Quantum Diaries

Posts Tagged ‘Fermilab’

Revolutionary muon experiment to begin with 3,200-mile move of 50-foot-wide particle storage ring

Wednesday, May 8th, 2013

Fermilab

This Fermilab press release came out on May 8. Read the original press release.

A model of the truck that will be used to transport the Muon g-2 ring, placed on a streetscape for scale. The truck will be escorted by police and other vehicles when it moves from Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York to a barge, and then from the barge to Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. Credit: Fermilab

Scientists from 26 institutions around the world are planning a new experiment that could open the doors to new realms of particle physics. But first, they have to bring the core of this experiment, a complex electromagnet that spans 50 feet in diameter, from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York to the DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.

The experiment is called Muon g-2 (pronounced gee-minus-two), and will study the properties of muons, tiny subatomic particles that exist for only 2.2 millionths of a second. The core of the experiment is a machine built at Brookhaven in the 1990s, and the centerpiece of that machine is a circular electromagnet made of steel and aluminum, 50 feet wide, with superconducting cable inside.

“It costs about 10 times less to move the magnet from Brookhaven to Illinois than it would to build a new one,” said Lee Roberts of Boston University, spokesperson for the Muon g-2 experiment. “So that’s what we’re going to do. It’s an enormous effort from all sides, but it will be worth it.”

While most of the machine can be disassembled and brought to Fermilab in trucks, the massive electromagnet must be transported in one piece. It also cannot tilt or twist more than a few degrees, or the complex wiring inside will be irreparably damaged. The Muon g-2 team has devised a plan to make the 3,200-mile journey that involves loading the ring onto a specially prepared barge and bringing it down the East Coast, around the tip of Florida and up the Mississippi River to Illinois.

The ring is expected to leave New York in early June, and land in Illinois in late July. Once it arrives, the ring will be placed onto a truck built just for this purpose, and driven to Fermilab in Batavia, a suburb of Chicago. The land transport portions on both the New York and Illinois ends of the trip will occur at night—to minimize traffic delays—and the truck will only travel, at most, 10 miles per hour. On the New York end, the trip from Brookhaven Lab’s gate to the departure port should take one night. The complete trip from the Illinois port to Fermilab should take two consecutive nights.

“The transport of the ring from Brookhaven to Fermilab is a great example of the cooperation that exists between national laboratories,” said James Siegrist, associate director of science for high-energy physics with the U.S. Department of Energy. “The Muon g-2 experiment is an important component of the future of particle physics in the United States.”

Once at Fermilab, the storage ring will be used to hold muons created in the laboratory’s accelerators. Muons “wobble” when placed in a magnetic field, and based on what we know about the universe, scientists have predicted the exact value of that wobble. An experiment using the same machine at Brookhaven in the 1990s saw evidence for – though not definitive proof of – a departure from that expected value.

“Fermilab can generate a much more intense and pure beam of muons, so the Muon g-2 experiment should be able to close that margin of error,” said Chris Polly, project manager for Fermilab. “If we can do that, this experiment could indicate that there is exciting science awaiting beyond what we have observed.”

The experiment is scheduled to begin taking data in 2016.

“The ring is a wonder of scientific engineering,” said William Morse of Brookhaven. “We’re extremely proud of it, and excited to see it used in this next-generation experiment.”

Tags: Fermilab, muon g-2
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Supernovae light the way to dark energy

Monday, April 29th, 2013

Fermilab

This article originally appeared in Fermilab Today on April 26, 2013.

Images from the Dark Energy Camera before (left) and after (right) a supernova explosion in a galaxy about 2 billion light-years away.

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration has captured images of 176 star explosions, called supernovae, including 16 that occurred farther than 7 billion light-years away and when the universe was only about half as old as it is today. A new type of CCD detector contained in the Dark Energy Camera enabled identification of the distant supernovae, making DECam about 10 times more sensitive than other optical cameras to the long-wavelength (red and near-infrared) light coming from these very distant explosions. This improved sensitivity will allow the DES collaboration to find more supernovae from this period in the history of the universe than any other project.

Our current understanding is that the universe is made up of about 70 percent dark energy and that this dark energy is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate. Measuring Type 1a supernovae is a way to study dark energy. The fainter the observed explosion, the further away it is, similar to the difference in brightness between nearby and distant candles. As the light of the explosion travels to us, it is stretched by the expansion of the universe and becomes redder. By combining the measured brightness and information about how much the light is stretched, cosmologists can calculate the expansion rate of the universe.

The Dark Energy Survey collaboration includes scientists, postdocs and graduate students from around the world, who worked together to build the camera, collect the images and identify the supernovae described in this result.

