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Some notes and updates
Four years of the Higgs boson, live-tweeting and timezones, new music, and quickly reviewing an Erikson book.
Higgs boson
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Prospects for suspected new fundamental particle improve marginally
Although the data’s statistical significance isn’t as good as it would have to be for there to be a new ‘champagne bottle boson’ moment, it’s encouraging that the data itself isn’t vanishing.
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Colliders of the future: LHeC and FCC-he
Because powerful accelerators take at least a decade to realise, physicists have started work on two machines to aid physics research of the future.
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New LHC data has more of the same but could something be in the offing?
Run 2 results from the LHC show that QCD is scale-invariant – in keeping with the Standard Model prediction.
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The Large Hadron Collider is back online, ready to shift from the "what" of reality to "why"
The world’s single largest science experiment will restart on March 23 after a two-year break. Scientists and administrators at the European Organization for Nuclear Research – known by its French acronym CERN – have announced the status of the agency’s upgrades on its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its readiness
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A new LHC: 10 things to look out for
Through an extraordinary routine, the most powerful machine built by humankind is slowly but surely gearing up for its relaunch in March 2015. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), straddling the national borders of France and Switzerland, will reawaken after two years of upgrades and fixes to smash protons at nearly
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Fabiola Gianotti, the first woman Director-General of CERN
The CERN Council has elected a new Director-General to succeed the incumbent Rolf-Dieter Heuer. Fabiola Gianotti, who served as the ATLAS collaboration's spokesperson from 2009 to 2013 - a period that included the discovery of the long-sought Higgs boson by the ATLAS and CMS experiments - will be
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Why you should care about the mass of the top quark
In a paper published in Physical Review Letters on July 17, 2014, a team of American researchers reported the most precisely measured value yet of the mass of the top quark, the heaviest fundamental particle. Its mass is so high that can exist only in very high energy environments -
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New Higgs results show signs of SUSY
Two years ago, physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider first announced the discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle, setting the high-energy physics community atwitter. And it was only a couple weeks ago that physicists also announced that the particle was definitely the one predicted by the sturdy Standard Model
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Restarting the LHC: A timeline
CERN has announced the restart schedule of its flagship science "project", the Large Hadron Collider, that will see the giant machine return online in early 2015. I'd written about the upgrades that could be expected shortly before it shut down in 2012. They range from new
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New results on Higgs bosons' decay into fermions
For a boson to be the Higgs boson, it has to be intimately related to the physical process it was hypothesized in 1964 to help understand. With new results published on June 22, physicists from CERN, the lab that runs the experiments that first discovered the Higgs boson, have found
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Gerald Guralnik (1936-2014)
Of the six scientists who came up with the idea of a Higgs boson in the mid-1960s, independently or in collaboration with others, I've met all of one. Tom Kibble was at the Institute of Mathematical Science, Chennai, in January 2013 for a conference. He was 80 years