The Atom Smashers weaves science, culture, and politics into a story that is thoroughly contemporary and American. Time, effort, public support, competitive scientists, and luck will tell if the Higgs will be discovered. In the meantime, the following resources contain more information on the search and the environment in which it takes place.
Large Hadron Collider shut down until Spring 2009
Ker Than, National Geographic News
23 September 2008
Full-power operation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) won't happen until early spring 2009, after an electrical glitch sparked a large helium leak inside the machine's tunnels.
Particle physics pajama party
Gabriel Spitzer, Chicago Public Radio
10 September 2008
A gaggle of scientists gathered late last night at West-suburban Fermilab. They marked the debut of a massive particle accelerator in Europe with a pajama party.
Protons and champagne mix as new particle collider Is revved up
Dennis Overbye, The New York Times
10 September 2008
Science rode a beam of subatomic particles and a river of Champagne into the future on Wednesday.
After 14 years of labor, scientists at the CERN laboratory outside Geneva successfully activated the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest, most powerful particle collider and, at $8 billion, the most expensive scientific experiment to date.
Fingers crossed, physicists are ready for collider to roll
Dennis Overbye, The New York Times
8 September 2008
Failing a collision with an unforeseen asteroid or an invasion from Alpha Centauri, the world will probably not end on Wednesday, but a lot of people will be holding their breath anyway.
At roughly 3:30 a.m. Eastern time, scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, say they will try to send the first beam of protons around a 17-mile-long racetrack known as the Large Hadron Collider, 300 feet underneath the Swiss-French border outside Geneva.
Why the world won't end on September 10
Valerie Jamieson, Short Sharp Science (NewScientist Blog)
1 September 2008
Hurray for the European Court of Human Rights. It has rejected an emergency injunction to block the Large Hadron Collider from turning on on 10 September. It's the latest legal case brought against the LHC by scientists who fear that the world's largest particle accelerator will produce fearsome entities that could destroy the Earth.
Large Hadron Collider: The wait is over
Matthew Chalmers, New Scientist
27 August 2008
"I will probably cry when we see the first collision," says Bilge Demirköz. After spending the best part of a decade designing detectors and writing computer code for them, the 28-year-old physicist is yet to get her hands on real data. That's about to change. In a matter of weeks, the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, will begin amassing enough data to keep physicists off the streets for decades.
Fermilab says: "Hey wait, we're in the Higgs hunt, too!"
JR Minkel, Scientific American
8 August 2008
It looks like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may have some competition in its search for the much-anticipated Higgs boson, the source of mass.
Yesterday CERN, the European particle physics lab, announced that on September 10 it would begin shooting protons around the full 27 kilometers (17 miles) of the circular LHC—the most powerful particle accelerator ever built—building up to collisions with a second, opposing beam in subsequent months.
How the Higgs may help
Kate Thayer, Kane County Chronicle
10 August 2008
The search for a tiny particle at Fermilab could lead to big things.
As physicists at the Batavia laboratory continue to hunt for the Higgs boson particle – something that they theorize exists – they say the general public may not see immediate results, or any results at all, but will benefit from the journey.
Tevatron experiments double-team Higgs boson
ScienceDaily
5 August 2008
Scientists from the CDF and DZero collaborations at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermilab have combined Tevatron data from the two experiments to advance the quest for the long-sought Higgs boson.
Fermilab zooms in on the Higgs boson
Symmetry Magazine
4 August 2008
Scientists working on the CDF and DZero experiments at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are entering Higgs territory. On Sunday, the two groups reported at a conference in Pennsylvania that for the first time their results directly restrict the allowed mass range for the elusive Higgs boson. The results show that the CDF and DZero experiments are sensitive to Higgs signals that may show up as the two collaborations gather and analyze more data.
Fermilab still playing Higgs hide-and-seek
Eric Hand, Nature
1 August 2008
When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) finally fires up its particle beams in a month or so, many physicists hope that it will find a long-awaited prize: the Higgs boson, thought to confer mass on other elementary particles.
