the Higgs. Compare this to 2000 when LEP at CERN was shutting down, passing the torch to the Tevatron at Fermilab, and there was all the commotion about the "Higgs discovery" there by ALEPH.
Anyway at the moment we have lots of bumps in our mass spectra which is how we find particles. However its a statistical process so bumps can naturally form just by chance alone. Factor in that we are looking in hundreds of places and all of a sudden a few bumps that have a probability of one in a few hundred of occurring dont seem so exciting yet. Not saying theres nothing there but we've seen this so many times before and it turns out to be nothing, people just tend to get to excited when they see them.
However Fermilab has a good chance of getting the Higgs (if its the Standard Model Higgs) because it has to be relatively light to make other measurements consistent which means its in the easiest spot for the Tevatron to see it but the hardest spot for the LHC to see it. It'll be well past 2009 before the LHC has a hope of seeing the Higgs at a low mass but it could see a high mass Higgs pretty quickly after turning on.
Re:Time is running out for Fermilab (Score:5, Funny)
Well, Fermilab has already made the first step towards this goal.
According to
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the parts of the LHC that caused the delay were designed by Fermilab ;-)
Most beleive that comming out of the trees was the first mistake.
Delay due to fault?
I beleive that in the year 3243 mankind embarks on the journey to go back to the past to prevent the 21st century misfire of this quantum shredder. Mankind found out about the action to undertake in a 11 page book found at a underground pyramid beneath a maya territory, and gave no clue as how or who put it there, and how they knew the change has to be made. Noone knows how the paradox history-pedia writers knew about it al
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Re:Time is running out for Fermilab (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Time is running out for Fermilab (Score:5, Insightful)
As a physicist at CERN, I'd love to see Fermilab publish some 5-sigma signal on something just as the LHC starts up. I think this would be a huge morale booster for **physicists in general** -- not just for Fermilab or, even a smaller sub-set of that, American physicists. And note, I am saying here a 5-sigma signal! Not necessarily the Higgs. Any other high-energy discovery which then the LHC would confirm and continue on, would be awesome. (Cascade B is simply not high-energy enough!)
Such a high-profile discovery would boost the morale here at CERN significantly. I think almost everyone has this fear, which often people are scared to put into words, that we might turn the detectors on and really, see nothing. There are lots of talks from theorists lately which hide the Higgs, and then hide other physics away by using different mechanisms, suggesting that we might, indeed, see nothing... That is absolutely the worst scenario!
aside I see that a lot of /.ers here think the Fermilab/CERN race as some sort of an American/European race. This is completely bull! There are ~800 Americans working at CERN and vice versa. Half of my research group at CERN is or has worked at Fermilab... I think if Fermilab discovers something, I think most of CERN would be delighted! Afterall, chances are Fermilab might be able to discover something but will not be able to measure the properties of said-particle, such as spin. Presumably, the LHC should be able to do this better... Seeing something at the LHC that is new, even if "just-discovered" by Fermilab, is better than the prospects of "seeing nothing."
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Your mistake is thinking that your opinion in this regard is relevant. It is a race; the US and EU are competitors and this goes a long way toward prestige and posturing. You
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What the "race" comes down to is funding. Europe's got LHC and ITER. The US only has the Tevatron for another year, plus the SSC's aborted fetus buried in Texas. Our current administration is afraid to fund anything evenly remotely sciency (b
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Well, the US has got several valuable neutrino projects, which often gets overlooked. Don't forget LIGO... Also, the US has a lot of potential for doing science (particularly particle physics) in space, which is a boat that it is missing by stopping the shuttle program and concentrating on Mars... which is sad... Big science is hard to fund, when the administration is this ignorant. But still, there are lots of small, cute particle physics experiments cropping up everywhere, from dark matter detection to
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[snip]
> attract the attention necessary to help solve the NSF's funding woes.
Let me be perfectly sure I'm understanding what you're saying here: you're saying we should discover an utterly useless bit of information so we can get more money?
Sqeeeel! - sound of pork
Maury
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The manned space missions get all the attention, whilst the scientifically valuable missions (of which I am proud to say, NASA does many), receive little to no popular coverage.
This past landing of the shuttle was front-page news for about three days. Compare that to the fact that very few members of the public really seemed to know or care that NASA was going to let the Hubble crash out of orbit due to neglect.
If NASA abandoned its manned space program, it would still be
Higgs boson (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Higgs boson (Score:4, Funny)
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Yup, which suggests that discovering it, and understanding it, may give us some control over mass and inertia.. or, to put that in layman's terms: anti-gravity
If you have control over mass, you have control the m component of the special theory of relativity, and thus control over how much energy a particle represents. If you can come up with negative mass (necessary for gravitic repulsion), you can come up with negative energy.
Negative energy. Wormholes [ucr.edu] and warp drives [ucr.edu]. I think anti-gravity could quite possibly be the least interesting aspect of control over mass...
