Newsline

Image of the week

I found the Higgs!

by Rika Takahashi

Two little visitors at show off the souvenirs they received at KEK's open house, held on Sunday, 2 September. The girl on the right was very happy to find a "Higgs" in her toy capsule given away at the ILC exhibit. Visitor numbers have increased dramatically from last year's open house, probably due to a special kind of Higgs mechanism that attracts the general public to particle physics.

LCpedia

Beam bunch

by Daisy Yuhas

Particles in a collider aren’t necessarily evenly dispersed along the beam path. Instead they’re often clumped together in bunches with space in between. The series of bunches are sometimes called a bunch train, a pulse, or simply ‘the beam’.

Director's Corner

Updating the European Strategy for Particle Physics

by Barry Barish

The particle physics communities worldwide are undertaking strategic planning processes that will set out the course of the field for the coming years. Recent science results, such as the discovery of the Higgs-like particle and the measurement of a relatively large value of theta13, open up exciting future possibilities. In Europe, the process of developing an update to the European Strategy for Particle Physics is under way. The next major step will be an open symposium in Krakow, Poland, from 10 to 12 September, for which a set of linear-collider input documents has been submitted.

Feature

From CERN Courier: ECLOUD12 sheds light on electron clouds

A recent workshop reviewed the latest experiences with the phenomenon of electron clouds at the LHC and other accelerators. Electron clouds – abundantly generated in accelerator vacuum chambers by residual-gas ionization, photoemission and secondary emission – can affect the operation and performance of hadron and lepton accelerators in a variety of ways. They can induce increases in vacuum pressure, beam instabilities, beam losses, emittance growth, reductions in the beam lifetime or additional heat loads on a (cold) chamber wall.

In the News

  • from ANSA
    5 September 2012
    Le future ‘fabbriche di Higgs’

    Ecco i progetti degli acceleratori che verranno dopo l’Lhc (google translation)

  • from diregiovani.it
    5 September 2012
    Il bosone di Higgs si produrrà in fabbrica

    ROMA – Produrre bosoni di Higgs: per questo in futuro bisognerà impiantare delle vere e proprie fabbriche. Questa filiera produttiva avrà lo scopo di produrre Bosoni per studiare le caratteristiche di queste particelle.

  • from Wired.it
    4 September 2012
    Il futuro della ricerca in fisica dopo il bosone

    Soluzione completamente diversa, ma in uno stadio di progettazione molto più avanzato, è quella di un collisore lineare elettroni-positroni, come l’ International Linear Collider (Ilc). (google translation)

  • from Physics World
    3 September 2012
    Special Report: Japan

    The 19-member committee not only recommended that Japan should take a lead in the design for a collider to study the Higgs boson, such as the International Linear Collider, but also that it should lead on plans to build a large-scale neutrino facility to study charge-parity violations in neutrino oscillations.

  • from BBC
    3 September 2012
    What is the smallest possible thing in the universe?

    Physics has a problem with small things. Or, to be more precise, with infinitely small things.

  • from Discovery News
    31 August 2012
    Two pages that sparked Higgs boson hunt

    Via the In the Dark blog, we are reminded that today (Aug. 31) is the 48th anniversary of the seminal paper in Physical Review Letters by physicist Peter Higgs (“Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons”), in which he first mentioned the possibility of a certain boson that now bears his name.

  • from John Adams Institue for Accelerator Science
    31 August 2012
    John Adams Institute is expanding

    The John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science is expanding, with a new research base at Imperial College London joining two existing centres at Royal Holloway, University of London and the University of Oxford.

  • from Fermilab Today
    30 August 2012
    World-record quality factor achieved at Fermilab

    This month, Grassellino reported a world-record measurement on a 1.3-gigahertz, single-cell niobium cavity heat-treated in a nitrogen-rich atmosphere.