Seeing is easy. We open our eyes, and there the world is–in starlight or sunlight, still or in motion, as far as the Pleiades or as close as the tips of our noses.
When Sal Rappoccio, a postdoctoral researcher from Johns Hopkins University, joined the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment in mid-2007, he did what any newcomer would do. He tried to start his analysis. It did not go well.
What will the physics community look like 10 years from now? What should it look like? With the adoption of the theme “Future Faces of Physics,” these are the questions the Society of Physics Students (SPS) is encouraging you to ask yourself.
With 30 issues behind us, this issue of symmetry launches the next phase of the magazine's development. Our readers now use the magazine in different ways, and we are reaching a much larger audience.
In August 2006, scientists working on the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at CERN conducted a Cosmic Challenge to test components of their 12,500-ton CMS particle detector.
‘Tis the season for science at the bottom of the Earth. Researchers are flying to the South Pole from all over the globe to take advantage of the “ warm” summer months, when temperatures average minus 35 degrees Fahrenheit.
ATLAS, a particle physics experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, boasts 2000-plus members from 35 countries. But on a map showing where those members come from, one continent is almost mark-free: Africa.
Every time Fermilab scientist Tom Schwarz starts up SpartyJet, he inwardly grimaces. The computer program works well. It does a fine job of finding and recording jets—sprays of subatomic particles that emerge from collisions involving protons.
Meeting in CERN’s Restaurant 1, anthropologist Arpita Roy of the University of California, Berkeley is quick to declare that she will not be having any more coffee today. She has begun drinking multiple cups per day as she meets with CERN physicists to learn about their work.
They started out scanning the cosmos for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence with SETI@ home. They’ve plotted chess moves, battled malaria, and folded proteins, all from their home computers. Now, volunteers are tackling particle physics with LHC@home.
The Terascale is an energy region named for the tera, or million million, electronvolts of energy needed to access it. Physicists are standing at its threshold, poised to enter this uncharted territory of the subatomic world.
With so much work to do on so many aspects of the Large Hadron Collider—the accelerator, detectors, software, physics, and so on—it’s hard not to get a bit lost.
