23 November 2011Almost a year of work, more than 50 meetings and plenty of diplomacy went into calculating the LHC experiments’ first combination of Higgs search results. The study, made public on 18 November, eliminates several hints the individual experiments saw in previous analyses but leaves in play the favored mass range for the Higgs boson, between 114 and 141 GeV. ATLAS and CMS ruled out at a 95 percent confidence level a Higgs boson with a mass between 141 and 476 GeV.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Higgs boson, LHC
10 November 2011The most ambitious future application under study is for the International Linear Collider (ILC), a 500 GeV superconducting linear accelerator. It will require 16 km of superconducting cavities operating at gradients of 31.5 MV/m. Intense research is underway to reach a high yield for high gradients: 30–40 MV/m. New vendors for niobium, for cavities and for associated components are being developed around the world.
Category: Feature | Tagged: SRF technology, superconducting cavity
Rika Takahashi | 10 November 2011Few particles get as much attention today as the theorised Higgs boson, which so far has eluded detection. Whatever the outcome of the Large Hadron Collider's search for it - whether it finds a Higgs particle or not - there is still compelling physics that a future collider should explore.
Category: Feature | Tagged: 500 GeV, Higgs boson
27 October 2011Linear collider detector developers inside and outside CERN are tackling the next generation of detector technology. While their focus has centred on high-energy linear collider detectors, their innovative concepts and designs will be applicable to any future detector.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CLIC, detector R&D
Leah Hesla | 20 October 2011Until the Large Hadron Collider tells scientists where in the energy frontier to dig for new physics, ILC researchers are preparing for eventualities. Should new physics be found to reside in a range higher than the ILC’s current reach, scientists have a energy-boosting plan in their back pocket.
Category: Feature | Tagged: 1 TeV, energy upgrade, TDR
Leah Hesla | 13 October 2011Steinar Stapnes has assumed the title of CERN’s Linear Collider Study Leader, a newly configured position that acknowledges a call for cooperation between the ILC and the laboratory’s well established Compact Linear Collider study. His new post requires him to perform a balancing act that involves two collider concepts, roughly a hundred researchers and a finite number of Swiss francs.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CERN, ILC-CLIC
Leah Hesla | 15 September 2011Resolved that pictures of particle jets don’t have to be fuzzy or gnarled, scientists developed the particle flow algorithm, a paradigm for effectively teasing out each particle’s energy from another’s. To make it work, researchers expanded the tracking capabilities of the detector model, enabling it to measure energies with higher precision.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CALICE, calorimetry R&D, detector R&D, particle flow algorithm