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I'm concerned that placing this project deep in the ground instills a false sense of safety in people who might not fully understand what they are doing. Am I correct to be concerned? Notice I didn't ask if I was _right_ to be concerned.
I don't like it and I can't quite articulate why not. If I'm correct, then I need to be able to articulate it
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There are 3 reasons why they are deep underground, the main reason is to protect IT not us. There may be some others somebody else can point out but these are the three that spring to mind
1) to minimize environmental impact
CERN is next to the alps in a very beautiful area. They didnt want a huge particle accelerator making it look ugly
2) shielding
Cosmic rays from space hit us all the time. Having our delicate accelerator (and seriously this thing is a pain to keep running) on the surface would mean we wou
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You are concerned because you don't understand enough of what's happening, which is a natural (and practical) response to the unknown. Placing it deep underground is not for *your* safety but for the *experiment's*: the "noise" of the world (the sun/stars/etc.) must be reduced as much as possible in order to detect anything in the sensitive detectors.
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Thank you for your reply. That makes the sense that I hoped it would. This is such an amazing project because everyone, regardless of their knowledge
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That sounds like Aether to me.
Fields are not aether (Score:3, Informative)
Nah, fields are mathematical formulations. Quantum field theory [universe-review.ca] provides the virtual particles [ucr.edu] that more physically explain force interactions via probability amplitudes and so on. In fact, this is exactly what gave Feynman [zyvex.com] his quantum electrodynamics [gsu.edu] and subsequent Nobel prize (that he disliked).
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Aether models require a preferred direction (which is how the Michelson-Morley experiment ruled them out). The Higgs has a magnitude only and no direction so the two are different, although they do, naively, look alike.
Bad Example (Score:3, Informative)
The other weird thing about the Higgs field is that it has its lowest energy
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Gravity is not a field (Score:3, Insightful)
Gravity is most certainly not some field. The standard model of physics allows for virtual particles that mediate the forces, which provides suitable explanation for how the force works rather than some simple field-based interpretation-- in the case of gravity there might be gravitons(*), and in the case of electromagnetic interactions there might be virtual photons. There is no all-knowing permeating field that is dis
Gravity IS a field (Score:2)
Errr....yes they do. The electric field, by definition, is the force felt per unit charge. If I put a charge in an electric field then can physically observe the force and hence infer that there is a field. Virtual particles are the mechanism that creates the field but the field IS is physical entity. Another simple test that a field is something real is that it has an energy density. If the field does not ph
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Virtual particles are virtual and not physical; so if they are what causes the field, then how can
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In the classical case the field clearly is physical: it requires energy to create one and then, once created, there is a region of space where charged particles feel a force. A virtual particle is just one that we cannot directly detect. However we can infer its existance from the effects it causes e..g e+e-->mu+mu- forward backward asymmetr
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Well, I for one welcome... (Score:2, Redundant)
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I for one... (Score:3, Interesting)
No, I don't wish any harm to the scientists or their reputations. However, I think it would be fun if Gravity didn't fit so nicely in the Standard Model like everyone is hoping it will.
Having something else, such as a massive Baryon, appear at the energies where the Higgs boson is 'supposed' to be means that scientists all over the world in many disciplines are going to have to go back to the drawing board and reevaluate their theories.
Re:I for one... (Score:5, Informative)
No, I don't wish any harm to the scientists or their reputations. However, I think it would be fun if Gravity didn't fit so nicely in the Standard Model like everyone is hoping it will.
Your point is well taken in that in some ways it would be more interesting if the Higgs were not found, but in fact the Higgs does nothing to bring gravity into the Standard Model. Instead it would explain the symmetry breaking in the Electroweak interaction. (I.e. why the W and Z are massive while the photon in massless.) Without a Higgs, a new mechanism would be necessary to explain this.
Re:I for one... (Score:5, Informative)
But I agree with you. I'd also hope for the non-existence of the Higgs boson. however, all odds are against us. There are some fundamental processes that can only be made sense of in the presence of a particle which looks very much like the Higgs. If I recall correctly, it was Chris Quigg that said that "if the Higgs boson does not exist, we'll need something much like it". But of course, with the Higgs come a lot of other issues (the hierarchy problem for instance), which open up a whole new area for physics.
Bad odds! (Score:3, Insightful)
Really? You have some evidence that the theorists are right? If so please share it with us. Just because nobody has thought of a better model it is by no means proof that one does not exist. The Higgs model really is a beautiful one and I think that we will find it...but in 1904 how many physicists would have bet on the universe having a maximum speed limit as the solution to the non-invariance of Maxwell's equations
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The Standard Model already had the particle masses stuck in there as free parameters so the Higgs does not increase the number of free parameters in the model (except for its own mass). What is beautiful about the Higgs is that it solves the mass problem in an elegant fashion.
