Tag: Physics

Categories
Universe Today

Large Hadron Collider shuts down for a smashing upgrade

Head-on view of magnet for High-Luminosity LHC
A magnet for the High-Luminosity LHC is readied at CERN's Large Magnet Facility. (Credit: © 2026 CERN / Florence Thompson)

After nearly 18 years of operation, highlighted by the detection of the elusive Higgs boson, Europe’s CERN physics research center says it’s bidding “Farewell” to the Large Hadron Collider. But it’s actually more like “See You Later, Accelerator!”

The new, improved High-Luminosity LHC is due to make its debut in 2030, with up to 10 times the luminosity of the original LHC. CERN officials talk about HiLumi LHC almost as if it will be a brand-new machine.

“The LHC has exceeded every expectation,” Oliver Brüning, CERN’s director for accelerators and technology, said today in a news release. “For nearly two decades, it has transformed our understanding of the universe and inspired generations of scientists, engineers and citizens around the world. Today we say goodbye to the LHC as we have known it, while preparing to welcome its successor: the HiLumi LHC, which will extend this scientific adventure far into the future.”

Continue reading “Large Hadron Collider shuts down for a smashing upgrade”
Categories
GeekWire

Muon detectives share the Breakthrough Prize glory

David Hertzog with muon storage ring at Fermilab
University of Washington physicist David Hertzog checks out the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab in 2018. (Photo Courtesy of David Hertzog)

University of Washington physicist David Hertzog can’t wait to find out how hundreds of researchers who worked on a geeky project known as the Muon g-2 Collaboration will react when they hear they’ve each won thousands of dollars for that work.

The money is coming from this year’s $3 million Breakthrough Prize for fundamental physics, which was awarded tonight during a gala ceremony in Los Angeles. Hertzog and his colleagues decided that the prize should be divided equally among everyone who was an author on research papers relating to the decades-long series of muon experiments.

“There are students who were in and out of this thing — two years or less,” he said. “They’re going to be shocked out of their lives about something they did a long time ago that they don’t remember doing. They’re going to get a phone call or email from the Breakthrough people, and they’re going to go, ‘What!?’ That’s kind of fun.”

Get the full story on GeekWire
Categories
Universe Today

CERN adds a new particle to subatomic menagerie

Artist's graphical conception of Xi-cc-plus particle
An artist’s impression shows the newly discovered subatomic particle, with two charm quarks and one down quark. (Credit: CERN)

The Large Hadron Collider’s subatomic discoveries didn’t stop with the Higgs boson: This week, scientists at Europe’s CERN research center announced that the collider’s LHCb experiment has detected a doubly charmed particle that’s like a proton, but four times as weighty.

The particle is known as the Ξcc⁺, or “Xi-cc-plus.” It flashes in and out of existence in less than the blink of an eye, but just knowing that it exists — and knowing how massive it is — could give physicists a more solid sense of how matter is put together.

Continue reading “CERN adds a new particle to subatomic menagerie”
Categories
Universe Today

America’s particle physics plan gets a status update

Illustration with subatomic particles and galaxy bubbles
Physics experiments address mysteries at subatomic and astronomical levels. (Illustration by Olena Shmahalo for U.S. Particle Physics)

RALEIGH, N.C. — Particle physicist Hitoshi Murayama admits that he used to worry about being known as the “most hated man” in his field of science. But the good news is that now he can joke about it.

Last year, the Berkeley professor chaired the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, or P5, which drew up a list of multimillion-dollar physics experiments that should move ahead over the next 10 years. The list focused on phenomena ranging from subatomic smash-ups to cosmic inflation. At the same time, the panel also had to decide which projects would have to be left behind for budgetary reasons, which could have turned Murayama into the Dr. No of physics.

Although Murayama has some regrets about the projects that were put off, he’s satisfied with how the process turned out. Now he’s just hoping that the federal government will follow through on the P5’s top priorities.

Continue reading “America’s particle physics plan gets a status update”
Categories
Fiction Science Club

Why scientists are mesmerized by the multiverse

Illustration: Visualization of our universe in the multiverse
An artist's conception shows our cosmos amid other universes in the multiverse. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / R. Hurt (IPAC)

The multiverse may be a cool (and convenient) concept for comic books and superhero movies, but why do scientists take it seriously?

In a new book titled “The Allure of the Multiverse,” physicist Paul Halpern traces why many theorists have come to believe that longstanding scientific puzzles can be solved only if they allow for the existence of other universes outside our own — even if they have no firm evidence for such realms.

It’s easy to confuse the hypotheses with the hype, but Halpern says there’s a huge difference between the multiverse that physicists propose and the mystical realm that’s portrayed in movies like “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.”

“Some people accuse scientists of trying to delve into science fiction if they even mention the multiverse,” Halpern says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “But the type of science that people are doing when they talk about the multiverse is real science. It’s far-reaching science, but it’s real science. Scientists are not saying, ‘Hey, maybe we can meet another Spider-Man and attack Kingpin that way.'”

Continue reading “Why scientists are mesmerized by the multiverse”
Categories
Fiction Science Club

‘Her Space, Her Time’ reveals hidden figures of physics

Sepia-tone photos of Leavitt, Payne-Gaposchkin, Rubin and Alexander
These are four of the women scientists profiled in "Her Space, Her Time": Henrietta Leavitt, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, Vera Rubin and Claudia Alexander. (Credits: Wikimedia; Smithsonian Institution; Rubin photo by Mark Godfrey, courtesy of AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives; NASA)

Quick: Name a woman scientist.

