A communication resource from the world's particle physics laboratories.
Illustration of a tetraquark composed of two charm quarks and two charm antiquarks, detected for the first time by the LHCb collaboration at CERN. (Image: CERN)
The LHCb collaboration has observed a type of four-quark particle never seen before. The discovery, presented at a recent seminar at CERN and described in a paper posted today on the arXiv preprint server, is likely to be the first of a previously undiscovered class of particles.
Fig. 1 The instantaneous luminosity of SuperKEKB measured at 5-minute intervals from Fall 2019 to June 22, 2020. Values are on-line measurements and contain an approximate 1% error.
Japan’s High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) has been steadily improving the performance of its flagship electron-positron collider, SuperKEKB, since it produced its first electron-positron collisions in April 2018. At 20:34 on 15th June 2020, SuperKEKB achieved the world’s highest instantaneous luminosity for a colliding-beam accelerator, setting a record.
Following almost two years of discussion and deliberation, the CERN Council today announced that it has updated the strategy that will guide the future of particle physics in Europe within the global particle-physics landscape. Presented during the open part of the Council’s meeting, held remotely due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the recommendations highlight the scientific impact of particle physics, as well as its technological, societal and human capital.
Jüri Ratas, Estonia’s Prime Minister, live from Tallinn and Fabiola Gianotti, CERN Director-General, at the signature ceremony. (Image: CERN)
Today, the representatives of CERN and of the Government of Estonia signed an Agreement admitting Estonia as an Associate Member in the Pre-Stage to Membership of CERN. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the signing ceremony took place via a live feed between Geneva and Tallinn, a first in the 66- year history of CERN.
Composite images of the galaxy Centaurus A in different wavelength ranges from submillimetre to X-rays. Credit: ESO/WFI (Optical); MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al. (Submillimetre); NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al. (X-ray) CC BY 4.0
An international collaboration bringing together over 200 scientists from 13 countries has shown that the very high-energy gamma-ray emission from quasars, galaxies with a highly energetic nucleus, is not concentrated in the region close to their central black hole but in fact extends over several thousand light-years along jets of plasma. This discovery shakes up current scenarios for the behaviour of such plasma jets. The work, published in the journal Nature on June 18th, 2020, was carried out as part of the H.E.S.S collaboration, involving in particular the CNRS and CEA in France, and the Max Planck society, DESY and a group of research institutions and universities in Germany.
The XENON1T TPC, during its installation inside the clean room in the Water Tank. At the bottom, one can see the 121 (out of 248 total) photosensors used to detect light signals of particles interacting in the xenon target. Credit: XENON Collaboration
Scientists from the international XENON collaboration announced today that data from their XENON1T, the world’s most sensitive dark matter experiment, show a surprising excess of events. The scientists do not claim to have found dark matter. Instead, they say to have observed an unexpected rate of events, the source of which is not yet fully understood.
CERN Beamline for Schools 2020 winners (Above) Team ChDR Cheese from the Werner-von-Siemens-Gymnasium in Berlin, Germany. (Below) Team Nations' Flying Foxes from the International School of Geneva, Switzerland.
Two teams of high-school students, one from the International School of Geneva, Campus des Nations, Switzerland, and one from the Werner-von-Siemens-Gymnasium in Berlin, Germany, have won the 2020 Beamline for Schools competition.
(Left) CMS event display of a candidate event in which two W bosons and one Z boson are produced and decay into three electrons and a muon. (Right) ATLAS event display of a candidate event in which two Z bosons are produced, along with two jets. The Z bosons subsequently decay into two electrons and two muons. (Image: CERN)
At the LHCP conference this year, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations presented new results relating to a physics process called vector boson scattering.
Collision events recorded by ATLAS (left) and CMS (right), used in the search for rare Higgs boson transformations (Image: CERN)
The ATLAS and CMS collaborations presented their latest results on new signatures for detecting the Higgs boson at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.