Fermilab races to find elusive particle
Stephanie Lecci, Chicago Public Radio
30 July 2008
Scientists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory say they've observed a rare occurrence. And it gives the lab a leg up in the race to find an elusive particle that's only thought to exist.
Large Hadron rap
alpinekat,YouTube
28 July 2008
Ahh yeah...I'm about to drop some particle physics in da club. The LHC is supa dupa fly...you know what I'm saying. Check it.
Everything you wanted to know about the Large Hadron Collider
Martin Coles,The Gazette
28 July 2008
What is the LHC? The Large Hadron Collider is the world's most powerful particle accelerator and it's about to start operating in a tunnel that runs beneath parts of Switzerland and France. Operated by CERN - the European Organisation for Nuclear Research - the LHC will produce very high-energy particle collisions.
Deep thinking
Martin Coles,The Gazette
28 July 2008
A science experiment set up inside a tunnel up to 175 metres underground aims to provide answers to the most fundamental questions about the nature of matter and the origins of the universe
Cern lab goes 'colder than space'
Paul Rincon, BBC News
18 July 2008
A vast physics experiment built in a tunnel below the French-Swiss border is fast becoming one of the coolest places in the Universe.
The Large Hadron Collider is entering the final stages of being lowered to a temperature of 1.9 Kelvin (-271C; -456F) - colder than deep space.
New Restrictions for Higgs Boson
Russia-InfoCentre
8 July 2008
Press service of Russian Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, located in the town of Dubna, reports about new data on Higgs boson.
More Fermilab job cuts averted
Russell Working,Chicago Tribune
1 July 2008
Fermilab, which spent the last six months bracing for layoffs and forcing employees to take unpaid furloughs, was granted a reprieve from further staff reductions Monday when President George W. Bush signed a bill granting emergency science funding to the Batavia facility.
Earth 'not at risk' from collider
Paul Rincon,BBC News
23 June 2008
Our planet is not at risk from the world's most powerful particle physics experiment, a report has concluded.
The document addresses fears that the Large Hadron Collider is so energetic, it could have unforeseen consequences.
CERN Council looks forward to LHC start-up
CERN Press Release
20 June 2008
At its 147th meeting in Geneva today, the CERN1 Council heard news on progress towards start-up of the laboratory’s flagship research facility, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Commissioning of the 27-kilometre LHC began in January 2007 when the first cool down of one of the machine’s eight sectors began.
Donor gives $5 million to aid Fermilab
Adrian Cho,ScienceNOW Daily News
28 May 2008
For once, staff at the United States's only remaining particle physics laboratory have received some good news. An anonymous donor has given the University of Chicago $5 million to be spent at cash-strapped Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. With the money, lab officials will be able to stop a rolling furlough program that since February has forced employees to take periodic unpaid leave and slashed their pay by 12.5%. The lab will still lay off roughly 140 workers, but officials also announced that those cuts would be restructured to give employees a chance to take voluntary layoffs before the involuntary ones begin.
Batavia facility hopes Durbin can restore some budget cuts
Russell Working, Chicago Tribune
9 May 2008
Fermilab is eyeing layoffs of about 140 employees in the coming weeks, leaving the Batavia physics laboratory with a 10 percent of its staff when retirements and resignations are factored in, an official said today.
Colliding with nature's best-kept secrets
Elizabeth Landau, CNN
9 May 2008
Visiting a particle accelerator is like a religious experience, at least for Nima Arkani-Hamed.
Immense detectors surround the areas where inconceivably small particles slam into one another at super-high energies, collisions that may confirm Arkani-Hamed's predictions about undiscovered properties of nature.
Can the Tevatron find the Higgs?