Chances are the name you came up with is Marie Curie, the physicist and chemist who won two Nobel Prizes more than a century ago for the discoveries she and her husband Pierre made about radioactivity.

But who else? In a new book titled “Her Space, Her Time,” quantum physicist Shohini Ghose explains why women astronomers and physicists have been mostly invisible in the past — and profiles 20 researchers who lost out on what should have been Nobel-level fame.

“This issue around having low representation of women in physics is something that’s common all around the world,” Ghose says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “And I’ve certainly faced it in my own experiences as a physicist growing up. I really didn’t know of any woman physicist apart from Marie Curie.”

Continue reading “‘Her Space, Her Time’ reveals hidden figures of physics”
Categories
GeekWire

Scientists find evidence of a gravitational wave ‘hum’

Illustration: Ripples in spacetime caused by gravitational waves
Scientists monitor how ripples in spacetime affect the timing of signals from pulsars. (Credit: Aurore Simonnet for NANOGrav Collaboration)

Astrophysicists have found the best evidence yet for a low-frequency “hum” of gravitational waves rippling through the cosmos, based on 15 years’ worth of ultra-precise measurements checking the timing of radio pulses from distant stars.

The evidence, newly published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, comes from several teams of researchers working in the U.S. and Canada as well as Europe, India, Australia and China.

The teams monitored radio emissions from a total of 115 ultra-dense, spinning stars known as pulsars. Nearly 70 of those pulsars were observed by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, known as NANOGrav.

“This is key evidence for gravitational waves at very low frequencies,” Vanderbilt University’s Stephen Taylor, who co-led the search and is the current chair of the NANOGrav Collaboration, said today in a news release. “After years of work, NANOGrav is opening an entirely new window on the gravitational-wave universe.”

Get the full story on GeekWire
Categories
GeekWire

Gravitational-wave sleuths look for more cosmic crashes

Specialist checks beam alignment at LIGO
A specialist checks the alignment of a test beam at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory. (NSF Photo)

After three years of upgrading and waiting, due in part to the coronavirus pandemic, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory has officially resumed its hunt for the signatures of crashing black holes and neutron stars.

“Our LIGO teams have worked through hardship during the past two-plus years to be ready for this moment, and we are indeed ready,” Caltech physicist Albert Lazzarini, the deputy director of the LIGO Laboratory, said in a news release.

Lazzarini said the engineering tests leading up to today’s official start of Observing Run 4, or O4, have already revealed a number of candidate events that have been shared with the astronomical community.

“Most of these involve black hole binary systems, although one may include a neutron star,” he said. “The rates appear to be consistent with expectations.”

One such event, called S230518h, was detected last week. Researchers say that if they can confirm the data, the event was most likely caused by the merger of a faraway black hole and a neutron star.

The twin LIGO gravitational-wave detectors at Hanford, Wash., and Livingston, La., will be joined for O4 by the Virgo detector in Italy as well as the KAGRA observatory in Japan. Virgo is scheduled to take part in the run starting later this year. KAGRA will parallel LIGO’s observations for the next month, take a break for some upgrades, and then rejoin the run.

Get the full story on GeekWire
Categories
Fiction Science Club

How quantum tech could change everything everywhere

Illustration combining 1660 star atlas and picture of quantum computing hardware
Quantum computing could change our perspective on the cosmos. (Illustration: Harmonia Macrocosmica, 1660 / Microsoft, 2022)

What does quantum computing have in common with the Oscar-winning movie “Everything Everywhere All at Once”? One is a mind-blowing work of fiction, while the other is an emerging frontier in computer science — but both of them deal with rearrangements of particles in superposition that don’t match our usual view of reality.

Fortunately, theoretical physicist Michio Kaku has provided a guidebook to the real-life frontier, titled “Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything.”

“We’re talking about the next generation of computers that are going to replace digital computers,” Kaku says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “Today, for example, we don’t use the abacus anymore in Asia. … In the future, we’ll view digital computers like we view the abacus: old-fashioned, obsolete. This is for the garbage can. That’s how the future is going to evolve.”

Continue reading “How quantum tech could change everything everywhere”
Categories
Fiction Science Club

Get a reality check on supersized quantum mania

Multiple Ant-Men in scene from "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania"
Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) faces proliferating quantum timelines in "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania." (Marvel Studios via Cedric Dumler / IMDB)

Ant-Man may be getting small in Marvel’s latest superhero movie — but in the real world, quantum is getting big.

Quantum information science is one of the top tech priorities for the White House, right up there with artificial intelligence. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM and other tech heavyweights are closing in on the development of honest-to-goodness quantum processors. A company called IonQ has a billion-dollar plan to build quantum computers in the Pacific Northwest. The market for quantum computing is projected to hit $125 billion by 2030.

So you might think “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” will be going all-out to feature real-life advances in quantum physics.

If that’s what you’re expecting from the movie, think again. “There’s no connection to real physics, or our understanding of reality,” says Chris Ferrie, a quantum physicist at the University of Technology Sydney and the UTS Center for Quantum Software and Information.

Ferrie should know, and not just because he has a Ph.D.: His latest book, titled “Quantum Bullsh*t,” colorfully catalogs all the ways in which popular depictions of quantum physics go wrong. In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Ferrie explains why those depictions tend to focus on the B.S. rather than the theory’s brilliance.

“The reality .. that quantum physics is a tool for engineers to make predictions about their experiments … is really boring,” he says.

Continue reading “Get a reality check on supersized quantum mania”