FCC Week report
The 2018 FCC Week, jointly organised by CERN, NIKHEF and the University of Twente, brought together about 500 scientists and engineers in Amsterdam to review the progress in the various domains of the study.
The LHCb experiment is charmed to announce observation of a new particle
Geneva, 6 July 2017. Today at the EPS Conference on High Energy Physics in Venice, the LHCb experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has reported the observation of Ξcc++ (Xicc++) a new particle containing two charm quarks and one up quark. The existence of this particle from the baryon family was expected by current theories, but physicists have been looking for such baryons with two heavy quarks for many years. The mass of the newly identified particle is about 3621 MeV, which is almost four times heavier than the most familiar baryon, the proton, a property that arises from its doubly charmed quark content. It is the first time that such a particle has been unambiguously detected.
Editorial – The Roadmap 2016 of the European Strategic Forum for Research Infrastructures (ESFRI)
From the launch event on September 25th 2014 in Trieste (IT) to the presentation of the Roadmap 2016 on March 1oth in Amsterdam (NL), ESFRI has carried out an important refinement of its method and has produced a new strategy document identifying new projects and consolidated landmarks as well as a thorough analysis of the European Landscape of Research Infrastructures accessible to European scientists and developers.
Particles are back in the LHC
On Friday, the LHC opened its doors to allow particles to travel around the ring for the first time since the year-end technical stop (YETS) began in December 2015. At 10:30 a.m., a first bunch was circulating and by midday the beam was circulating in both directions. Progress over the weekend has been good and low intensity beam has already been taken to 6.5 TeV and through the squeeze.
The LHC is waking up
Many theories consider sleeping as a boost in human performance. This is exactly what is happening at the LHC at CERN. After almost 2 years of silent signal, sections of the LHC are reactivated one by one with upgraded performance. The wake-up period will last for the next few months until the 13 TeV physics programme can fully begin in 2015.
Even if no data measurements are currently underway in the LHC, many things have happened during the 18-month shutdown that began in 2013. Indeed, major upgrades have been undertaken, in particular regarding the proton synchrotron and the super proton synchrotron. Incredible efforts have been deployed to upgrade…
FCC and more after LHC
Particle physics takes the long-term view. Originally conceived in the 1980s, the LHC took another 25 years to come into being. This accelerator, which is unlike any other, is just at the start of a longer programme, which is expected to run for another 20 years.
Even now, plans are being hatched for a large-scale upgrade to increase luminosity and thereby exploit the LHC to its full potential. The high luminosity LHC is CERN’s number-one priority and will increase the number of collisions accumulated in the experiments by a factor of 10 from 2024 onwards…
SIF Fermi Prize for decisive contribution to LHC discoveries
The 2013 Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society [SIF] has been awarded to Pierluigi Campana (INFN Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati), Simone Giani (CERN), Fabiola Gianotti (CERN), Paolo Giubellino (INFN Torino) and Guido Tonelli (Università di Pisa and INFN Pisa), “for the outstanding results that the five large international collaboration experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider [LHC] – LHCb, TOTEM, ATLAS, ALICE, CMS – have achieved during the first period of LHC data taking under the successful guidance of the…
International Master classes in Particle Physics
Master classes are a unique opportunity for high-school students, where they can hunt particles at the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] and analyse real data from the experiments. Each year, in spring, research institutes and universities around the world open their doors and invite students for daylong visits. This year’s International Master classes were organized in March, under the auspices of the International Particle Physics Outreach Groups [IPPOG], and attracted more than 10 000 students.In the Master class, students gained insight into the international organization of modern research in…
LHC stops … to regenerate more powerful!
2012 was quite a year for the CERN Large Hadron Collider [LHC]! A year of fundamental achievements both in physics and technology, successfully marking the end of the first 3 years period of data taking of LHC. A two years technical stop is now foreseen to allow improvements that will not only permit the machine to reach its full design energy (7 TeV per beam) and increased luminosity, but also allow the experiments to reach their utmost performance.
So far the LHC has been making continuous progress, exceeding the more optimistic luminosity goals and beam…
Lead ions and protons colliding for first time in LHC
The LHC saw its first collisions of lead ions with protons on 13 September. The largest experiments – ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb – all recorded lead ion-proton collisions in this test, which precedes the main run planned for January-February next year.
For more information, please visit the CERN website.
Higgs? CERN sees new particle consistent with elusive boson
CERN’s ATLAS and CMS experiments have observed a new particle – consistent with the elusive Higgs boson – in the mass region around 125-126 GeV/c2, it was announced during a seminar at the Swiss-based laboratory on 4 July.
“The five sigma signal – at around 125 GeV – we’re seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found,” said CMS experiment spokesperson Joe Incandela. “The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies…
Primordial QCD Matter in the LHC Era
The “Primordial QCD Matter in the LHC Era: implications of QCD results in the early universe” conference is being held in Cairo, Egypt on 10-14 February 2013.
The event – the second in this series – aims to bring together cosmologists and particle physicists to discussion QCD matter in the light of recent discoveries from the Large Hadron Collider [LHC].
Topics under discussion at the event will include: astrophysical observations and ultra-high energy cosmic rays…
