26 May 2011

First results from a major astronomical survey using a cutting-edge technique appear to have confirmed the existence of mysterious dark energy.

“Besides black holes, there’s nothing denser than what we’re creating,” said David Evans, a physicist at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. and a team leader for the LHC’s ALICE detector, which helped observe the quark-gluon plasma. “If you had a cubic centimeter of this stuff, it would weigh 40 billion tons.”

A month ago, the LHC set a record of 10 million collisions per second. “This is now 100 million collisions per second,” Spiro said at a conference in Paris on the “infinitely small and the infinitely big.”

Fermi’s future experiments will focus on creating the greatest number of particles, not necessarily the most energetic ones. Scientists plan to create dense, relatively low-energy beams of neutrinos, little-understood particles that have almost no mass, no electrical charge and other quirky properties.

Discussions are already under way about future upgrades and complementary devices, like a linear collider which would accelerate electrons and their antiparticles, positrons, in a straight line rather than a circle before smashing them head on.