The Xc1(3872) hadron, which contains charm quarks, could be a pair of two-quark particles loosely bound together. (Image: CERN)
The ALICE, CMS and LHCb collaborations present new measurements that show how particles containing charm quarks can serve as “messengers” of hadrons and the quark–gluon plasma, carrying information about these forms of matter
A view of the underground ALICE detector used in the study of the antideuteron (Image: CERN)
The study of light antinuclei – from creation to annihilation – will bolster future indirect dark matter searches
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The Collinear Resonance Ionisation Spectroscopy (CRIS) setup at CERN’s nuclear-physics facility ISOLDE. (Image: CERN)
The result represents an essential step towards using these molecules for fundamental physics research and beyond
Creation of a pionic helium atom: a pion replaces one of the two electrons in a normal helium atom to form pionic helium. A resonant laser then induces a quantum jump of the pion from one orbit of the pionic helium atom to another. This leads to nuclear break-up which permits direct detection of the pionic helium atom. (Image: Diagram by the ASACUSA collaboration of CERN)
Further studies could be used to test the Standard Model of particle physics.
A typical diagrammatic representation of the hadronic light-by-light scattering contribution with Argonne's Mira supercomputer in the background. Photo courtesy of Luchang Jin, University of Connecticut
For two decades, physicists have been trying to reconcile a gap between theoretical and experimental data on a particle called the muon. A new study, powered by Argonne Lab's supercomputer Mira, sharpens one piece of the puzzle.
Interactions Collaboration Member laboratories are lending their knowledge, technology, and expertise to the global effort against the novel coronavirus, COVID-19. They are analyzing the virus with detectors, helping evaluate data through advanced computing, and even producing personal protective equipment for medical personnel.
Fig.2 Event displays of candidate electron neutrino (left) and electron antineutrino (right) events observed in Super-K from the T2K neutrino beam. When an electron neutrino or antineutrino interacts with water, an electron or positron is produced. They emit a faint ring pattern light, which is detected by about 11,000 photo-sensors. The color in the displays represents the photon detection timing.
Published in Nature, the results are a major step forward in the study of difference between matter and antimatter.
This new magnet reached the highest field strength ever recorded for an accelerator focusing magnet. Designed and built by Fermilab, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, it will be the first niobium-tin quadrupole magnet ever to operate in a particle accelerator — in this case, the future High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Photo: Dan Cheng, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
In a multiyear effort involving three national laboratories from across the United States, researchers have successfully built and tested a powerful new magnet based on an advanced superconducting material. The eight-ton device — about as long as a semi-truck trailer — set a record for the highest field strength ever recorded for an accelerator focusing magnet and raises the standard for magnets operating in high-energy particle colliders.
Inner vertex components of the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (righthand view) allow scientists to trace tracks from triplets of decay particles picked up in the detector's outer regions (left) to their origin in a rare "antihypertriton" particle that decays just outside the collision zone. Measurements of the momentum and known mass of the decay products (a pi+ meson, antiproton, and antideuteron) can then be used to calculate the mass and binding energy of the parent particle. Doing the same for the hypertriton (which decays into different "daughter" particles) allows precision comparisons of these matter and antimatter varieties.
New results from precision particle detectors at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) offer a fresh glimpse of the particle interactions that take place in the cores of neutron stars and give nuclear physicists a new way to search for violations of fundamental symmetries in the universe.
ICFA was encouraged by the reports from Mr. H. Masuko, Deputy-Director General, MEXT Research Promotion Bureau and Hon. T. Kawamura, Chairperson of the Federation of Diet Members for the ILC, at the ICFA meeting held at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford, USA, on the 20th February 2020.
Interactions Collaboration Member laboratories are lending their knowledge, technology, and expertise to the global effort against the novel coronavirus, COVID-19. They are analyzing the virus with detectors, helping evaluate data through advanced computing, and even producing personal protective equipment for medical personnel.
-- Symmetry Magazine, Kathryn Jepsen
This year, October 31 was more than just Halloween. It was also the first global celebration of Dark Matter Day. In 25 countries, 11 US states and online, people interacted with scientists, watched demonstrations, viewed films, took in art exhibits and toured laboratories to learn about the ongoing search for dark matter.
Symmetry has collected a series of photos from participants around the world. Check out how people celebrated Dark Matter Day and download a commemorative dark matter poster (to be printed using visible matter).
This report distills the findings of a series of international peer reviews of the communications and outreach functions of large-scale multidisciplinary science laboratories around the world.