David Harris, symmetry breaking
12 April 2008
In the past year, there has been a lot of discussion about whether the Tevatron collider at Fermilab can find the Higgs boson before the Large Hadron Collider can. There have been all kinds of claims, and even stories of hints of sightings. In a session today, Brian Winer from Ohio State University gave a very clear presentation about just how close the Tevatron is to potentially finding the Higgs.
Higgs boson: a ghost in the machine
Eben Harrell, Time Magazine
9 April 2008
Get physicists and cosmologists talking about their work and they will tell you that there are elegant theories and messy ones. Almost all of them believe the universe conforms to an elegant one. A central goal of today's physics, in fact, is to show that at its very beginning, the universe was ordered and unified. But this unity didn't last for long. Just instants after the Big Bang, as the explosion cooled and its contents scattered, the cosmos' forces and matter differentiated. The universe fell from a state of perfect grace into its current complexity, in a cosmic parallel to Adam and Eve.
Coming soon: superfast internet
Jonathan Leake, The Sunday Times
6 April 2008
The internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.
At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds
Physicist: Fermilab could find 'God particle'
Alexander G. Higgins, Chicago Sun-Times
9 April 2008
The physicist who first theorized the existence of a subatomic particle dubbed "the God particle" says he's almost sure it will be confirmed in the next year - and that it might already have been created at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the far west suburbs.
Veteran physicist hopes secret of universe lies underground
AFP
7 April 2008
British scientist Peter Higgs, whose work is the cornerstone of modern physics, said Monday he is putting champagne on ice in the hope a new experiment confirms his theories on how the universe works.
Higgs, a veteran professor at Edinburgh University, told journalists in a rare interview that he hopes a vast experiment in the tunnels deep underground the CERN laboratory on the Franco-Swiss border could finally prove the existence of an elusive and unstable particle to which he has lent his name.
Coming to New York, a science event for the masses
Dennis Overbye, The New York Times
3 April 2008
Vowing to make New York City the center of the scientific universe – as it is for commerce, art, and expensive dining – a panel of university presidents, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein of New York, the actor Alan Alda, the Clumbia physicist Brian Greene and a Muppet announced plans on Wednesday for a World Science Festival to be held here at the end of May.
“The most exciting city in the world is going to be a little more exciting,” Mr. Alda said at a news conference at New York University.
Future science needs aid now
Kevin T. Pitts, Chicago Tribune
2 April 2008
When I started hearing rumors last year that Congress might cut the high-energy physics budget, I never dreamed that it would be as bad as the whisperings suggested
Unfortunately, my worst nightmare came true: The $500 billion spending bill, approved by Congress shortly before Christmas, cut $94 million in funding for high-energy physics—a field in which I study exotic particles that are way too small to be seen even with the most powerful microscope to determine how our universe is put together and the rules that it plays by.
Talks Brian Cox: An inside tour of the world's biggest supercollider
TED
April 2008
"Rock-star physicist" Brian Cox talks about his work on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Discussing the biggest of big science in an engaging, accessible way, Cox brings us along on a tour of the massive project.
Asking a judge to save the world, and maybe a whole lot more
Dennis Overbye, The New York Times
29 March 2008
More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford Rice.
None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth – and maybe the universe.
Large Hadron Collider (comic strip)
Randall Munroe, XKCD
26 March 2008
The Large Hadron Collider, CERN...
Okay, moment of truth. <click>
Democrat wins Hastert’s seat in Illinois
Deanna Bellandi, Associated Press
9 March 2008
Nearly two years after taking control of Congress, the Democrats have claimed another prize by capturing former GOP House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s seat – a development that Republicans say is not a harbinger of things to come.
The longtime Republican district fell to the Democrats Saturday when wealthy scientist and businessman Bill Foster snatched the seat in a closely watched special election.
At the heart of all matter: the hunt for the God particle
Joel Achenbach, National Geographic
March 2008
If you were to dig a hole 300 feet straight down from the center of the charming French village of Crozet, you'd pop into a setting that calls to mind the subterranean lair of one of those James Bond villains. A garishly lit tunnel ten feet in diameter curves away into the distance, interrupted every few miles by lofty chambers crammed with heavy steel structures, cables, pipes, wires, magnets, tubes, shafts, catwalks, and enigmatic gizmos.
