Pictures!

Finally, some pictures from our trip! We now have a flickr account:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lhscernteam/

There are also pictures from our 2 days in Paris, so feel free to check those out.
-Kaitlin

ATLAS and CMS articles, by Nathaniel

The race is on. 

Two experiments at the LHC are currently moving at a lightning pace to produce the same event. They are immensely competitive and they each employ similar plans of achieving their goals. Their designs and methods, however, are completely different. 

ATLAS (A Toroidal Lhc ApparatuS) and CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) are designed to explore the origins of matter via the interactions  and collisions of very massive particles, such as protons. When these collisions blast through the center of the detectors, their debris will be sent hurdling in the form of various exotic particles, whose energy is deposited in the detectors and their calorimeters, meaning "energy-measurers." This debris often decays into other, even more fascinating and uncommon particles, whose trajectories are measured and calculated by the computer systems, thus indicating their momenta and other useful data. 

This is where the similarities between these two detectors definitively ends. Though ATLAS utilizes a solenoidal magnet (a loop of wire wrapped around a metallic core, producing a controlled magnetic field) among its inner components, it implements a far more radical design around the outside. This outer magnetic field is produced by ATLAS's eight massive superconducting barrel loops and its two end caps. 

CMS opted for a drastically different magnetic design, using one large solenoid magnet. Due to CMS's attempt to reduce wasted space (hence the name "compact"), it was able to construct a highly effective and competitive particle detector to compete and check ATLAS at only 60% of the size. Some of CMS's components are in place with an accuracy of 5 microns in space. 

Thus, these two detectors have a naturally competitive nature and their approaches are entirely different for finding the legendary Higgs Boson predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. However, upon touring each facility, one must  note the sense of camaraderie and respect among the employees and scientists associated with both experiments. It is truly a golden age for physics when this type of relationship is possible.

Greetings from CERN!

I'm here in the CERN video editing room, updating the blog. We've been taking tons of video footage for the visual team back at Lincoln to manipulate and mold into a final, finished, and polished project. Additionally, we'll be using voice-overs for some of the videos, since we managed to get zilch audio the first day of the interviews. (Very depressing, especially since the physicists' comments on the food in the cafeteria were lost.) We've been to ATLAS, CMS, and the LHC tunnel, and learned plenty of information to use in future articles and for videos. 

ALSO:

WE FOUND THE HIGGS. 

Actually, Peter Higgs. I even shook his hand, haven't washed it yet. (Just kidding, Mom) 

Although finding the particle would have been fantastic, this is trés exciting,  as they might say here in Switzerland.

So long for now, I'm off to do some work, and then at 4:30 PM (16:30) I have an interview with a physicist who, get this, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2003!!! What an exciting weekend, Higgs yesterday, Sir Anthony James Leggett today. There's no place like CERN, end of story.

Good bye!