Science’s Evidence of “God Particle” Still Agnostic
The science world was all atwitter last night about today’s announcement from CERN. Had the Higgs boson, the yet-to-be-observed subatomic particle thought by some to endow other particles with mass (prompting the nickname of “God Particle”), fina...
Fast neutrinos, C-P violations, and the shrinking space for the Higgs
It has been a busy week in the world of particle physics, with attention focused on the home of the LHC: CERN. This year, the LHC generated five inverse femtobarns worth of data—nearly half...
More details on the "faster than the speed of light" neutrinos
Last night, in response to a worldwide surge in interest, the OPERA experiment released a paper that describes the experiments that appear to show neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. And today, CERN broadcas......
CERN investigates connections between cosmic rays and clouds
The CLOUD (Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets) project at CERN is using the proton synchrotron at the LHC to investigate the controversial link between cosmic rays and cloud formation. This week Nature contains a p...
Simulate proton smashing with updated LHC@home
Particle physics may be all about finding the unknown, but to do that we need a really strong grip on the known. If the Higgs boson is out there, it's just one of a...
For the good of all of us: CERN launches open source hardware effort
Open source software is used extensively by CERN, the particle physics lab behind the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. In fact, the organization even maintains its very own Linux distribution—based on Red Hat Enterp...
LHC spots no black holes, eliminates some versions of string theory
The results continue to pour out of the LHC's first production run. This week, the folks behind the CMS detector have announced the submission of a paper to Physics Letters that describes a test of...
Getting the lead in turns LHC into a mini Big Bang machine
When it's colliding protons, the LHC is a particle discovery machine. The protons themselves contain only a few quarks, so they don't create much noise that could hinder the search for exotic particles that may emerge from the......
LHC spots possible signs of a high-energy particle soup (updated)
Today, the scientists running the Compact Muon Solenoid detector at the Large Hadron Collider reported some of the first signs of unexpected physics happening at the LHC. After tracking the particles that have spilled out of so...
Feature: A photo tour of the Large Hadron Collider
Back in July, we were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to tour CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider. In addition to getting some great information on how the machine gets protons up to speeds nearly that...
The Large Hadron Collider cranks up the collisions
In our story about how protons find their way into the LHC, we spent a fair bit of time emphasizing the importance of the machine's luminosity, which is a rough measure of how many collisions...
Searching through the LHC data flood for dark matter
As we mentioned in recent coverage, a hypothesis called supersymmetry is one of the leading candidates to fix the problems that have appeared in the Standard Model, which explains the behavior of the fundamental components of mat...
