• OPERA catches its first tau neutrino

    Updated: 2010-05-31 12:49:34
    Scientists from the OPERA experiment at INFN's Gran Sasso National Laboratory have announced the first direct observation of a neutrino transforming from one type into another. When confirmed by a few more such events, this observation will provide further strong evidence that neutrinos have mass, a phenomenon that remains unexplained by physicists' recipe for understanding the universe, the Standard Model.

  • Accelerator physicists strive to lower cost of cancer treatment

    Updated: 2010-05-28 12:56:48
    Accelerator physicists from industry and academia were challenged this week at the International Particle Accelerators Conference in Kyoto, Japan, to find ways to make a new cancer treatment, carbon-ion therapy, more affordable.

  • Middle East accelerator project approaches barrier

    Updated: 2010-05-27 16:56:40
    Members of an unlikely international collaboration constructing the Middle East’s first synchrotron light source have dealt with outdated equipment, inexperience and language barriers. But one hurdle looms particularly large in their path: They need to gather more than $24 million to complete the final section of the accelerator.

  • Physicists hold first international particle accelerator conference

    Updated: 2010-05-24 16:27:53
    This week hundreds of accelerator physicists have gathered in Kyoto, Japan, to take part in the first International Particle Accelerator Conference, taking a step toward the practices of their detector-building colleagues.

  • The Quote Of The Week - Electroweak Unification

    Updated: 2010-05-21 20:19:48
    "Leptons interact only with photons, and with the intermediate bosons that presumably mediate weak interactions. What could be more natural than to unite these spin-one bosons into a multiplet of gauge fields ? Standing in the way of this synthesis are the obvious differences in the masses of the photon and the intermediate (boson), and in their couplings. We might hope to understand these differences by imagining that the symmetries relating the weak and electromagnetic interactions are exact symmetries of the Lagrangian but are broken by the vacuum". Steven Weinberg

  • The ATLAS Experiment: Popping up next month across North America (and on Tuesday in NYC)

    Updated: 2010-05-20 19:59:19
    The world's first Large Hadron Collider pop-up book has gotten a makeover for North American readers. The silver edition of "Voyage to the Heart of Matter" will be available in the United States and Canada starting in June. New York City-area LHC-philes can get a sneak preview of the book and learn more about the LHC at an event May 25 at the New York Academy of Sciences.

  • Fermilab scientists find evidence for significant matter-antimatter asymmetry

    Updated: 2010-05-18 19:25:34
    Scientists of the DZero collaboration at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced Friday, May 14, that they have found evidence for significant violation of matter-antimatter symmetry in the behavior of particles containing bottom quarks beyond what is expected in the current theory, the Standard Model of particle physics.

  • Neutrinos: a fishy explanation

    Updated: 2010-05-18 19:13:51
    Collaboration members for the NOvA neutrino experiment held public tours of the future site of the NOvA detector facility the weekend of Minnesota's annual Governor's Fishing Opener. Aside from proximity of the site to the opener, held on Lake Kabetogama, does the experiment have anything to do with fishing? Maybe. Fishing guide Frank House and physicist Mark Messier explain.

  • The Plot Of The Week - News On CP Violation

    Updated: 2010-05-18 10:54:48
    If you follow the blogosphere as a source of information on cutting-edge high-energy-physics results, you certainly by now know that the DZERO collaboration has produced a new exciting result. They find a 3.2 standard deviation effect in a study of charge asymmetry of muon pairs, which can be due to a unexpected, large source of CP violation -one which constitutes a very good shot at explaining the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the Universe! read more

  • Minnesota governor visits NOvA site

    Updated: 2010-05-18 02:29:59
    On Saturday, May 15, enthusiasts headed north to the annual Governor's Fishing Opener, the first day of the fishing season. On Friday, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty stopped to visit Minnesota residents and visitors interested in a different type of catch: neutrinos.

  • Looking at the Galaxy Zoo with (gravitational) lenses

    Updated: 2010-05-14 19:00:26
    Can you tell a gravitational lens from a spiral galaxy? With an expansion of the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project, you can try your eye at lens identification, thanks in part to the efforts of Phil Marshall at SLAC and Stanford's Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophyics and Cosmology.

  • National Lab Day brings Fermilab physics to students

    Updated: 2010-05-12 18:06:02
    Twenty Fermilab volunteers gave hands-on presentations in area elementary and high schools last week to celebrate National Lab Day. “It was all really interesting,” said student Mary LeDoux. “I had heard some of the information about science done at Fermilab before but it really helps to hear it all again because these are very deep concepts.”

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