LHC discovers black rings

Now that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has increased its energy level to 3.5TeV (3.5 Tera electron Volts = 3,500 Giga electron Volts = 3,500,000 Mega electron Volts) new physics is starting to emerge.

Normally there is agreement not to release findings too early, as this is very much a team sport, and papers are published with hundreds if not thousands of physicists names attached. In fact the first paper published last year from an LHC collaboration had 20 pages just listing the authors.

However, a recent joiner with their PhD still fresh, emailed a friend with some exciting news about the discovery of Black Rings – obviously not realizing that such would soon become public.

Well apparently they had recorded 97 double collisions in the CMS experiment, where the second collision happened within a few picoseconds of the first. This meant that particles ejected from the second interacted with products of the previous collision. Initial analysis was very puzzling, as some anomalous tracks were discovered. Fortunately a brilliant theoretical Nuclear Physicist from Estonia, Prof. Selrahc Nivag, found a possible explanation, a Black Ring.

A Black Ring is a theoretical possibility when an intense gravitational field interacts with strange quarks. Now quarks are normally bound up with others and not seen by themselves. The first collision generated hadrons containing strange quarks, the second collision generated transient super dense collection of protons and neutrons (a hyper nucleus) with a high quantum spin number, and their interaction created a transient Black Ring which lasted less than a microsecond.

About 34 of the 97 double collisions gave anomalous results tentatively identified with Black Rings. Theoretical predictions suggest that for collisions of this type, after allowing for variations in the precise details of the actual double collisions, would generate 31 such events – not bad correlation, considering the accuracy of the measurements, and within the expected margin of experimental error.

A Black Ring is predicted to decay in a flash of gamma radiation with several particles flying out in the same plane as the ring. Additionally, in 3 of the Black Ring events, later particles were seen going through the centre of the Black Ring – identified by particle tracks ending abruptly where the Black Ring was, and having continuation tracks indicating they had been converted to their anti-matter counter parts (the surrounding magnetic field caused the tracks to curve in opposite directions, due to the abrupt change in the sign of the charged particles).

This interpretation is still highly speculative, as the significance is only at the level of 2 standard deviations, and physicists prefer to get enough data for it to be valid at at least 7 standard deviations.

So no Black Holes, just a few Black Rings – maybe.

The Large Hadron Collider will restart soon at 7 TeV

The Large Hadron Collider, otherwise known as the LHC, is designed to hurl protons and nuclei of atoms together a phenomenally high speeds extremely close to the speed of light.

The LHC has 2 beams going in opposite directions around an oval of about 27 kilometres, at specified pints, where experiments like ATLAS and CMS are located, they cross and collisions may occur.

These collisions are at an energy high enough that particles are created from the interaction of the colliding protons and neutrons. Most of the particles detected from these collisions are known, but physicists are still interested in how they behave at the energies achieved in the LHC, but the most sought after prize is the Higgs Boson - along with possibility of finding other particles predicted, but not yet observed.

Theoretical nuclear physicists can not account for why the sub atomic particles, that we have already detected so far, have mass. So Peter Higgs, along with others, postulated a totally new type of particle, now called the Higgs Boson, that appears to neatly resolve the problem.

Some other physicists, think that the Higgs Boson does not exist, and there must be some other mechanism to account for mass. However, most physicists feel that searching for the Higgs is worthwhile, as it is important to find evidence of it either definitely existing or not existing, as the case may be. The existence of the Higgs would confirm our understanding of the so called standard model of nuclear particles and allow our understanding of it to be extended to higher energies, or force physicists to reconsider the standard model in a very fundamental way.

Also of considerable interest: would be new types of particles not predicted, and new ways of matter behaving at the super high temperatures found in the collisions of nuclear particles at the LHC.

The LHC had been designed to run at 10 TeV (10,000,000,000,000 electron volts, as distinct from the maximum energy possible in the average New Zealand home of 240 volts), but due to technical problems they will run at 7 TeV. The LHC will be run at this energy for 18 to 24 months to get a decent amount of physics done and to get more experience of operating the system, plus it gives more time to prepare what is required to operate at the design energy of 10 TeV.

