7 June 2012Alongside a story on muons—the short-lived cousins of the electron— symmetry magazine in its June 2012 issue features a silent movie about the Standard Model of Particle Physics. See quarks dancing, the Higgs entering the scene and get your own answer to the question mark at the end!
Category: Feature | Tagged: muon, Standard Model
Rika Takahashi | 31 May 2012Close to 80 scientists gathered at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan for the ILD workshop held from 23 to 25 May. The workshop also drew interest from Japanese media, who attended press briefing and the tour around "the south site" for the ILC.
Category: Feature | Tagged: candidate sites, ILD, Japan
Barbara Warmbein | 10 May 2012Five shafts, pacmen shields and moving platforms: the design for the hall in which the ILC detectors will sit, be pushed and pulled, record data, get upgrades and maintenance is now final, at least for an ILC that is not built underneath mountains.
Category: Feature | Tagged: cavern, CFS, detector R&D, ILD, interaction region, SiD
3 May 2012Empty space is anything but. Remove everything you can from an area of space and it will still bustle with activity. A veritable abundance of particles and all-pervasive fields fill space with energy. Empty space even weighs something. Indeed, studying ‘nothing’ can tell us almost everything about the universe we live in. Learn more about the relationship between vacuum and “virtual” particles, the Higgs boson, supersymmetry and dark energy
Category: Feature | Tagged: Higgs boson, LHC, supersymmetry
5 April 2012While people often grasp only a fraction of the physics at stake, they easily recognise the full extent of the human undertaking. Particle-physics experiments and accelerators are, indeed, miracles of technology and major examples of worldwide co-operation and on-site teamwork.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CLIC, ILC
Leah Hesla | 1 March 2012We don’t usually notice all three dimensions of a semiconductor chip. We note the intricate, maze-like circuitry imprinted onto one side or its reflective sensor surface. Rarely is attention paid to its depth, mostly because chips have so little of it. In the last five to ten years, the particle detector community has been working with the semiconductor industry to develop sensors’ minuscule depths to create technology with integrated functionalities that could be used in fields outside particle physics.
Category: Feature | Tagged: detector activities, detector R&D, monolithic active pixel sensors, pixel sensors
23 February 2012Meetings for the International Linear Collider Steering Committee and the International Committee for Future Accelerators recently took place in Oxford, England. One of the principal issues discussed at both meetings was a new organisation for the worldwide linear collider effort.
Category: Feature | Tagged: future colliders, ICFA, ILCSC
Perrine Royole-Degieux | 16 February 2012The international community of theorists and experimentalists working on ILC and CLIC is convinced of the strong physics case for a generic linear collider. More than one hundred of them gathered at DESY last week for three days of intense discussions and review of the different physics scenarios. Two papers are now under way and will be finalised by this summer. In the meantime the input from the whole particle physics community will be very welcome.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CLIC, DESY, European Strategy for Particle Physics, lc forum, physics case
Leah Hesla | 9 February 2012Designing a 1-TeV upgrade of the ILC requires a suitable particle beam to go along with it. Scientists recently decided on the shape of the 1-TeV beam, and it has a shifted waist.
Category: Feature | Tagged: 1 TeV, beam size
