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08/01/06

Into a new world of physics and symmetry

The worldwide particle physics community is about to sail on a voyage into a New World of discovery. The Large Hadron Collider, a multi-billion-dollar particle collider that will begin operations in Europe in 2007, will take us into new realms of energy, space, time, and symmetry.

08/01/06

LHC papers

The Large Hadron Collider, to start up in late 2007, traces its inception back to 1979. There are already more than 4000 papers in the SPIRES database that are about the LHC, either mentioning its name in the title or referring to it in a significant way.

08/01/06

Extracting physics from the LHC

A proton travels around a 27-kilometer ring at nearly the speed of light. Along with a bunch of other protons, it passes through the hearts of each of a series of detectors more than ten thousand times per second. Then, on one pass, it slams into a proton coming from the other direction.

07/01/06

First vertex detector

The Positron Electron Project (PEP) collider at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center produced its first collisions in 1979. All sorts of particles burst out, including the tau lepton, an ephemeral cousin of the electron.

07/01/06

US Congress meets Quantum Universe

Have you ever tossed a ball at a wall, playing a game of one-man catch? As you tossed that ball again and again and again, have you ever thought about the chance that it could go right through the wall? According to quantum mechanics, this is a real possibility.

07/01/06

Battling the clouds

Clouds of electrons could block the view of new discoveries at the proposed ILC, a multi-billion-dollar particle collider. Eliminating those clouds is critical to the prspects for the machine's success.

07/01/06

Elementary particle physics

Physics has demonstrated that the everyday phenomena we experience are governed by universal principles applying at time and distance scales far beyond normal human experience.