Note that the LHC is run at about 270 degrees Celsius below the freezing point of water, or less than 2 degrees above absolute zero. So another reason for the long period at just one energy level of 7 TeV, is that while there are improvements they can make to increase the energy in stages to 10 TeV, is that simply warming the LHC up to room temperature and cooling it down again takes at least 2 months, in addition to the time required to make the actual engineering modifications and subsequent testing.

It is expected that the LHC will restart operations in the few days about the level it finished last year of about 1 TeV and ramp up over a few week to 7 TeV. They want to avoid any mishaps that might put the LHC out of commission, like what happened shortly after they started up the first time when they had an explosion that forced a delay of a year while they fixed the problem.

Physicists from all around the world are hard at work preparing to do some exciting new physics at the LHC, including some people from New Zealand.

White Blood Cell Chases Bacteria

Here is an excellent video, and at the end it gives a chance to look at more videos that give further glimpses into what is happening at the microscopic level of life.

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+.
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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.
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Be sure to also look at part 1 of the article, Inside the tangled world of string theory!

The interactive scale of the Universe

This article from Bad Astronomy (actually a very good website, its name came from Phil's desire debunk the bad astronomy found in hoax sites) links to a very useful interactive demonstration of the relative size of things in the Universe from far smaller than an atom, to the size of the known universe.

It will be very usefully in getting a handle on the relative size of things, plus get an understanding of modern physics and astronomy, with the size of biological things somewhere in the "middle" of the size scale.

Thorium is a much safer more efficient reactor fuel than Uranium

The main reason all current commercial and military nuclear reactors use Uranium, is because the US government wanted to produce lots of Plutonium for nuclear weapons. Now that the infrastructure and perceptions of many people are fixated on Uranium, and hence there is a huge commercial and political inertia against moving towards a Thorium energy program.

Thorium as a fuel is a lot less expensive to refine and manufacture for use in nuclear reactors than Uranium, by several orders of magnitude. Plus the Thorium reactors are intrinsically much safer, as there is no chance of a Chernobyl style incident using Thorium.

Using Thorium largely eliminates the problems of radioactive waste (compared to Uranium), and totally eliminates the worry that such reactors could lead to increased availability of weapons grade Plutonium.

I think that if nuclear reactors had been based on using Thorium, rather than Uranium and there had been less emphasis on Nuclear weaponry, then New Zealand would have been much less anti-nuclear.

The article itself goes into much more depth, and also gives some useful additional background:
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When Sorensen and his pals began delving into this history, they discovered not only an alternative fuel but also the design for the alternative reactor. Using that template, the Energy From Thorium team helped produce a design for a new liquid fluoride thorium reactor, or LFTR (pronounced “lifter”), which, according to estimates by Sorensen and others, would be some 50 percent more efficient than today’s light-water uranium reactors. If the US reactor fleet could be converted to LFTRs overnight, existing thorium reserves would power the US for a thousand years.

Overseas, the nuclear power establishment is getting the message. In France, which already generates more than 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, the Laboratoire de Physique Subatomique et de Cosmologie has been building models of variations of Weinberg’s design for molten salt reactors to see if they can be made to work efficiently. The real action, though, is in India and China, both of which need to satisfy an immense and growing demand for electricity. The world’s largest source of thorium, India, doesn’t have any commercial thorium reactors yet. But it has announced plans to increase its nuclear power capacity: Nuclear energy now accounts for 9 percent of India’s total energy; the government expects that by 2050 it will be 25 percent, with thorium generating a large part of that. China plans to build dozens of nuclear reactors in the coming decade, and it hosted a major thorium conference last October. The People’s Republic recently ordered mineral refiners to reserve the thorium they produce so it can be used to generate nuclear power.
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Sailing the Seas of Titan

There are shades of Hal Clement's Science Fiction (SciFi) novel "Mission of Gravity", where aliens are employed by Earth's scientists to investigate a fast spinning super Jupiter type planet in sailing ships. However, this article about a nautical craft for Saturn's moon Titan, is a real proposed scientific project, although no aliens are involved as crew members!
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The first interplanetary nautical craft may be a boat to explore the methane seas of Titan. A proposed mission to Titan would explore some of its largest seas, including Ligeia Mare (pictured) or the Kraken Mare, both of which are in the northern hemisphere of the foggy moon of Saturn. The concept has been studied for over two years by scientific team led by Ellen Stofan of Proxemy Research, Inc. in Washington DC, and has recently been submitted to NASA.
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