Cutting Edge

A 32-year-old nuclear physicist, part of the Large Hadron Collider project on the Swiss-French border, has been arrested by French police on suspicion of involvement with al-Qaeda.

According to The Independent, the arrest was made after anti-terrorist police had followed his movements for more than a year. Le Figaro newspaper suggested that the man's name had originally come to light in connection with the "Afghan network" of terrorist groups based in Europe.

(Credit: CC Ethan Hein/Flickr)

Of Algerian origin, he was arrested together with his brother, who was not working on the Collider.

Sources told The Independent that the scientist was not thought to be threatening the Collider itself, but rather was helping terrorists choose nuclear targets for attack.

The French Ministry of the Interior told Le Figaro that, having seized the man's two computers, three hard disks, and several USB keys, it believed the threat was serious. A Ministry spokesman said, "Our investigation showed without doubt that there were targets in France and elsewhere and indicated that we have perhaps avoided the worst."

CERN reassured the Independent that the suspect was not working on any of the major elements of the Collider, nor did he have access to the tunnel in which the Big Bang experiment is to be carried out. The CERN representative added, "None of our research has potential for military application, and all our results are published openly in the public domain."

The Collider is due to for a restart in November. One can only hope it's a safe one.

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded for "two revolutionary optical technologies."

Charles K. Kao, who discovered how to transmit light through fiber optics, and the team of Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, who designed the first digital-imaging sensor, split the Nobel Prize, announced by the Nobel Foundation on Tuesday.

Born in Shanghai, Charles K. Kao made a discovery in 1966 that would lead to today's fiber optics. A man ahead of this time, Kao calculated how it would be possible to transmit light over 100 kilometers (62 miles), compared to only 20 meters (65 feet) for the fiber cables available in the '60s. He discovered that by removing impurities and creating a more pure type of glass, the fiber could be made more efficient and absorb less of the light over great distances.

Kao's research stimulated other scientists to join the effort, leading to the first ultrapure fiber cable created in 1970.

Another breakthrough in technology was the invention of the first successful digital-imaging sensor, used today in everything from consumer cameras to surgical devices.

Working at Bell Labs in New Jersey in 1969, Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith built the first CCD (Charge-Coupled Device). Using the photoelectric effect theorized by Albert Einstein, the sensor transforms light into electric signals. The team's major hurdle was determining how to gather and read out those signals into a large number of pixels in a short burst of time.

The first consumer camera with a CCD was designed in 1981, leading to a revolution in digital photography.

Willard S. Boyle, left, and George E. Smith of Bell Labs invented charged-coupled devices (CCDs). In this 1974 photo, they are demonstrating an experimental TV camera that contains a CCD substitute for the vacuum tube of a conventional TV camera.

(Credit: Alcatel-Lucent/Bell Labs)

"When combined with the laser and the transistor, the invention of an efficient, low-loss optical fiber has made nearly instantaneous communication possible across the entire globe," said H. Frederick Dylla, director of the American Institute of Physics. "This mode of communication is essential for high-speed internet and forms the optical backbone of 21st century commerce. The CCD sensor has revolutionized technical, professional, and consumer photography in the last few decades. Taken together these inventions may have had a greater impact on humanity than any others in the last half century."

Kao will take home one half of the award prize of 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.4 million) with the team of Boyle and Smith splitting the other half. Awarded by the The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Nobel prizes are given each year for achievements in science, literature, and economics.

The world's largest particle accelerator is on course for a November restart. Six out of eight superconducting sectors are down to working cryogenic temperatures, according to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

James Gillies, head of communications for CERN, told ZDNet UK on Monday that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) would probably be ready to collide beams of particles by mid-November.

"Things are going well," said Gillies. "We hesitate to say 'hurray' just yet, but things are going smoothly."

Gillies said CERN plans to restart the giant experiment in incremental stages.

Read more of "LHC on course for November restart" at ZDNet UK.

University researchers in England and the Ukraine have built a laser that emits high-frequency sound waves instead of light beams.

Called simply the "saser," the acoustic laser uses packets of sonic vibrations called "phonons" much like a regular laser uses photons.

Specifically, the acoustic laser device consists of a sonic beam traveling through a "superlattice" constructed of 50 sheets of material each only atoms thick that are alternately made of gallium arsenide and aluminium arsenide, two materials found in semiconductors.

Sasers could have "significant and useful applications in the worlds of computing, imaging, and even anti-terrorist security screening," according to the researchers.

Anthony Kent, a professor in the University of Nottingham's School of Physics and Astronomy, led the U.K. group that worked in collaboration with Borys Glavin of the Lashkarev Institute of Semiconductor Physics in the Ukraine.

Professor Anthony Kent of the University of Nottingham.

(Credit: University of Nottingham)

The saser theory has been around for years, and several labs around the world have been working on variations of the device. But Kent's group said it has built the "first device to emit sound waves in the terahertz frequency range." The beam of "coherent acoustic waves" that it creates has nanometer wavelengths, according to the group's abstract.

