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Posts Tagged ‘particles’

The Extreme Light Infrastructure will be built in Eastern Europe

The lasers will be the first to operate in the exawatt scale--a quintillion watts. That’s about a million times more powerful than 10 billion 100-watt lightbulbs. And a fourth superlaser should be forthcoming, one with beams twice the power of these three. This is the laser that was theorized to be the most powerful laser possible.

The list of implications for this never-before-seen technology is long, reaching into cancer diagnosis and treatment, elimination of nuclear waste, broadening of the technology industry, and expansion of nanoscience and molecular chemistry research.

Several countries competed for the honor of hosting the laser. ELI's most important research laser will find its home in the Czech Republic while the other two will reside in Hungary and Romania.

[Czech Position via io9]

The Large Hadron Collider is now officially the world's most powerful particle accelerator

What do all those zeros really mean? Like in a game of molecular bowling, the LHC’s hunt for the Higgs boson depends on a high number of collisions. But in this game, when the ball hits the pins, it creates bright lights--the brighter the lights, the more potential collisions. A strike would look like a blazing solar explosion, while a gutter ball would look depressingly dark.

This beam intensity record is a strike, but the game isn’t over. CERN scientists is bowling for data, hoping to prove the existence of the Higgs boson, a theoretical molecule thought to give mass to all the other particles. Last night’s smash means a lot more data, which brings the LHC a frame closer to their goal.

The collider will continue running until the end of this year, when it will take a well-deserved break.

[Live Science]

India's Ministry of Environment and Forests just approved the building of the Indian Neutrino Observatory (INO) in the Bodi West Hills, located in Tamil Nadu. The INO is a ridiculously ambitious project that dwarfs CERN, requiring 50,000 tons of magnetized iron to study neutrinos.

Neutrinos are the elusive miniscule particles that are able to travel at tremendous speeds and pass through ordinary matter undetected, which of course makes it hard as hell to detect them. Scientists have previously built giant machines to attempt to study them, and proposed such goofy ideas as using the moon as a tester. But the INO might be the most impressive of all.

First discussed in 1989, the INO was shuffled around due to a lack of resources (including a lack of trained physicists) and opposition from environmental groups (the original site was next to a tiger preserve). But a new program to train physicists was set up, the site was moved to southeastern India, and now the plans have secured approval from the Ministry of Environment and Forests.

The INO will use that huge amount of iron, layered in sheets, as the passive material, with about 30,000 neutrino detectors -- glass resistive plate chambers -- sandwiched in between the sheets. The lab hopes to measure, study, and examine neutrinos beamed from CERN or Fermilab (distance and mass in between the labs not really being an issue for neutrinos). Their main goal is to study the tendency of neutrinos to oscillate between their three forms--electron, muon, and tau--which is, at this point, mostly theoretical. There are some proposals that involve communication via neutrino but study is needed to figure out exactly what these things are and how they work.

[New Scientist]

Only a few percent of the 15 million or so cargo containers that enter the country every year are screened for nukes, a number that Congress mandates must be 100 percent by 2012. That benchmark is impractical using today’s tech, however. Standard detectors can miss nuclear material hidden behind lead or steel, and naturally radioactive cargo such as kitty litter gives false positives, requiring a labor-intensive hand-search.

A new detector from Decision Sciences, a security company in California, sees through anything and can scan a semi in less than a minute. It tracks muons, cosmic particles constantly bombarding Earth. Muons penetrate everything but are deflected more by heavy atoms such as uranium and plutonium. The detector tracks these deflections.

The company finished lab tests this spring and is now building detectors to deploy at several ports in the next year. “As long as it works quickly enough, it should fit the bill,” says Robert Dynes, a physicist at the University of California at San Diego who reviewed radiation detectors for Homeland Security. Tests indicate that the device should be speedy on real cargo, says Decision Sciences’s chief technology officer, Allan Wegner. And it’s nearly foolproof. Wegner can’t go into detail about its weaknesses (for obvious reasons), but he assures us that kitty litter and watermelons will no longer threaten national security.

How It Works

As muons come from the sky, they pass through the top detector, the truck and the bottom detector. The muons create ionization trails in the scanner's gas-filled detector tubes, which sensors record.

