Lots of Alice Activity in the LHC Wonderland

Welcome to ALICE, a journey to the beginning of the Universe.

ALICE is the acronym for A Large Ion Collider Experiment, one of the largest experiments in the world devoted to research in the physics of matter at an infinitely small scale. Hosted at CERN, the European Laboratory for Nuclear Research, this project involves an international collaboration of more than 1000 physicists, engineers and technicians, including around 200 graduate students, from 105 physics institutes in 30 countries across the world. The ALICE Experiment is going in search of answers to fundamental questions, using the extraordinary tools provided by the LHC:

* What happens to matter when it is heated to 100,000 times the temperature at the centre of the Sun ?

* Why do protons and neutrons weigh 100 times more than the quarks they are made of ?

* Can the quarks inside the protons and neutrons be freed ?

[link to aliceinfo.cern.ch]

a mini big bang?????????

Last Edited by MJ on 08/04/2009 01:35 PM

[link to service-access-data.web.cern.ch]

Always been like that.

I know someone who work there and there preparing for the big experiment: Crashing particles into each other. Don't be affraid by the Gigantic Power Numbers. The result is so small they have to invent detector to see it.

There won't be a black hole that destroy the earth. Only a litlle tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny pouffff. Then years and years of data analysis.

The repair work of LHC has been completed and it is now being prepared to receive a beam of high energy particles, said Pandey, who was selected for the programme through Online Curriculum Center of the International Baccalaureate Organization, where he is registered as an Indian teacher.
hmmmmmmm...
[link to www.indianexpress.com]

I agree mostly.
I just think that there is something going on there right now.
Little bit more than a hunch i should say.

The experiment was scheduled long ago (last year). They had a problem and reschedule for end of august 2009. That probably what's all this activity is about. Running the only thing that will be running at Cern for the next couple of years.

Particle physics is screaming out for a new result pointing the way to the physics that we know must lie beyond the unreasonably successful standard model. We know this physics should be there because of purely particle physics problems, such as the hierarchy problem - why is the weak scale so much lower than the Planck scale, and stable against quantum corrections - but also because cosmological observations such as the matter antimatter asymmetry of the universe and dark matter tell us that new particles and interactions must be out there, perhaps at the energy scale of the LHC.

People aren’t sitting around twiddling their thumbs and just waiting for the machine to turn back on, of course. And none of what I’ve written above is in any way intended as a criticism. Ongoing work at existing experiments (such as those at the Tevatron, for example) is placing new limits (for example the recent claimed exclusion of a Higgs mass between 160 and 170 GeV), and experimentalists are busy refining their techniques for extracting the maximum amount of information from the upcoming LHC data. This is all extremely important work, and certainly very interesting. But it doesn’t change the fact that people really want the LHC.

And it isn’t just pure particle physicists who feel this way. Those of us in particle cosmology have been getting a wealth of data from cosmology for a while now. But this has left us in a position where dark matter and cosmic acceleration are on such a firm footing that more than ever we desperately need to understand how these phenomena fit into our understanding of fundamental physics. The LHC is the next essential tool in this quest. New physics discovered there may have direct implications for cosmology. And if it doesn’t, then proposed theoretical explanations will be constrained by, and may well open up new vistas for, cosmology.
[link to blogs.discovermagazine.com]

Physics as expected is turning on its head.
We know there is corrections that need to be made.
This is opening a door that only a few really know what is behind.