LHC beautiful diagrams of Quark 'atoms'

In the 6 September 2010: Beautiful atoms entry of the LHCb experiment web site, they have some wonderful diagrams showing how they found 'atoms' of Beauty and anti-Beauty quarks. They show how the experimental results can be mapped to the transitions where the 2 quarks drop from higher to lower energy orbitals, just like as in an Hydrogen atom.

In other news: the actual number of protons in the LHC beam is now about a millions times more than when they started this year!

Age no barrier to being productive in Theoretical Physics

Edward & Nappi are 2 Theoretical Physicists married to each other, talking about where advances are most likely to be made in their field (part 2 of 2 of the article). Note that Ed's wife is confident that they can both still contribute effectively, despite being 50+.
[...]
He reckons the most influential insights in string theory will come from the younger generation, but Nappi isn't so sure. She cites a recent study showing that scientists in their 50s and 60s are at least as productive as those in their 30s, if not more so. "We are planning to get a lot more work done now that the children have moved out," she says. It's a fearsome prospect: Ed Witten might just be entering his prime.
[...]
Be sure to also look at part 1 of the article, Inside the tangled world of string theory!

A Physical Marriage

Well, think of a better title for 2 Theoretical Nuclear Physicists who married each other, and who collaborate in the same line of work!

This is the blog of the wife, Nicole. Who says:
[...]
I always knew I wanted to be a scientist. I just had a hard time deciding what kind of science to do, because it all seemed so interesting. After a love affair with chemistry and a flirtation with computer science in high school, I finally settled for physics, as the most fundamental of the natural sciences.
[...]
I am married to another theoretical physicist. We both work at IPMU and write our papers together.
[...]

LHC restarts!

Probably the most exciting thing happening now in Science, is the restart of the Large Hadron Collider (commonly referred to as the LHC)! A massive explosion required about a year to fix, and to re-engineer to try and prevent such a problem happening again - those events, and the current status are documented.

The LHC is an enormous apparatus that is mostly a ring 27 kilometres in circumference half in France and half in Switzerland, designed to smash together the nuclei of atoms to produce as yet undetected elementary particles.

The ring has 8 major experimental stations such as the CMS and ATLAS experiments, that are 'sort of' general purpose detectors with different characteristics, each weighing over ten thousand tonnes.

The Director of the LHC, Steve Myers, paid tribute to the huge amount of dedicated team work involved.

They are starting at relatively low energies, as they need to carefully bring the machine up to its design level. So at the moment they can only see the types of particle they already know about.

At full strength they hope to detect the particle that a lot of physicists think is responsible for why other particles, such as the proton and electron have mass. This particle is called the Higgs Boson, named after Peter Higgs. If they don't find it, and can demonstrate it does not exist at the energies that the LHC can reach, then this is also interesting as it will lead to new physics.

Apart from the Higgs Boson, there is a potential doubling of the number of particles needed to explain the world according to the Super Symmetric Theory (affectionately known as SUSY), these are expected to discovered by the LHC. Plus there is the 'expected unexpected' discoveries.

Some good URL's to look at are:

Pretty pictures of the LHC
Physicists blogging
Official LHC website
Unofficial LHC webisite
LHC on Twitter
Collision events as they happen at the CMS experiment