Headline, July 03 2022/ ''' '' CERN REVOLUTION COSM '' '''

''' '' CERN REVOLUTION

 COSM '' '''

PHYSICISTS ARE TALKING ABOUT REVOLUTION : Tantalizing hints precede results, as CERN collider resumes its operations.

WHERE DOES THE UNIVERSE COME FROM? WHY IS IT made of matter rather than antimatter? What is the ''dark matter'' that suffuses cosmos? How does the Higg particle itself have mass?

Physicists hoped that some answers would materialize in 2010, when the large collider was turned on. Nothing showed up except the Higgs - in particular no new particle that might explain the nature of dark matter. Frustratingly, the Standard Model remained unshaken.

IN April, scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, outside Geneva, once again fired up their cosmic guns, the Large Hadron Collider.

After a three - year shutdown for repairs and upgrades, the collider has resumed shooting protons - the naked guts of Hydrogen atoms - around its 17-mile electromagnetic underground racetrack. Early next month, the collider will begin crashing these particles together to create sparks of primordial energy.

AND SO the great game of hunting for the secret of the universe is about to be on again, amid new developments and refreshed hopes for particle physicists. Even before its renovation, the collider had produced hints that nature could be hiding something spectacular.

Mitesh Patel, a particle physicist at Imperial College of London who conducts an experiment at CERN, described data from his previous runs as ''the most exciting set of results I've seen in my professional lifetime.''

A decade ago, CERN physicists made global headlines with the discovery of the Higgs boson, a long-sought particle that imparts mass to all the other particles in the universe. What is left to find?  Almost everything, optimistic physicists say.

When the CERN collider was first turned on in 2010, the universe was up for grabs. The 27-kilometer collider, the biggest and most powerful ever built, was designed to find the Higgs boson.

That particle is the keystone of the Standard Model, a set of questions that explains everything scientists have been able to measure about the subatomic world.

But there are deeper questions about the universe that the Standard Model does not explain.

Physicists hoped that some answers would materialize in 2010, when the large collider was first turned on. Nothing showed up except the Higgs - in particular, no new particle except that might explain the nature of dark matter. Frustratingly, the Standard Model remained unshaken.

The collider was shut down at the end of 2018 for extensive upgrades and repairs. According to the  current schedule, the collider will now run until 2025 and then shutdown for two more years for further extensive upgrades.

Among the recent set of upgrades are improvements to the giant detectors that sit at the four points where the proton beams collide and analyze the collision debris. Starting in July, those detectors will have their work cut out for them.

The protons beams have been squeezed to make them more intense, increasing the chances that protons will collide at the crossing points - but creating confusion for the detectors and computers in the form of multiple spray particles that need to be distinguished from one another.

''Data's is going to be coming in at a much faster rate than we've been used to,'' Dr. Patel said. Where once only a couple of collisions occurred at each beam crossing, now there would be more like five.

''That makes our lives harder in some sense because we've got to be able to find the things we're interested in amongst all those different interactions,'' he said. '' But it means there's a bigger possibility of seeing the thing you are looking for.''

Meanwhile a variety of experiments have revealed possible cracks in the Standard Model - and have hinted at a broader, more profound theory of the universe. These results involve rare behaviours of subatomic particles whose names are unfamiliar to most of us in the cosmic bleachers. 

TAKE the muon, a subatomic particle that became briefly famous last year. Muons are often referred to as fat electrons; they have the same negative electrical charge as an electron but are 207 times as massive.

''Who ordered that?'' the physicist Isador Rabi said when the muons were discovered in 1936.

Nobody knows where muons fit in the grand scheme of things. They are created by cosmic ray collisions - and not in collider events - and they decay radioactively in microseconds into fizz of electrons and the ghostly particles called neutrinos.

Last year, a team of some 200 physicists associated with the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois reported that muons spinning in a magnetic field had wobbled significantly faster than predicted by the Standard Model.

The discrepancy from theoretical predictions came in the eighth decimal place of the value of parameter called g-2, which described how the particle responds to a magnetic field.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on The Universe, Big Bang, CERN and the Experiments, continues. The World Students Society thanks author Dennis Overbye.

With respectful dedication to the Scientists, and Researchers at CERN. See Ya all prepare and register for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society - for every subject in the world : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

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