Disclaimer: this is a blog post, not a paper. Seriously, I'm not suggesting to build such an accelerator, but I believe that by trying to answer this question the reader can learn something about the intriguing realm of accelerator physics. The Large Hadron Collider operating at CERN is the most powerful collider ever built by … Continue reading Why don’t we build a particle accelerator orbiting the Sun?
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Has Particle Physics Been Hijacked by ET?
After the two sophons arrive on Earth, their first mission is to locate the high-energy particle accelerators used by humans for physics research and hide within them. At the level of science development on Earth, the basic method for exploring the deep structure of matter is to use accelerated high-energy particles to collide with target … Continue reading Has Particle Physics Been Hijacked by ET?
Is Toronto bigger than…?
After I moved to Toronto, Canada, many friends keep me asking whether their hometown can fit into my new city's borders. Intrigued by their questions, I superimposed some maps taken from google, with same scale (1cm = 5 km). I also sketched an approximate border of Toronto to make the comparisons easier. What I've found … Continue reading Is Toronto bigger than…?
The Higgs Boson: A God Particle, After All?
Forewords My opinion about this issue shifts as more data are accumulated according to the Bayes theorem, so it may change in the near future after the LHC Run2 starts. Anyway, it seems to me that data are pointing towards J. A. Wheeler's self-aware Universe. What if the truth was that we are afraid of … Continue reading The Higgs Boson: A God Particle, After All?
Conosci i tuoi mesoni
Il primo layer dell'inner detector (ID) di ATLAS dista 4 cm dall'interaction point (IP), per cui: * pi0 decadono immediatamente (ctau~25 nm) e nel detector arrivano solo i gamma; * pi carichi hanno ctau~7 m ed entrano nell'ID; * K0_S decadono rapidamente (ctau~2.6 cm) e nel detector arrivano solo i prodotti di decadimento. il vertice dei K0_S e' una delle … Continue reading Conosci i tuoi mesoni
What is mass: Q&A
Q: It takes trillions of collisions to produce a few Higgs bosons, and they decay very quickly. However, if this boson is supposed to give things their mass, shouldn't there be an abundant supply of Higgs bosons around us? This seems contradictory to me. In other words, if they are not around us constantly, what … Continue reading What is mass: Q&A
The Hunt for the Higgs Boson
Forewords The hunt officially started on Oct 19th, 1964 when Peter Higgs published a paper called "Broken symmetries and the masses of gauge bosons" on Physical Review Letters (Vol 13, No. 16). Nowadays, his brilliant explanation about the origin of the mass of elementary particles is being tested in two laboratories: at Fermilab, 80 miles … Continue reading The Hunt for the Higgs Boson
The LHC @ home: How to build an electromagnet
At the LHC, the main experiment at CERN, protons and other charged particles generated during collisions are deflected using powerful electromagnets. These magnets can yield enormous B fields of several Tesla. For comparison, Earth's magnetic field has a strenght of ~10^-4 T, a "natural" unit which is called Gauss after the guy who measured it … Continue reading The LHC @ home: How to build an electromagnet
ATLAS: Last detector connected
The LUCID detector, which will measure the luminosity of the collisions occurring in the centre of ATLAS, was among the last pieces of the detector to get approval. In fact, the small collaboration, based in Bologna, Italy; Alberta, Canada; Lund, Sweden; and at CERN, didn’t even begin building until February of last year. LUCID is … Continue reading ATLAS: Last detector connected
Beyond the Standard Model Pub 