Budget cuts undermine U.S. role in atom-smasher project
John Borland, Wired
13 February 2008
Physicists have developed a plan to keep a $6.6 billion international particle accelerator project moving forward, despite deep budget cuts that have all but stopped participation by American and British scientists this year.
However, those funding cuts have made it less likely that the groundbreaking project will wind up on U.S. soil, participants say. American researchers, fearful of losing their traditional leadership in the field, had hoped to bring the proposed facility to the United States.
Making science a presidential priority
John Carey, BusinessWeek
8 February 2008
When most of the Republican candidates for President proclaimed that they did not believe in evolution during a debate last year, astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss was one of many who were aghast. The Case Western University professor and best-selling author was even more upset when former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee shrugged off concerns, saying that he was running for President, not writing a middle-school curriculum. "How could being scientifically illiterate be perfectly acceptable?" Krauss asks. "No one would accept a candidate who, say, denied the Holocaust."
Fiasco at Fermilab
Mark Alpert, Scientific American
February 2008
In recent years the U.S. national laboratories have laid out an ambitious research agenda for particle physics. About 170 scientists and engineers at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., have been developing designs and technologies for the International Linear Collider (ILC), a proposed machine that would explore the frontiers of high-energy physics by smashing electrons into their antimatter counterparts.
But on December 17, 2007—a date that scientists quickly dubbed “Black Monday”—Congress unexpectedly slashed funding for the ILC and NOvA, throwing the entire future of American physics into doubt.
Physicists hope U.S. budget will mean an end to research Cuts
Kenneth Chang, The New York Times
5 February 2008
Under President Bush’s proposed federal budget announced on Monday, research in the physical sciences would receive a hefty boost.
That is welcome news to physicists in a broad swath of fields, from those who study the tiniest of fundamental particles to those trying to understand basic science that could lead to future energy sources. It is especially welcome after two years of tight financial constrictions resulting from money wrangling between Congress and the White House that have turned off some experiments, delayed others and left some scientists unemployed.
U.S. physics begins to crumble under budget strain
Stuart Clark, New Scientist
8 January 2008
The reality of the US budget cuts to particle physics has hit home. The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California, US, has just announced a trio of painful consequences: the end of work on the International Linear Collider, the imminent closure of its BaBar antimatter experiment, and the layoff of 125 workers.
SLAC and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois are the main US institutions involved in the International Linear Collider (ILC), a future $6.7 billion particle accelerator designed to recreate the conditions of the early universe.
Federal budget impact on Fermilab and HEP
Fermilab Today
The FY08 federal budget cut $94 million in funding for High Energy Physics. The diminished funds will have a powerful impact at Fermilab, requiring workforce adjustments and forcing the cancellation of R&D for experiments and technology key to the future of particle physics.
Top Congressional scientists cross party lines to call for a Presidential debate on science & technology
Science Debate 2008
26 December 2007
A Republican and a Democratic member of the United States Congress, who are each also scientists, are leading an effort to push for a presidential debate on science and technology policy.
Congressman Vern Ehlers, R-MI, and congressman Rush Holt, D-NJ, have agreed to co-chair the non-partisan initiative, called ScienceDebate2008.com, whose signers also include fourteen Nobel laureates, several university presidents, other congresspersons of both parties, the president of the Academy of Evangelical Scientists and Ethicists, and the heads of several of America’s major science organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Fermilab director speaks to Chicago Public Radio about budget crisis
Chicago Public Radio’s Eight Forty-Eight
3 January 2008
WBEZ Chicago Public Radio's program Eight Forty-Eight features an interview with Fermilab Director Pier Oddone regarding the federal budget cuts to High Energy Physics, what they mean for Fermilab and on efforts to restore the funding cuts.
