Cutting Edge

It took 100 years to discover all the physics particles that have thus far been observed. It took the Large Hadron Collider four months.

That's the report Monday from the International Conference on High-Energy Physics in Paris, where LHC researchers announced they've successfully retraced the steps of earlier particle accelerators. The final step was the likely view of a super-heavy and short-lived particle called the top quark, first seen in 1995 at Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator near Chicago.

"They have re-found all the known particles in the standard model," the successful but ultimately insufficient explanation that … Read more

GENEVA--The Large Hadron Collider is a marvel of both brute-force and sophisticated engineering.

To start, look at the mostly circular cavern, 27 kilometers in circumference, that houses the accelerator. It's got an average depth of 100 meters, but in fact it's actually horizontal: its plane is tilted 1.4 percent to keep it as shallow as possible to minimize the expense of digging vertical shafts while placing the cavern in a subterranean sandstone layer.

Tidal forces from the moon cause the Earth's crust to rise about 25cm, an effect that increases the LHC's circumference by 1mm. … Read more

GENEVA--The LHC shows science on an unusually large scale.

Thousands of researchers are involved in each of the Large Hadron Collider's major experiments, and more are there to operate the beam itself. Something like half the world's particle physicists are involved one way or another with the LHC, estimated Maria Isabel Pedraza Morales, a University of Wisconsin physicist who works on the ATLAS experiment.

The accelerator is likely to lead to hundreds of academic papers and doctoral dissertations in coming years. CERN's hallways are teeming with an international mix of senior physicists and young researchers just getting … Read more

GENEVA--There are two kinds of physicists in the world, broadly speaking: those with the equation-covered blackboards, and those with the scales, thermometers, and pressure gauges.

The theoretical physicists have had the upper hand for years, but something new has begun tilting the balance toward the experimentalists: the Large Hadron Collider.

This mammoth, $8 billion particle accelerator is housed in a ring 27km in circumference bored about 100 meters beneath a somewhat pastoral valley west of Geneva and operated by a multinational nuclear physics organization called CERN, which was founded in 1954.

The LHC is now speeding protons nearly to the … Read more

The first particle has been detected in a Large Hadron Collider experiment that hopes to shed light on the nature of interactions between matter and antimatter.

LHCb--an experiment set up to explore what happened in the moments immediately after the Big Bang--on Wednesday found a particle called a beauty or bottom quark. CERN scientists have a wish list of particles they want to measure in the experiment, and the beauty quark is the first on the list that they have found.

The detection is a step on the road to the possible discovery of new particles or interactions between particles, … Read more

Researchers at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, did something gutsy but smart Tuesday: they revved the Large Hadron Collider up to a new energy level in full public view.

Happily for the dozens of scientists and engineers in attendance, the LHC successfully reached its goal of a 7 TeV energy level--two beams of protons each at 3.5 trillion electron-volt energies whizzed in opposite directions and eventually collided at several points in the gigantic underground ring-shaped particle accelerator.

Scientific projects by and large are hardly cloaked in secrecy. But the LHC's run Tuesday was … Read more

After overcoming some hurdles, researchers operated the Large Hadron Collider at its highest energy level yet on Tuesday, gathering data after smashing protons into each other.

The huge underground particle accelerator at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, is designed to probe the nature of dark matter, antimatter, and an elusive particle called the Higgs boson, as well as any number of physics issues about how those things relate to the history of the universe.

"We have observed the first collisions [and] lots of beautiful tracks. It's really fantastic," said a representative of one … Read more

The Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator, is set to restart late Monday following a technical break and a glitch on Saturday.

The first proton beams of 2010 were circulated in the Large Hadron Collider on Saturday, CERN said Monday. The machine had been undergoing technical maintenance for 10 weeks. However, soon after the beams were circulated Saturday, they had to be stopped to allow for maintenance to the cryogenic systems that help regulate the superconducting magnets, according to CERN, which is also known as the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

"Engineers had to access the … Read more

The Large Hadron Collider is about to enter its longest continuous operational period, in preparation for full-strength particle-smashing.

On Wednesday, Steve Myers, the LHC's director for accelerators and technology, blogged that CERN had decided last week to run the giant particle collider for 18 to 24 months at a collision energy of seven tera-electron-volts (TeV)--or 3.5 TeV per beam--with the powering-up phase starting later this month.

After that, the LHC will "go into a long shutdown in which we'll do all the necessary work to allow us to reach the LHC's design collision energy … Read more