Scientific American

New "Beauty Baryon" Particle Discovered at Large Hadron Collider

Tue, 01 May 2012 10:15:00 EST

A never-before-seen subatomic particle has popped into existence inside the world's largest atom smasher, bringing physicists a step closer to unraveling the mystery of how matter is put together in the universe.

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Is Supersymmetry Dead?

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 08:00:00 EST

For decades now physicists have contemplated the idea of an entire shadow world of elementary particles, called supersymmetry. It would elegantly solve mysteries that the current Standard Model of particle physics leaves unexplained, such as what cosmic dark matter is. Now some are starting to wonder. The most powerful collider in history, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has yet to see any new phenomena that would betray an unseen level of reality. Although the search has only just begun, it has made some theorists ask what physics might be like if supersymmetry is not true after all.

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What Happens Inside the Large Hadron Collider? [Video]

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:30:00 EST

The Large Hadron Collider is the most expensive and complex scientific experiment ever built. This video shows how the contraption accelerates and slams together subatomic particles and what comes out of the collision.

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Quantum "Graviton" Particles May Resemble Ordinary Particles of Force (preview)

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 11:01:00 EST

On a sunny spring day one of us (Dixon) entered the London Underground at the Mile End station on his way to Heathrow Airport. Eyeing a stranger, one of more than three million daily passengers on the Tube, he idly wondered: What is the probability the stranger would emerge at, say, Wimbledon? How could you ever figure that out, given that the person could take any number of routes? As he thought about it, he realized that the question was similar to the knotty problems that face particle physicists who seek to make predictions for particle collisions in modern experiments.

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"Time Crystals" Could Be a Legitimate Form of Perpetual Motion

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 17:10:00 EST

The phrases "perpetual-motion machine"--a concept derided by scientists since the mid-19th century--and "physics Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek" wouldn't seem to belong in the same sentence. But if Wilczek's latest ideas on symmetry and the nature of time are correct, they would suggest the existence of a bona fide perpetual-motion machine-- albeit one from which energy could never be extracted. He proposes that matter could form a "time crystal," whose structure would repeat periodically, as with an ordinary crystal, but in time rather than in space. Such a crystal would represent a previously unknown state of matter and might have arisen as the very early universe cooled, losing its primordial symmetries.

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Signal for Higgs Boson Particle Gains Strength

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:40:00 EST

Today the two main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, submitted the results of their latest analyses. The new papers boost the case for December’s announcement of a possible Higgs signal , but let’s not get too excited.

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Is Space Digital? (preview)

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:12:00 EST

Craig Hogan believes that the world is fuzzy. This is not a metaphor. Hogan, a physicist at the University of Chicago and director of the Fermilab Particle Astrophysics Center near Batavia, Ill., thinks that if we were to peer down at the tiniest subdivisions of space and time, we would find a universe filled with an intrinsic jitter, the busy hum of static. This hum comes not from particles bouncing in and out of being or other kinds of quantum froth that physicists have argued about in the past. Rather Hogan’s noise would come about if space was not, as we have long assumed, smooth and continuous, a glassy backdrop to the dance of fields and particles. Hogan’s noise arises if space is made of chunks. Blocks. Bits. Hogan’s noise would imply that the universe is digital.

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Key Findings on Higgs Boson, Alzheimer's Drugs, Lake Vostok Set to Emerge in 2012

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:00:00 EST

Let's talk about Earth [More]

The Top 10 Science Stories of 2011

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 11:00:00 EST

Inevitably, year-end lists invite plenty of debate and criticism, and Scientific American 's is no exception. Certainly, we could have included the discovery of new worlds beyond our solar system, including Kepler 22 b, an exoplanet in the "Goldilocks" zone of habitability, as well as the first known Earth-size exoplanets . Or noted the accumulating evidence suggesting that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to retrieve natural gas is likely to contaminate water supplies. (Final New York State regulations, expected in mid-2012, could determine the future of fracking in the U.S.)

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Tantalizing Hints of Elusive Higgs Particle Announced [Update]

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 10:08:00 EST

GENEVA--The two largest collaborations of physicists in history Tuesday presented intriguing but tentative clues to the existence of the Higgs boson , the elementary particle thought to endow ordinary matter with mass.

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Demystifying the Higgs Results: A Panel Discussion for the General Public [Video]

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 09:00:00 EST

What do the results of the Higgs boson , the "God particle," mean for science ? Join researchers from the Perimeter Institute, Canada's premier center for theoretical physics, for an interactive, live webcast as they discuss the latest findings from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the biggest, most ambitious scientific experiment in human history.

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Large Hadron Collider Backgrounder

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 18:10:08 EST

Welcome to the Scientific American podcast Science Talk, posted on December 11th, 2011. I'm Steve Mirsky. Rumors are flying about the search for the long-sought Higgs boson at Europe's Large Hadron Collider. The Higgs is the elementary particle hypothesized to be the origin of the mass of all matter. So, finding it would be a pretty big deal. And our man in Europe, Davide Castelvecchi, will be at the press conference on Tuesday December 13th at which the LHC folks will tell us what, if anything, they've got. For a preview of that event, check out Davide’s December 8th article on our Web site at www.scientificamerican.com.

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Has the Higgs Been Discovered? Physicists Gear Up for Watershed Announcement

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 12:18:00 EST

The physics buzz reached a frenzy in the past few days over the announcement that the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva is planning to release what is widely expected to be tantalizing--although not conclusive--evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson, the elementary particle hypothesized to be the origin of the mass of all matter.