The breakthrough is being published in the prestigious Physical Review journal. The researchers are also receiving a grant for just over $1 million (636,000 pounds) from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of the U.K..

"While our work on sasers is driven mostly by pure scientific curiosity, we feel that the technology has the potential to transform the area of acoustics, much as the laser has transformed optics in the 50 years since its invention," Kent said Wednesday in a statement.

We've still got a long way to go before human beings can be beamed from one place to another Star Trek-style, but on Friday a team of scientists at the University of Maryland achieved, nonetheless, a milestone in teleportation.

According to LiveScience, the university's Joint Quantum Institute for the first time was able to teleport information between two separate atoms across a distance of a meter--about one step for an adult.

The overview of the experiment's setup.

(Credit: LiveScience)

Generally, teleportation works thanks to a remarkable quantum phenomenon called entanglement that only occurs on the atomic and subatomic scale. Once two objects are put in an entangled state, their properties are inextricably entwined. In layman's terms, if they are in entangled mode, what you "see" on one is what you get on the other.

The JQI team set out to entangle the quantum states of two individual ytterbium ions so information embodied in one could be teleported to the other. Each ion was isolated in a separate high-vacuum trap, suspended in an invisible cage of electromagnetic fields and surrounded by metal electrodes.

After that, the experiment worked like this: Single photons from each of two ions in separate traps interacted at a beamsplitter. When both detectors recorded a photon simultaneously, the ions were entangled. At that point, ion A was measured, revealing exactly what operation had to be performed on ion B to teleport ion A's information (see illustration at right).

It's important to note that the achievement is not any form of conventional communication. This is because in teleportation no information pertaining to the original object actually travels to the other. Instead, the information measured from the first object appears on the second object.

The research was supported in part by the Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity program under U.S. Army Research Office contract.

It looks like the military's interest in teleportation remains strong. Who knows? This might mean we'll catch Osama bin Laden soon.

The CERN Computer Center features 8,000 servers, 40,000 Intel processors, and many, many petabytes of data.

(Credit: CERN)

GENEVA--The CERN Computer Center is the number-crunching hub that powers the physics research lab's quest to discover the nature of the universe.

A formidable 8,000 servers housing 40,000 Intel processor cores provide the grunt to help crack the petabytes of data spewed out from CERN's cutting-edge particle accelerators, based here. Editors' note: This story was originally published on Silicon.com as a photo gallery. Click here to see all the images.)

About half of these cores will be used to deal with data from the 17-mile-long Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which will generate about 15 petabytes of data by colliding protons with protons.

The computer center will provide only about 20 percent of the processing power used to examine the LHC data, with the rest coming from the LHC Computing Grid, a dedicated network of more than 100,000 processors.

Scientists hope the LHC will offer a "glimpse" at the Higgs Boson, a particle thought to give mass to the universe.

The LHC will produce up to 600 million particle collisions per second. To store the huge amount of data the LHC produces, the center houses 8 petabytes of hard disks and 18 petabytes of magnetic tapes. This will increase to 16 petabytes of disc and 30 petabytes of tape by the end of the year.

Even this is insufficient to store the vast amounts of the raw data produced by the LHC, so its four detectors--which each look for different particles and energy signatures--have built-in electronics and smaller computer centers that analyze petabytes of data per second they collect and that throw away the bulk of the information not of interest to the physicists.

The data that's left is sent on to the computer center and its racks of servers.

"A lot of processors are devoted to data processing for physics. We are collecting a tremendous amount of data from the collision points," said Jean Michel Jouanigot, head of network services at CERN.

The computing center holds 1,500 10-gigabit ports for data exchange and 70,000 1-gigabit ports for information flow among CERN sites. These are just some of the switching points.

(Credit: CERN)

The grid is linked to the center through dedicated 10-gigabit-per-second connections. It can handle about 50,000 users at once, sharing out bandwidth and processing power between scientists.

"The grid is a worldwide collaboration through many hundreds of sites and will get information through very powerful networks," Jouanigot said.

CERN serves as an Internet exchange point and is one of the oldest in Europe.

Within the computing center itself, the data exchange is handled by 1,500 10-gigabit ports, while information flow within CERN's various sites is handled by 70,000 1-gigabit ports.

Four robots are on duty to fetch data from CERN's StorageTek vault.

(Credit: CERN)

The center has four robots, each holding about 20,000 tapes, and it's planning to fit in two more.

Using existing tape technology, the room would be filled up within 10 years. However, Jouanigot said, the center is constantly upgrading to tapes with higher data density, adding that each tape now stores about 750GB compared to about 200GB two years ago.

Jouanigot said that the center refreshes its hardware about every three to four years. All the hardware in the computing center uses off-the-shelf components, and the servers run a customized version of Red Hat Linux.

The LHC is fed with protons by a series of particle accelerators that increase the speed and energy of the particles. The particles are then are fed into the LHC's 17-mile ring and accelerated to 99.9 per cent the speed of light.

Each beam that will collide in the LHC consists of up to 100 billion protons, and the center's 39 consoles allow operators to manage the beams' passage around the accelerators and monitor their cooling. The facility's cryogenic cooling system brings the collider's temperature to just above absolute zero to allow the superconducting magnets that drive the beams to work.

