OPERA, ELENA, TOTEM

CERN the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the biggest particle physics laboratory in the world

Tre buone ragioni per parlare del CERN di Ginevra (prendendo per buone le ragioni del lapsus riportate dal ministro  La Russa ieri a Ballarò)

OPERA experiment reports anomaly in flight time of neutrinos from CERN to Gran Sasso

L'esperimento OPERA ha osservato fasci di neutrini viaggiare alla velocità della luce + 20/milionesimi, dal CERN  per 730 km fino al laboratorio del CNR-INFN  sotto il  Gran Sasso.

 Nuovi risultati sono stati presentati via webcast su http://webcast.cern.ch. 
Giornalisti hanno potuto fare domande via  twitter usando il tag #nuquestions, o  via il canale del CERN press office. 
I risultati di questa collaborazione rsono disponibili sul server arxiv.org: http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897.

• The OPERA result is based on the observation of over 15000 neutrino events measured at Gran Sasso, and appears to indicate that the neutrinos travel at a velocity 20 parts per million above the speed of light, nature’s cosmic speed limit. Given the potential far-reaching consequences of such a result, independent measurements are needed before the effect can either be refuted or firmly established. This is why the OPERA collaboration has decided to open the result to broader scrutiny. 
• The OPERA measurement is at odds with well-established laws of nature, though science frequently progresses by overthrowing the established paradigms.
•  “When an experiment finds an apparently unbelievable result and can find no artefact of the measurement to account for it, it’s normal procedure to invite broader scrutiny, and this is exactly what the OPERA collaboration is doing, it’s good scientific practice,” said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci. “If this measurement is confirmed, it might change our view of physics, but we need to be sure that there are no other, more mundane, explanations. That will require independent measurements.”

TOTEM: Quando il protone diventa più grande

 

Un braccio del detector per la misurazione del diametro dei protoni

• The TOTEM experiment at the LHC has just confirmed that, at high energy, protons behave as if they were becoming larger. In more technical terms, their total cross-section – a parameter linked to the proton-proton interaction probability – increases with energy. This phenomenon, expected from previous measurements performed at much lower energy (CERN SppS Collider and the Tevatron), has now been confirmed for the first time at the LHC’s unprecedented energy.

 ELENA: Extra-Low-Energy Antiprotons
la costruzione di ELENA è prevista nel 2013, con i contributi delle principali nazioni industriali.

• Geneva, 28 September 2011. The kick-off meeting for ELENA, the Extra Low Energy Antiproton Ring, starts today at CERN¹. Approved by CERN Council in June this year, ELENA is scheduled to deliver its first antiprotons in 2016. This week’s kick-off meeting brings together scientists from Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, UK and USA.

• “ELENA is a new facility aimed to deliver antiprotons at the lowest energies ever reached in order to improve the study of antimatter,” said CERN’s Stéphan Maury, Head of the ELENA project.
• ELENA will consist of a small new decelerator ring that will be installed in same building that houses CERN’s existing Antiproton Decelerator (AD). It will slow antiprotons down to under a fiftieth of the current AD energy, bringing an improvement of a factor of 10-100 in antiproton trapping efficiency. At the AD, antiprotons have to be slowed down by passing them through a series of foils, a process that results in the loss of some 99.9% of the antiprotons extracted from the AD before they reach the experiments
• “This is a big step forward for antimatter physics. Going to extra low energy increases the trapping efficiency for antiprotons, which will not only improve the research potential of existing experiments, but will also allow CERN to support a wider range of antimatter experiments,” said Walter Oelert, an antimatter pioneer at CERN, who has actively supported the ELENA project.
• Ever since the Nobel Prize winning discovery of antiprotons in 1955, these particles have proved to be an important research tool. In the 1980s, they played a pivotal role in the discovery of the W and Z particles at CERN, which also led to a Nobel Prize.
• CERN’s achievements with low-energy antiprotons include the trapping and accumulation of large numbers of antiprotons in the early 1990s, which led to very precise comparisons of protons and antiprotons. In 1995, the first antiatoms - antihydrogen - were created at CERN, opening the way to new experiments on antimatter and, more recently, the trapping of antihydrogen atoms. One experiment at the AD has also made preliminary studies of the potential for using antiprotons in cancer therapy. In the future, experiments will make detailed comparisons of hydrogen and antihydrogen atoms, and measure the influence of gravity on antiprotons.
• Construction of ELENA is scheduled to begin in 2013, in parallel with AD running. When complete in 2016, ELENA will be able to support more experiments than the AD can today, giving CERN - a laboratory best known for the high-energy frontier of particle physics - a grandstand seat at the low-energy frontier.