For example if you do the tree level calculation
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Actually they must sum up to give less than one (since you might not interact!). However this is NOT an argument that the Higgs must be found. We have to find something, true, before 1 TeV but who is to say it must be the Higgs?
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Now lets remember that gravity only acts (classically) between particles with mass. So, if we don't find the Higgs boson (this is the particle
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Therefore please allow me to ask in all seriousness of those who have stated that Higgs is not associated with gravity, what is the difference between granting mass to a particle and granting it a gravitational field?
My understanding is that the symmetry of bosons indicate that all of them exchange a force between two other particles, even other bosons. (Since gluons have color-charge they can interact with each other via the Strong Nuclear force as well as quarks.)
Isn't the Higgs boson, or even a vi
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The acquisition of mass in the Standard Model (which only deals with the strong and electroweak forces) is through the interaction of the fields we know (ie. protons, electrons, etc.)with the Higgs field.
Now if something has mass, according to classical gravity it has a gravitational field. But in a Quantum Field Theoretic interpretation of the Gravity (as you said, all forces are mediated by an exchanged boson) the force of gravity (that is the attractive interaction between 2 massive particles) is
Alternative to the Higgs Boson (Score:1)
But, the iPhone.... (Score:3, Funny)
Or at least let them watch YouTube while waiting for repairs.
Uncertainty (Score:2, Funny)
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What did you expect? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, time does slow down when you're moving close to the speed of light ...
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workin hard, boss (Score:1)
no, really. i'm the tevatron operator today. :-)
Not to worry for Fermilab; we have a nice neutrino program to keep us going for a while. In general everyone here is seriously cranked (in a good way) about CERN coming up. They are going to kick some ass when they crank up the ring. The engineering stats are ... mind boggling.
I am but a lowly glamour-drenched peon and not not a decision maker, but i would be less than surprised if someone came up with
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But along the same lines of what you said, not all physics in the next decade will come from having the biggest, sexiest ring collider. Examples: beam neutrino experiments (MiniBooNE, Minos, NOvA), reactor neutrino experiments (Double-CHOOZ, Daya Bay), dark matter experiments, etc. If there is beyond-standard model physics to be found, it's probably not going to appear on the
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It is so hard not to be jealous sitting at CERN. But, it is a good sort of jealousy really. I just hope I get data one day... You guys over there in Fermilab are doing an awesome job! Keep up the good work! :)
I wish we were all at the SSC right now, but oh well...
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Might not be a good thing (Score:2)
5-sigma probably not possible (Score:5, Interesting)
It is unlikely that we will have enough data for a 5-sigma Standard Model Higgs discovery before the LHC turns on. If I remember the plot for the expected Higgs significance correctly the best we can hope for is "3-sigma evidence" unless the Higgs really is right above the current limits (where ALEPH once suggested it was).
However this assumes a Standard Model Higgs. If something called Supersymmetry (SUSY) exists then there are 5 Higgs bosons (two with a charge) and in some areas of SUSY parameter space we can see some of these a lot more easily than the Standard Model Higgs This would also be a LOT more exciting than a Standard Model Higgs!
Link to plot (Score:4, Informative)
The dip round 160 GeV/c2 mass is because a heavy enough Higgs can decay differently than a lighter one and the different decay is a lot easier to detect above all the other "background" events happening in the detector. We should get 10-20 fb-1 between both experiments by 2009 so, as you can see, unless we do something clever (which had not been thought of at the time the plots were made) or the Higgs is really light we won't get 5-sigma, but 3-sigma is a real possibility.
Am I The First To Say... (Score:4, Funny)
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Quadripole accident? (Score:1)
Schrodinger's Cat ? (Score:2)
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Fermilab physicists? (Score:1)
This gives extra time for Fermilab physicists to try to understand the latest interesting hints of the Higgs boson
Um, shouldn't the Fermilab physicists be busy fixing the broken magnet at CERN? Apparently it was their part that failed..
Angels and Deamons crew at CERN (Score:2)
Ok, so this is off topic, but might be interesting to those curious about what's happening at CERN.
Allan Cameron and Ron Howard was at CERN last week. Here is a photo [cdsweb.cern.ch].
Tom Hanks will be here in two weeks to visit the LHC and in the fall, Angels and Deamons will be filmed at CERN... Why the hurry? It has only been two months since the cast has been selected?! Presumably, they want to shoot before the LHC closure sometime in March... ?
Give her the gas, Clem! (Score:1)
Wrong question (Score:1, Flamebait)
> useful data from collisions at 14TeV, could Fermilab collect
> enough data for a 5-sigma discovery by then?"
Who cares? I'm serious. This entire experiment is designed to demonstrate something everyone already agrees we know. This is the same sort of useless activity that monks used to do when debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
What happens if the experiment does work? Absolutely nothing. Well not nothing, everyone