Heavy atoms, such as uranium and plutonium, deflect muons more than lighter ones do. If the angles of muons' entrance and exit paths vary by a wide magin, nuclear material could be present.

The detector also senses gamma radiation, which the computer combines with muon data to build a 3D view of suspicious muon-scattering objects, alerting customs agents exactly where to search.

In the image, a microscopic manipulator made of quartz is grabbing a teeny piece of something.

Reportedly, the mechanism designed to capture bits of the asteroid malfunctioned (perhaps when Hayabusa was hit by a solar flare), and did not grab the chunks of rock it was supposed to. But the researchers now believe that some bits of asteroid dust, kicked up by the probe's landing, made their way into the capture chamber regardless.

Analysis of the dust is proceeding.

[BBC]

Geoneutrinos -- which are anti-neutrinos -- result from the radioactive decay of uranium, thorium and potassium in the Earth's crust and mantle. Like their regular-matter counterparts, geoneutrinos are chargeless and tiny, passing through matter almost undisturbed. Regular neutrinos are emitted by the sun and cosmic rays.

The Borexino experiment at Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory was actually designed to watch for regular neutrinos, but scientists at Princeton University, part of an 88-member team, realized it could also look for subterranean subatomic particles. Geoneutrinos were first studied in 2005.

The Borexino study, published in the April issue of Physical Review Letters B, contains data from two years of observations, according to a Princeton news release. Geoneutrinos and neutrinos are hard to detect because they are so small and just barely interact with other matter, so it takes a long time to make just a handful of observations.

Earth scientists would like to know more about how decaying elements like uranium and thorium affect the planet's temperatures and cause convection in its mantle. Convection is the steady flow of hot rock deep in the Earth that drives plate tectonics -- the movement of continents, seafloor spreading, volcanoes and earthquakes. Scientists don't know whether radioactive decay drives the heating action, or is one of several factors.

At the observatory, scientists look for neutrinos by examining a lot of liquid. When the neutrinos hit the detector, tiny heat changes happen, and those observations allow scientists to indirectly detect the neutrinos.

The detector consists of nested spheres, containing thousands of tons of hydrocarbon liquid and highly purified water. An array of sensitive photodetectors watches for the telltale signals of solar neutrinos and geoneutrinos.

Scientists can imagine a day when a network of geoneutrino-detecting facilities, located at strategic spots around the globe, can sense particles to better understand the Earth's interior dynamics. Data about Earth's internal heat could one day provide enough information to predict volcano eruptions and earthquakes, according to the Princeton news release.

Or it could spur world governments to build a bunch of big metal arks.

[PhysOrg]

But it only works at sub-freezing temperatures for now

The crystals work by manipulating phonons, or vibrational waves that can carry either sound or heat depending on the frequency. Each crystal structure consists of alternating layers of silicon dioxide and a polymer material, so that the spacing between similar layers matches the wavelength of phonons. That allows the material to block and reflect back the phonons in the form of heat.

Most prior research used larger crystals to deal with sound-related phonons, but nanotechnology has given researchers the ability to create the tiny structures necessary to control heat-related phonons.

Phonons reflected by the new material represent low-frequency heat, and so the material only does its insulating trick in sub-freezing temperatures. That means the most immediate applications could involve protecting scientific instruments in an Antarctic environment, or insulating devices on spacecraft operating far from the sun.

But researchers hope to come up with room-temperature variants by thinning the layers that make up the crystal structure -- a necessary step toward reaching the range of a supposedly "perfect insulator" that blocks heat at certain frequency ranges.

The work done by MIT researchers and their colleagues in Germany and Greece has greater possibilities beyond the "perfect insulator." The ability to control phonons could lead to more efficient ways of scavenging phonon-related heat in computers, cell phones and cars to create electricity.

And that's just the beginning, according to Edwin Thomas, a materials scientist and engineer at MIT. He compared the early scientific understanding of phonons with that of understanding electrons and photons behind electricity and light.

Mastering electrons and photons has led to technological innovations that built the modern world and gave us lasers, transistors, photovoltaic cells and microchips. Thomas believes that we may be sitting on the brink of a phonon-driven technological revolution as well.

[MIT]