14 April 2011

Analysing data collected in a run of just one month, ALICE has recently found evidence of the formation of four anti-nuclei of Helium 4, the heaviest antimatter ever created in a laboratory.

A fire in the access shaft of the Soudan Mine in Minnesota appears to have caused little damage to the experiments that exploit the shielding from cosmic rays provided by the roughly 714-m-deep Soudan Underground Laboratory.

The find must be more fully confirmed, but researchers at the Tevatron are racing to work through existing data.

Scientists want to use the high gradients produced by the plasma acceleration to build very compact accelerators. Wanting to use the particles from plasma accelerators for experiments and in order to get a good beam quality, the scientists will use a trick. They inject beams with already good properties into the plasma and accelerate them further.