The amount and wavelength of a supernova’s light determines its age and type. Researchers use filters that divide optical light into four separate parts, with each filter allowing only certain wavelengths to pass through. We know these 16 supernovae are about 7 billion light-years away because most of the light was observed with the filter that allowed only the reddest light to pass through and be measured by the special red-sensitive detectors in the camera. Less sensitive cameras require time-consuming follow-up observations to determine the supernova age.

To search for supernovae, the DES observers take images of the same patch of sky every four to seven days. Then they subtract the images from each other and search for differences. Computers and teams of people looked at thousands of sets of DECam images to find the 176 candidate supernovae. So far five of the candidates have been followed up, and all five were confirmed to be type 1a supernovae.

The Dark Energy Survey will measure more than 3,000 type-1a supernovae in the next five years and provide new information about the mysterious nature of dark energy. For more information, see the Dark Energy Survey website.

–Brenna Flaugher

Tags: Cosmic Frontier, dark energy, Dark Energy Survey, Fermilab
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Dark-matter search results from CDMS II silicon detectors

Monday, April 15th, 2013

Fermilab

This article first appeared in Fermilab Today on April 15, 2013.

Scientists around the world are working to understand the nature of dark matter, which accounts for most of the mass of the universe. The earth seems to be moving through a cloud of dark-matter particles that encompasses the visible parts of our galaxy. We should be able to sense this dark matter if we can deploy detectors that are sensitive to the ‘billiard ball’ scatter of a dark matter particle from an atomic nucleus inside these detectors.

Experimental upper limits (90 percent confidence level) for the WIMP-nucleon spin-independent cross section as a function of WIMP mass. The black dotted line is from the present analysis, and the blue solid line includes previous CDMS II silicon-detector data. Also shown are limits from the CDMS II germanium-detector standard and low-threshold analyses (dark and light dashed red), as well as limits from the XENON collaboration (dark and light dash-dotted green). The magenta oval shows a possible WIMP signal region proposed to explain data from CoGeNT. The light and dark blue regions indicate the 68 percent and 90 percent contours obtained if the present result were to be interpreted as a WIMP signal. The asterisk shows the maximum likelihood point under this interpretation.

The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) experiment was designed to do exactly that, using germanium and silicon detectors cooled to very low temperatures in order to detect the electric charge and heat liberated by single dark-matter particle collisions with nuclei and distinguish them from the messier interactions created by normal matter.

At the American Physical Society April meeting in Denver, the CDMS collaboration presented on Saturday its blind-analysis results from data taken with silicon detectors during CDMS II operation at the Soudan Underground Laboratory. Kevin McCarthy, a graduate student from MIT, presented the results, which were submitted to Physical Review Letters.

The blind analysis resulted in three candidate events. Although this number is higher than the expected background of roughly half an event, this is far from a discovery. Simulations of the known backgrounds indicate that a statistical fluctuation could produce three or more events about 5 percent of the time. In other words, if the experiment were done 100 times, five of them would show at least three events in the signal region even if dark-matter particles did not exist.

However, there is more information on the characteristics of the expected background events and the expected signals from weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, which are the favorite particle explanation for dark matter. A likelihood analysis that includes the measured recoil energies of the three events yields a 0.19 percent probability for the background-only hypothesis when tested against a model that includes a WIMP contribution. This translates into roughly a 3-sigma confidence level for the hypothesis that the three events are due to WIMP interactions. This is exciting but still does not meet the scientific standard for a discovery. Further investigations are necessary.

Nevertheless, if one indulges in a “what if” scenario and interprets the result as due to a WIMP signal, the WIMP mass would be around 8.5 times the mass of a proton. For the simplest theories of WIMP interactions and using the Standard Model for dark-matter distribution in our galaxy, the rate found for such interactions is in some conflict with the current results from the XENON experiments. The paper presents more details.

In 2010, the CDMS collaboration published results on dark-matter searches with germanium detectors, which resulted in two events in the signal region and an estimated background of 0.8 events. The conclusion at the time was that these events were likely leakage surface electrons rather than true nuclear recoils, and other experiments have not found any signals in this mass region.

The SuperCDMS Soudan experiment is currently taking data with larger, and better, germanium detectors, and hopes to shed additional light on low-mass WIMPs before the end of the year. The collaboration is considering the use of silicon detectors in future experiments.

—Dan Bauer, Deputy Director, Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics

Tags: CDMS, Center for Particle Astrophysics, Cosmic Frontier, Fermilab
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Springfield gets its own super collider

Thursday, October 11th, 2012

Fermilab

Until last evening I thought that The Simpsons game for iPhone and iPad was just another overrated little game. Your task is to rebuild Springfield after an explosion obliterates Homer’s power plant. The game is supposed to be an interesting, easy-going distraction, but it evolves at too slow a pace (unless you are willing to spend money on it, which I am not) and lacks the much-appreciated humorous punch that characterizes the show.

