That's one HECK of a catcher's mitt, don't you think?

Caught this article from the RSS feeds on the main forum page. Supersymmetry is looking like a wrong theory.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14680570

The latest conference in Mumbai states...

ATLAS and CMS have excluded the existence of a Higgs over most of the mass region 145 to 466 GeV with 95 percent certainty.

So it's looking like the Higgs doesn't exist. Only time will tell.

Article here.

It's that time of year when CERN shuts down for the winter, so no new science being done for a few months.

But, and it's a biggie, there have been some press releases saying they think they've found the Higgs boson.

It appears to be around 125 GeV, which is the low end for our current therories (standard model). The certainty level is about 1.8 to 2.5 sigma so it's not a discovery yet (has to be 5 sigma) and there will be no more data 'till next year.

Cern press release here.
Bad Astonomy blog here.

To put a little more perspective on what 125 GeV means...

The rest mass of a proton is approx 1 GeV (actually 0.938 GeV. I did look this up) or 1.672621777(74)×10 -27  kg if you dislike electron volts (eV).

So, it's about 125 times the mass of a proton.

The LHC is up but not yet running for the year they find the Higgs, hopefully. They are planning a ramp in power from 3.5 TeV to 4 TeV. The collisions being twice this value. The max the machine can do is 7 TeV but we're 2-3 years or so off from that at the mo. with a 20 month technical stop at the end of this year to upgrade the machine.

Here's the live data from the dashboard.

And press releases here.

The LHC is up and running and doing science.

Another record hit on the 5th Apr 2012 of 8TeV. Article here.

The beams are running at a little over 100MJ per beam. This will go up as the weeks go on due to putting more protons per bunch and more bunches. Currently at 1380 bunches and about 1E11 (100,000 million) protons per bunch. And it takes 1 million protons to create 1 anti-proton.

I expect it'll be the end of summer before anything is anounced about the Higgs.

A new article for you:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18521327

Any theory's of what would happen to a living being standing inside the particle smasher right where the particles collide 

I'm thinking something along the lines of the world's largest microwave on steroids... Times a million!

Great possible theory Dave 
I think vaporization of all the nearby matter would ac cur   
It is hard to imagine that 2 tiny particles could create such a force of destruction.

More than 2, actually. More like millions in each stream. But still the total mass of those particles (at rest, mind you) is still unimaginably small.

Quote from: sybershot on June 21, 2012, 23:19:58 PM
Any theory's of what would happen to a living being standing inside the particle smasher right where the particles collide 

In a word, death.

The particles would be very unhealthy, from a radiation point of view. = death in a few days/weeks.
Moving through several tons of machinery would be impossible but I'll ignore this bit.
The magnetic field strength, to hold this lot in place, would be enough to pull the iron from your blood. = death in mins/hours.

In summary, the magnets would get you before the radiation.

Quotewould be enough to pull the iron from your blood

Eeew gruesome, reminds me of Magneto in x-men 

The sort of energies they obtain at the LHC are going on all the time in the upper atmosphere. Not as intense but even higher energies.
They're called cosmic rays up there.

Astronauts have complained of seeing flashes from these cosmic rays going through their eyes.


Latest release from CERN is this. They have lots of data and are crunching the numbers now. Results due this autumn (fall).