Taking science on faith
Paul Davies, The New York Times
24 November 2007
Science, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.
Geometry is all
The Economist
22 November 2007
One of the mysteries of the universe is why it should speak the language of mathematics. Numbers and the relationships between them are, after all, just abstract reasoning. Yet mathematics has shown itself to be particularly adept at describing both the contents of the universe and the forces that act on them. Now comes a paper which argues that one branch of the subject - geometry - could form the basis of all the laws of physics.
Dr. President
Chris Mooney, Seed Magazine
8 October 2007
During the past seven years of the Bush administration, America has been subject to what can only be called antiscientific governance. Scientists have been ignored, threatened, suppressed, and censored across agencies, across areas of expertise, and across issues. Policies have gone forward repeatedly without adequate scientific input and sometimes in spite of it, and have subsequently backfired.
Inside the Subatomic Race
Alan Boyle, MSNBC
24 September 2007
On the surface, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory looks like a patch of Illinois left behind from the 1970s - or sometimes even the 1870s.
Much of Fermilab's 6,800-acre preserve, nestled amid Chicago's suburbs, has reverted to wilderness. A herd of bison roams the prairie. Decades-old frame houses and industrial buildings dot the developed areas. The tallest building is Wilson Hall, a 16-story headquarters that looks like a setting for the '70s sci-fi flick "Logan's Run."
And then there's the Tevatron.
Building the Future of Physics
Alan Boyle, MSNBC
26 September 2007
Particle physicists can't afford to get too sentimental about where they work. They need bigger and bigger machines to focus on smaller and smaller frontiers - and when they just can't make the machines bigger, they have to blaze a completely new trail to those frontiers.
Scientific showdown takes shape
Jeremy Manier, Chicago Tribune
5 September 2007
More than 300 feet beneath the suburbs and sunflower fields at the French-Swiss border lies a high-tech beast that may signal the doom of Fermilab.
The particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider is coming to life in tunnels and caverns that crackle with the anticipation of an enterprise at the leading edge of physics. For 40 years, that vaunted role belonged to Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, bringing the Chicago area civic prestige and unique academic clout, but that's about to change.
Can one theory explain all things physical?
Dave Mosher, MSNBC
21 August 2007
Ancient philosophers thought wind, water, fire and earth were the most basic elements of the cosmos, but the study of the small has since grown up. Physicists continue to carve the known universe into particles to describe everything from magnetism to what atoms are made of and how they remain stable.
Fermilab looks toward a future of uncertainty
Michele du Vair, The Beacon News
15 August 2007
Particle accelerators, origin of the universe, dark energy.
These are a few of the terms Judy Jackson, director of public affairs for Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, broke down into laymen's terms Tuesday in a presentation for the Batavia Women in Business luncheon at the Fox Valley Country Club in North Aurora.
What's in a name? Parsing the 'God Particle,' the ultimate metaphor.
Dennis Overbye, The New York Times
7 August 2007
We need to talk about the "God particle."
Recently in this newspaper, I reported on the attempts by various small armies of physicists to discover an elementary particle central to the modern conception of nature. Technically it's called the Higgs boson, after Peter Higgs, an English physicist who conceived of it in 1964. It is said to be responsible for endowing the other elementary particles in the universe with mass.
Supercollisions on the horizon?
Russell Working, Chicago Tribune
5 August 2007
The project staggers the imagination: a machine that would stretch 20 miles through the bedrock 400 feet beneath Kane, DuPage and perhaps Will Counties. It could help physicists discover mysterious forces of the universe and new dimensions in the fabric of space and time.
But there are other mysteries to resolve before the first spade is turned for a proposed, multibillion-dollar International Linear Collider scientists hope to center under Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory's Batavia campus.
At Fermilab, the race is on for the "god particle"
Dennis Overbye, The New York Times
24 July 2007
In 1977, Steven Weinberg, then two years shy of the Nobel Prize in Physics, decided to do a little of what some theorists call "ambulance chasing."
