Lifeboat Foundation

CERN has revealed plans for a gigantic successor of the giant atom smasher LHC, the biggest machine ever built. Particle physicists will never stop to ask for ever larger big bang machines. But where are the limits for the ordinary society concerning costs and existential risks?

CERN boffins are already conducting a mega experiment at the LHC, a 27km circular particle collider, at the cost of several billion Euros to study conditions of matter as it existed fractions of a second after the big bang and to find the smallest particle possible – but the question is how could they ever know? Now, they pretend to be a little bit upset because they could not find any particles beyond the standard model, which means something they would not expect. To achieve that, particle physicists would like to build an even larger “Future Circular Collider” (FCC) near Geneva, where CERN enjoys extraterritorial status, with a ring of 100km – for about 24 billion Euros.

Experts point out that this research could be as limitless as the universe itself. The UK’s former Chief Scientific Advisor, Prof Sir David King told BBC: “We have to draw a line somewhere otherwise we end up with a collider that is so large that it goes around the equator. And if it doesn’t end there perhaps there will be a request for one that goes to the Moon and back.”

“There is always going to be more deep physics to be conducted with larger and larger colliders. My question is to what extent will the knowledge that we already have be extended to benefit humanity?”

Continue reading “Why it is dangerous to build ever larger big bang machines” »

Back in the first moment of the universe, everything was hot and dense and in perfect balance. There weren’t any particles as we’d understand them, much less any stars or even the vacuum that permeates space today. The whole of space was filled with homogeneous, formless, compressed stuff.

Then, something slipped. All that monotonous stability became unstable. Matter won out over its weird cousin, antimatter, and came to dominate the whole of space. Clouds of that matter formed and collapsed into stars, which became organized into galaxies. Everything that we know about started to exist.

So, what happened to tip the universe out of its formless state? [How Quantum Entanglement Works (Infographic)].

Today the collaboration for the LHCb experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of two new particles in the baryon family. The particles, known as the Xi_b’^- and Xi_b*^-, were predicted to exist by the quark model but had never been seen before. A related particle, the Xi_b*, was found by the CMS experiment at CERN in 2012. The LHCb collaboration submitted a paper reporting the finding to Physical Review Letters.

Like the well-known protons that the LHC accelerates, the new particles are baryons made from three quarks bound together by the strong force. The types of quarks are different, though: the new X_ib particles both contain one beauty (b), one strange (s), and one down (d) quark. Thanks to the heavyweight b quarks, they are more than six times as massive as the proton. But the particles are more than just the sum of their parts: their mass also depends on how they are configured. Each of the quarks has an attribute called “spin”. In the Xi_b’^- state, the spins of the two lighter quarks point in the opposite direction to the b quark, whereas in the Xi_b*^- state they are aligned.

“Nature was kind and gave us two particles for the price of one,” said Matthew Charles of the CNRS’s LPNHE laboratory at Paris VI University. “The Xi_b’^- is very close in mass to the sum of its decay products: if it had been just a little lighter, we wouldn’t have seen it at all using the decay signature that we were looking for.”

Continue reading “LHCb observes two new baryon particles” »

Electronegativity is one of the most well-known models for explaining why chemical reactions occur. Now, Martin Rahm from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, has redefined the concept with a new, more comprehensive scale. His work, undertaken with colleagues including a Nobel Prize-winner, has been published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

The theory of electronegativity is used to describe how strongly different atoms attract electrons. By using electronegativity scales, one can predict the approximate charge distribution in different molecules and materials, without needing to resort to complex quantum mechanical calculations or spectroscopic studies. This is vital for understanding all kinds of materials, as well as for designing new ones. Used daily by chemists and materials researchers all over the world, the concept originates from Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius’ research in the 19th century and is widely taught at high-school level.

Now, Martin Rahm, Assistant Professor in Physical Chemistry at Chalmers University of Technology, has developed a brand-new scale of electronegativity.

Continue reading “New scale for electronegativity rewrites the chemistry textbook” »

New tabletop sensors could be sensitive enough to glimpse gravitational waves and even dark matter particles.

A new study suggests that subatomic particles called muons streamed through the atmosphere and fatally irradiated megafauna like the monster shark megalodon.

The production of entropy, which means increasing the degree of disorder in a system, is an inexorable tendency in the macroscopic world owing to the second law of thermodynamics. This makes the processes described by classical physics irreversible and, by extension, imposes a direction on the flow of time. However, the tendency does not necessarily apply in the microscopic world, which is governed by quantum mechanics. The laws of quantum physics are reversible in time, so in the microscopic world, there is no preferential direction to the flow of phenomena.

One of the most important aims of contemporary scientific research is knowing exactly where the transition occurs from the quantum world to the classical world and why it occurs — in other words, finding out what makes the production of entropy predominate. This aim explains the current interest in studying mesoscopic systems, which are not as small as individual atoms but nevertheless display well-defined quantum behavior.

A scientific collaboration has released a concept design for the Large Hadron Collider’s successor, an enormous new experiment that would sit inside a hundred-kilometer (62-mile) tunnel.

The design concept plans for two Future Circular Colliders, the first which would begin operation perhaps in 2040. The ambitious experiments would hunt for new particles with collision energies 10 times higher than those created by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The concept design is the first big milestone achieved by the scientific collaboration.

These tiny subatomic particles, showering down from the depths of space, continue to surprise (and annoy) physicists chasing them.