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The Story of the Higgs Boson, as Told by Higgs Himself [Video]

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 09:00:00 EST

Many physicists are great at figuring out how the world works, but less adept at describing those workings to a nontechnical audience. Brian Greene, a theoretical physicist at Columbia University, is an exception to that stereotype. Greene is known for his popular books, which have exposed the complex ideas of string theory and quantum physics to a wide audience. With a new four-part Nova miniseries, The Fabric of the Cosmos , which begins airing November 2 at 9:00 P.M. on PBS, Greene ought to be able to reach even more curious folk. A DVD of the series goes on sale November 22.

In the clip below from the episode "What Is Space?" Greene takes on one of the hottest topics in physics: the Higgs boson. Physicists have long thought that the Higgs particle should exist but have yet to find it. With the aid of the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, the elusive Higgs boson may finally come out of hiding. In the clip, Higgs, now an emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, tells of his nerve-racking 1964 presentation at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., when his ideas still ran counter to conventional wisdom. Also featured in the video are physicists Joseph Lykken of Fermilab, Raphael Bousso of the University of California, Berkeley, and Leonard Susskind of Stanford University.

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Waiting for the Higgs (preview)

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 08:00:00 EST

Underneath a relict patch of illinois prairie, complete with a small herd of grazing buffalo, protons and antiprotons whiz along in opposite paths around a four-mile-long tunnel. And every second, hundreds of thousands of them slam together in a burst of obscure particles. It’s another day at the Tevatron, a particle accelerator embedded in the verdant grounds of the 6,800-acre Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory complex in Batavia, about 50 miles due west of Chicago. There have been many days like this one, some routine, some spectacular; of the 17 fundamental particles that physicists believe constitute all the ordinary matter and energy in the universe, three were discovered here. But there won’t be many more such days. By October 1 the power supplies for more than 1,000 liquid-helium-cooled superconducting magnets will have been turned off forever, the last feeble stream of particles absorbed by a metal target, ending the 28-year run of what was until recently the most powerful particle accelerator in the world.

For several hundred physicists here who have spent nearly two decades searching for a hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson, the closure means ceding the hunt--and possible Nobel glory--to their archrival, the Large Hadron Collider, a newer, more powerful accelerator at CERN on the Swiss-French border. With its 17-mile circumference and higher energies, the LHC has displaced the Tevatron as the world’s premier particle physics research instrument, a position it will retain well into the next decade.

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Particles Found to Travel Faster Than Speed of Light

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 17:00:00 EST

An Italian experiment has unveiled evidence that fundamental particles known as neutrinos can travel faster than light. Other researchers are cautious about the result, but if it stands further scrutiny, the finding would overturn the most fundamental rule of modern physics--that nothing travels faster than 299,792,458 meters per second.

The experiment is called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus), and lies 1,400 meters underground in the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. It is designed to study a beam of neutrinos coming from CERN, Europe's premier high-energy physics laboratory located 730 kilometers away near Geneva, Switzerland. Neutrinos are fundamental particles that are electrically neutral, rarely interact with other matter, and have a vanishingly small mass. But they are all around us--the sun produces so many neutrinos as a by-product of nuclear reactions that many billions pass through your eye every second. [ Click here to read more about CERN's Large Hadron Collider ]

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Recommended: The Art of Medicine: Over 2,000 Years of Images and Imagination

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 09:00:00 EST

The Art of Medicine: Over 2,000 Years of Images and Imagination by Julie Anderson, Emm Barnes and Emma Shackleton. University of Chicago Press, 2011

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Cloud Formation May Be Linked to Cosmic Rays

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 12:45:00 EST

From Nature magazine

It sounds like a conspiracy theory: 'cosmic rays' from deep space might be creating clouds in Earth's atmosphere and changing the climate. Yet an experiment at CERN, Europe's high-energy physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, is finding tentative evidence for just that.

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Why Math Works (preview)

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 08:00:00 EST

Most of us take it for granted that math works--that scientists can devise formulas to describe subatomic events or that engineers can calculate paths for spacecraft. We accept the view, initially espoused by Galileo, that mathematics is the language of science and expect that its grammar explains experimental results and even predicts novel phenomena. The power of mathematics, though, is nothing short of astonishing. Consider, for example, Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell’s famed equations: not only do these four expressions summarize all that was known of electromagnetism in the 1860s, they also anticipated the existence of radio waves two decades before German physicist Heinrich Hertz detected them. Very few languages are as effective, able to articulate volumes’ worth of material so succinctly and with such precision. Albert Einstein pondered, “How is it possible that mathematics, a product of human thought that is independent of experience, fits so excellently the objects of physical reality?”

As a working theoretical astrophysicist, I encounter the seemingly “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics,” as Nobel laureate physicist Eugene Wigner called it in 1960, in every step of my job. Whether I am struggling to understand which progenitor systems produce the stellar explosions known as type Ia supernovae or calculating the fate of Earth when our sun ultimately becomes a red giant, the tools I use and the models I develop are mathematical. The uncanny way that math captures the natural world has fascinated me throughout my career, and about 10 years ago I resolved to look into the issue more deeply.

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Pop Star/Physicist Sees "Wonders of the Universe" Here on Earth [Video]

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 18:00:00 EST

Ask someone where they are from and most likely they will tell you their hometown, perhaps even a specific neighborhood. Put the same question to physicist Brian Cox and you get an entirely different response--one that involves the recycling of atoms brought together from the far reaches of the universe. Cox likes to remind people that every atom of their bodies used to be part of something else, and will become part of something new in the end. [More]