The "heart" of the STAR detector at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is the Time Projection Chamber, which tracks and identifies particles emerging from ion collisions.
Subtle Signs of Fluctuations in Critical Point Search
Physicists analyzing data from gold ion smashups at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility for nuclear physics research at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, are searching for evidence that nails down a so-called critical point in the way nuclear matter changes from one phase to another.
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Candidate events from ATLAS (left) and CMS (right) for a Higgs boson decaying into a Z boson and a photon, with the Z boson decaying into a pair of muons. (Image: CERN)
LHC experiments see first evidence of a rare Higgs boson decay
The discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012 marked a significant milestone in particle physics. Since then, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations have been diligently investigating the properties of this unique particle and searching to establish the different ways in which it is produced and decays into other particles.
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Neutron stars are compact objects formed when massive stars collapse at the end of their lives. Tracking how hypernuclei flow collectively in high-energy heavy ion collisions could help scientists learn about hyperon-nucleon interactions in the nuclear medium and understand the inner structure of neutron stars.
First Measurements of Hypernuclei Flow at RHIC
Physicists studying particle collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) have published the first observation of directed flow of hypernuclei. These short-lived, rare nuclei contain at least one “hyperon” in addition to ordinary protons and neutrons. Hyperons contain at least one “strange” quark in place of one of the up or down quarks that make up ordinary nucleons (the collective name for protons and neutrons). Such strange matter is thought to be abundant in the hearts of neutron stars, which are among the densest, most exotic objects in the universe. While blasting off to neutron stars to study this exotic matter is still the stuff of science fiction, particle collisions could give scientists insight into these celestial objects from a laboratory right here on Earth.
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The ISOLDE facility seen from above (Image: CERN)
ISOLDE takes a solid tick forward towards a nuclear clock
Atomic clocks are the world’s most precise timekeepers. Based on periodic transitions between two electronic states of an atom, they can track the passage of time with a precision as high as one part in a quintillion, meaning that they won’t lose or gain a second over 30 billion years – more than twice the age of the Universe.
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Magnet row of the ALPS experiment in the HERA tunnel: In this part of the magnets, intense laser light is reflected back and forth, from which axions are supposed to form. Photo: DESY, Marta Mayer
‘Light shining through a wall’ experiment ALPS starts searching for dark matter
The world’s most sensitive model-independent experiment to search for particularly light particles, of which dark matter might be composed, starts today at DESY in the form of the ‘light shining through a wall’ experiment ALPS II. Scientific calculations predict that this ominous form of matter should occur five times as often in the universe as normal, visible matter. Until now, however, no one has been able to identify particles of this substance; the ALPS experiment could now furnish such evidence.
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JoAnne Hewett (Photo courtesy of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)
JoAnne Hewett Named Director of Brookhaven National Laboratory
The Board of Directors of Brookhaven Science Associates (BSA) has named theoretical physicist JoAnne Hewett as the next director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and BSA president. BSA, a partnership between Stony Brook University (SBU) and Battelle, manages and operates Brookhaven Lab for DOE’s Office of Science. Hewett will also hold the title of professor in SBU’s Department of Physics and Astronomy and professor at SBU’s C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics.
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Event display of a W-boson candidate decaying into a muon and a muon neutrino inside the ATLAS experiment. The blue line shows the reconstructed track of the muon, and the red arrow denotes the energy of the undetected muon neutrino (Image: CERN)
Improved ATLAS result weighs in on the W boson
The W boson, a fundamental particle that carries the charged weak force, is the subject of a new precision measurement of its mass by the ATLAS experiment at CERN. The preliminary result, reported in a new conference note presented today at the Rencontres de Moriond conference, is based on a reanalysis of a sample of 14 million W boson candidates produced in proton–proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN’s flagship particle accelerator.
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First WIMP Search Results from the XENONnT Experiment
The XENON collaboration presented today results from XENONnT, the latest-generation experiment of the XENON Dark Matter project dedicated to the direct search for Dark Matter in the form of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). With an initial exposure slightly larger than 1 tonne x year, a blind analysis shows that the data is consistent with the expectations from the background-only hypothesis.
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Scientists used the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) to track how upsilon particles dissociate in quark-gluon plasma. These upsilons are made of a bottom quark and antibottom quark held together by gluons with different binding energies: a tightly bound ground state (left), an intermediate variety (right), and the largest, most loosely bound state (center).
STAR Physicists Track Sequential 'Melting' of Upsilons
Scientists using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) to study some of the hottest matter ever created in a laboratory have published their first data showing how three distinct variations of particles called upsilons sequentially “melt,” or dissociate, in the hot goo. The results, just published in Physical Review Letters, come from RHIC’s STAR detector, one of two large particle tracking experiments at this U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility for nuclear physics research.
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Scientists used the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) to systematically search through data from collisions at different energies, looking for signs that the production of quark-gluon plasma turns off. That sign shows up as a sign change in data on net proton production at the lowest collision energy.
Clear Sign that QGP Production 'Turns Off' at Low Energy
Physicists report new evidence that production of an exotic state of matter in collisions of gold nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)—an atom-smasher at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory—can be “turned off” by lowering the collision energy. The “off” signal shows up as a sign change—from negative to positive—in data that describe “higher order” characteristics of the distribution of protons produced in these collisions.
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Click here to view the CERN symposium livestream on 4 July!