He heard a rumor, while spending a year at Stanford, that collisions at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory were spitting out weird triplets of particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons. Dr. Weinberg canceled reservations at a lodge in Yosemite National Park to spend the weekend with his colleague Benjamin Lee, trying to concoct a theory to explain the trimuons.
How to get fewer scientists
Gene Sperling, The Washington Post
24 July 2007
President Bush told cancer researchers gathered at the National Institutes of Health in January that we need to "make sure that our scientists are given the tools and encourage young kids to become scientists in the first place." Yet his administration's stingy NIH budgets over the past five years and its threat last week to veto the appropriations bill giving the NIH a small funding boost sound more like components of a Discourage Future Scientists Act.
Beyond the standard model with the LHC
John Ellis, Nature
18 July 2007
Whether or not the Large Hadron Collider reveals the long-awaited Higgs particle, it is likely to lead to discoveries that add to, or challenge, the standard model of particle physics. Data produced will be pored over for any evidence of supersymmetric partners for the existing denizens of the particle 'zoo' and for the curled-up extra dimensions demanded by string theory. There might also be clues as to why matter dominates over antimatter in the Universe, and as to the nature of the Universe's dark matter.
Surgeon General Sees 4-Year Term as Compromised
Gardiner Harris, The New York Times
11 July 2007
Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona told a Congressional panel Tuesday that top Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to weaken or suppress important public health reports because of political considerations.
Down the rabbit hole
The Economist
28 June 2007
"Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!" So muttered the White Rabbit just before he plunged into Wonderland, with Alice in pursuit. Similar utterances have been escaping the lips of European physicists, as it was confirmed last week that their own subterranean Wonderland, a new machine called the Large Hadron Collider, will not now begin work until May 2008. This delay may enable their American rivals to scoop them by finding the Higgs boson - predicted 43 years ago by Peter Higgs of Edinburgh University to be the reason why matter has mass, but not yet actually discovered.
Quantum scoop: the holy grail of particle physics may already have been found.
James Owen Weatherall, Slate
4 June 2007
Some call the Higgs boson the Holy Grail of particle physics. As the only undetected element of the field's theoretical masterpiece - the "standard model" - the Higgs guarantees a Nobel Prize for the experimenters who find it first. Now the European Union has spent an estimated $8 billion to build the world's largest particle accelerator, the large hadron collider, to finally track it down.
Masters of the universe
Robin McKie, The Observer
27 May 2007
The size of London's Circle Line and engineered to one-billionth of a metre accuracy, the £3bn, 27km circular proton accelerator deep beneath the Swiss-French border is the world's largest machine. And it's been built to uncover the smallest fragments of the cosmos. Robin McKie travels to Geneva to meet the scientists determined to prove the existence of the God particle
A giant takes on physics' biggest questions
Dennis Overbye, The New York Times
15 May 2007
300 feet below Meyrin, Switzerland - the first thing that gets you is the noise.
Physics, after all, is supposed to be a cerebral pursuit. But this cavern almost measureless to the eye, stuffed as it is with an Eiffel Tower"s worth of metal, eight-story wheels of gold fan-shape boxes, thousands of miles of wire and fat ductlike coils, echoes with the shriek of power tools, the whine of pumps and cranes, beeps and clanks from wrenches, hammers, screwdrivers and the occasional falling bolt. It seems no place for the studious.
Particle physicists hunt for the unexpected
Sarah Tomlin, Nature Magazine (registration required)
8 May 2007
Most physicists at Illinois-based Fermilab, home to the world's most powerful particle collider, share a dream. They hope against hope that the Tevatron will find the long-sought Higgs particle before the much more powerful Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN — the European particle-physics laboratory outside Geneva, Switzerland — comes along in a year or so and eats their lunch. Bruce Knuteson, though, has a fear. What if the LHC finds something even more exotic than the Higgs —and the tell-tale traces of that novelty turn out to have been lurking, unrecognized, in Fermilab's data for years?