But for the time being, that cooling system has been switched off. The LHC is being returned to room temperature to allow repairs to be carried out on a fault. It is expected to start up again in April.

Nick Heath of Silicon.com reported from London.

Build an $8 billion machine that forms a 17-mile circle 300 feet underground and that may reveal secrets from the origins of the universe, and you're bound to provoke curiosity.

The machine in question is the Large Hadron Collider, the goal of which is to reproduce the conditions from just fractions of a second after the Big Bang. It'll do so by slamming together subatomic particles at about the speed of light, with scientists poised for a glimpse at the results.

In Sunday night's season premiere of the CBS news program 60 Minutes, Steve Kroft talked to a number of the scientists involved--one reckoned that half of all U.S. particle physicists are there--and ventured underground for a closer look at the one-of-a-kind machinery built by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. (CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.)

Below are some clips from the 60 Minutes story:

See inside the Large Hadron Collider: Get the lowdown on the machinery in the underground facility and the kinds of questions it might help answer, such as "What is the origin of mass?"

How the Large Hadron Collider works: Animation shows the scope of the facility and how the subatomic particles will zip along at the speed of light before colliding with each other.

Meet the Americans working on the Large Hadron Collider: Steve Kroft talks to three scientists, one from MIT, one from the University of Chicago, and one from the University of Michigan.

How will we benefit from the Large Hadron Collider? Practical results might be a ways off, but they'll be coming, and they'll be shared equally among all the countries that have participated.

Professor Peter Higgs will have to wait at least a few additional seasons to find out whether his long-held theory on how matter has mass is right.

That's because officials announced Tuesday that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which could confirm the existence of a theoretical particle name after Higgs, will remain shut down until at least early spring.

Click image for gallery on the Large Hadron Collider.

(Credit: Maximilien Brice for CERN)

The LHC, the world's largest particle collider, is located in a nearly 17-mile-long circular tunnel along the French-Swiss border about 330 feet underground. Built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (or CERN), it promises to push forward theories of particle physics, such as the Higgs Boson, and the fundamental building blocks of all things.

The collider was officially launched on September 10 when the first particle beam was successfully sent around the full circuit. However, it hit a major glitch last week when a mechanical failure triggered a helium leak and forced a shutdown for what was initially reported to be at least two months.

Now it looks like the investigation and repairs won't be finished in time to restart the LHC before CERN's obligatory winter maintenance period, pushing the restart date back to early spring 2009, officials said.

CERN Director General Robert Aymar said in a press release that the delay was "undoubtedly a psychological blow," but added that the success with the first beam operation was testimony to the years of preparation and the skills of teams involved. "I have no doubt that we will overcome this setback with the same degree or rigor and application."

It appears the helium link was caused by a faulty electrical connection between two of the accelerator's magnets. But the magnets involved can't even be opened up for investigation until the sector is brought to room temperature, which will take three or four weeks, CERN said.

Peter Limon, who was responsible for commissioning the Tevatron superconducting accelerator in the U.S., offered perspective by adding that such problems are to be expected given the size and complexity of the LHC.

"Events occur from time to time that temporarily stop operations, for shorter or longer periods, especially during the early phases," he said in the press statement.

The LHC experiments involve accelerating two beams of subatomic particles--called hadrons--in opposite directions to more than 99.9 percent the speed of light. Smashing the beams together will create showers of new particles for physicists to study using special detectors. On a microscale, it will re-create conditions that existed during the first billionth of a second of the Big Bang.

The world's largest particle collider has been shut down for at least two months due to a large helium leak stemming from an incident Friday, officials said.

The Large Hadron Collider is a gigantic particle accelerator located in a nearly 17-mile-long circular tunnel along the French-Swiss border about 330 feet underground. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN.

Click image for gallery on the Large Hadron Collider.

(Credit: Maximilien Brice for CERN)

The collider was officially launched on September 10 when the first particle beam was successfully sent around the full circuit. On the heels of an earlier malfunction due to a faulty transformer, CERN said Friday's incident was most likely caused "by a faulty electrical connection between two magnets, which probably melted at high current leading to mechanical failure." At no time was there any risk to people, CERN added.

Although a full investigation is still under way, CERN announced Saturday that the section of the tunnel will have to be "warmed up" for repairs, which means the LHC will be down for at least two months.

The LHC experiments involve accelerating two beams of subatomic particles--called hadrons--in opposite directions to more than 99.9 percent the speed of light. Smashing the beams together will create showers of new particles for physicists to study using special detectors.

The result is expected to push forward theories of particle physics and the fundamental building blocks of all things. The LHC was designed primarily as an attempt to product the "Higgs boson," a hypothetical particle whose observation would help confirm some of the predictions in the Standard Model of physics. Other currently theoretical particles may also be observed for the first time, including microscopic black holes.

Some have theorized that the black hole experiments could go wrong with catastrophic results, but CERN has done extensive safety analysis and has repeatedly denied any such threat.