How do you renovate a delicate, irreplaceable detector? Very carefully. During the last four months of 2006, the BaBar collaboration at SLAC successfully replaced a prematurely aging muon identification system.
I have been attending hundreds of talks by particle physicists who look for a very specific experimental signature that is predicted by a very specific theory extending the Standard Model.
The sun is shining; the Earth is warm instead of icy. Life is good, thanks to the weak force. One of the four known forces that shape the universe, the weak force sustains our lives, driving the nuclear reactions that power the sun and heat the Earth’s core. It’s also tremendously useful.
As physicists and engineers devise ways to make the International Linear Collider perform better at a lower cost, the design evolves, sometimes with tweaks but at other times with major reconfigurations.
A one-time visitor to SLAC, the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA), recently took to the frigid skies over Antarctica on a mission looking for evidence of cosmic-ray neutrinos.