Onwards and upwards
The Economist
8 March 2007
Not content with spending around $10 billion on a shiny new collider at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory in Geneva, physicists are now campaigning for its successor. The International Linear Collider (ILC), as the machine is dubbed, would cost a mere $8.2 billion, according to its backers. Ray Orbach, the head of America's Office of Science, gave a warning last month that, although he supports the project, it is too expensive to build rapidly. The first data to come from such a collider would probably not emerge until the mid- to late-2020s.
Higgs may fly
The Economist
8 March 2007
Bumblebees cannot do it. Fly, that is. Or so physics is said to have shown. That the insects routinely become airborne demonstrates the shortcomings of some theoretical accounts of the world. Particle physics is in a similar state. The Standard Model that scientists have devised to describe the building blocks of nature is incomplete. One failing is the lack of a proven explanation for the existence of mass. Finding exactly what bestows this vital property on matter is the quarry of a global hunt.
Higgs boson: glimpses of the god particle
Anil Ananthaswamy, New Scientist
2 March 2007
If the blips in the debris of the Tevatron particle smasher really are signs of the Higgs boson then it's not what we expected. It might mean that it's time to replace the standard model with a more complex picture of the universe
Closer to god: Fermilab makes solo top quarks
Alexander Hellemans, Scientific American (requires purchase or subscription)
March 2007
The world's biggest accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics near Geneva, will come on line in a few months. Even so, for the next few years it may have a hard time upstaging the Tevatron collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Ill., which appears to have generated "single" top quarks. The finding, reported last December, helps to narrow the search for the long sought after Higgs particle and raises the possibility that Fermilab will find it before the LHC does.
Fermilab will stay open
Andre Salles, The Beacon News
16 February 2007
Thanks to a newly passed budget resolution, it looks like Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory will not have to shut down for a month after all.
Shrinking Higgs brings optimism to US lab
Jenny Hogan, Nature Magazine (registration required)
9 January 2007
Physicists shooting to find the Higgs boson the particle thought to endow all others with mass have seen their target move, again. A new measurement of the mass of another subatomic particle, the W boson, has lowered the predicted mass of the Higgs.
CDF precision measurement of W-boson mass suggests a lighter Higgs particle
Kurt Riesselmann, Fermilab
8 January 2007
Scientists of the CDF collaboration at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced today (January 8, 2007) the world's most precise measurement by a single experiment of the mass of the W boson, the carrier of the weak nuclear force and a key parameter of the Standard Model of particles and forces. The new W-mass value leads to an estimate for the mass of the yet-undiscovered Higgs boson that is lighter than previously predicted, in principle making observation of this elusive particle more likely by experiments at the Tevatron particle collider at Fermilab.
Congressional budget delay stymies scientific research
William J. Broad, Dennis Overbye, and Andrew C. Revkin, The New York Times (requires membership or purchase of article)
7 January 2007
The failure of Congress to pass new budgets for the current fiscal year has produced a crisis in science financing that threatens to close major facilities, delay new projects and leave thousands of government scientists out of work, federal and private officials say.
A message from the director: continuing resolution
Pier Oddone, Fermilab Today
5 January 2007
In December, Congress passed the third "continuing resolution" or "CR" to fund the federal budget for fiscal year 2007 at the 2006 level. Also in December, the incoming chairs of the House and Senate appropriations committees stated their intent to pass a "joint budget resolution" for the remainder of the fiscal year. The committee chairs were careful not to specify the level of the joint funding resolution and explicitly stated their intent to mitigate as much as possible the adverse consequences that would result from such resolution. However, there has been broad speculation that the result may be a continuing resolution at the FY06 level for the remainder of the FY07 fiscal year. This would have very negative effects on many federally funded programs throughout the country, including the physical sciences and Fermilab.