Or so was my impression until, out of the blue, Professor Frink shows up and asks for nothing less than a new … super collider. Lisa, as a citizen reluctant to spend the taxpayers’ money, asks, “What about the LHC at CERN?”, but Frink argues that’s not powerful enough. So I decide that my Springfield will have its very own super collider and then I find out the new super collider’s building looks like Fermilab’s Wilson Hall. Now, THAT was a Simpsons punch!

Check out the screen shots below.

–Marcelle Soares-Santos

Tags: Fermilab, popular science, super collider, television
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Second muon experiment receives Mission Need approval from DOE

Wednesday, September 19th, 2012

Fermilab

This article first appeared in Fermilab Today on Sept. 19, 2012

This rendering shows the location of the proposed Muon Campus at Fermilab. The arrow points to the proposed site of the planned Muon g-2 experiment. Image: Muon Department/FESS

Fermilab’s plans for creating a Muon Campus with top-notch Intensity Frontier experiments have received a big boost. The Department of Energy has granted Mission Need approval to the Muon g-2 project, one of two experiments proposed for the new Muon Campus. The other proposed experiment, Mu2e, is a step ahead and already received the next level of DOE approval, known as Critical Decision 1.

“We now are officially on DOE’s roadmap,” said Lee Roberts, professor at Boston University and co-spokesperson for the roughly 100 scientists collaborating on the Muon g-2 (pronounced gee minus two) experiment. “This should make it easier to increase the size of our collaboration and foster international participation. Potential collaborators supported by the National Science Foundation or foreign funding agencies will be happy to see that we now have DOE’s official Mission Need approval.”

At present, the Muon g-2 collaboration includes scientists from institutions in China, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and Russia as well as 16 institutions in the United States. Physicists from several institutions in the United Kingdom are in the process of joining the collaboration.

The new Muon Campus at Fermilab will consist of the reconfigured Antiproton Source, which will provide high-intensity muon beams, and two new buildings, which will host the Muon g-2 and Mu2e experiments. The new buildings will be located south of Wilson Hall, between the Booster accelerator and the former Antiproton Source.

“The design of the buildings has progressed a lot,” said Chris Polly, project manager for the Muon g-2 experiment. “We hope to break ground for the Muon Campus by the end of the calendar year.”

The Muon g-2 experiment will be more sensitive to virtual or hidden particles and forces than any previous experiment of its kind. It will measure with high precision a quantity known as the muon magnetic moment. A previous measurement, made with an experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory, yielded a surprise when it produced a result seemingly inconsistent with the magnetic moment predicted by theory. If confirmed, the discovery would open a window on subatomic interactions that go beyond the particles and forces described by the Standard Model.

Since the publication of the final Brookhaven results in 2004, scientists have worked diligently to refine theoretical predictions and devise an experiment that will yield a more precise measurement. Experimenters turned to Fermilab, which is the only laboratory in the world that currently has the capability to make high-intensity muon beams that meet the experiment’s requirements.

Fermilab is reconfiguring the Debuncher ring, part of the former Antiproton Source, to create high-intensity muon beams for the Muon g-2 experiment. Earlier this year, a team of scientists successfully circulated the first muons in the Debuncher. Photo: Reidar Hahn

The Muon g-2 plans include the transportation of a 50-foot-diameter ring with a set of one-of-a-kind superconducting magnets from Brookhaven to Fermilab. The circular ring would be transported by a special truck and barge to Illinois and then by truck to Fermilab. Project managers are beginning to work with transportation specialists and local authorities on the details of this endeavor. The truck would move at about 5 mph at night, with escort from police and transportation experts.

To prepare for the Muon g-2 experiment, a group of scientists led by Mary Convery of Fermilab’s Muon Department already tested the production and capture of muons with Fermilab’s former Antiproton Source earlier this year. They slammed protons from the Main Injector into a target to create sprays of secondary particles, including muons.

“The team succeeded in capturing and circulating muons in the Debuncher at the energy of 3.1 GeV,” Convery said. “We were able to gain valuable experience with these muon beam studies before the accelerator complex was shut down in April to make upgrades to the accelerators for NOvA.”

Another group of scientists is advancing plans for the state-of-the-art particle detectors that are necessary to measure the muon magnetic moment. In June, DOE recognized Fermilab’s Brendan Casey with an award to support parts of those R&D efforts.

“The Muon g-2 detector group is well established,” said Muon g-2 co-spokesperson Dave Hertzog of the University of Washington. “There are lots of interesting aspects that students can work on. This is a really exciting time for the collaboration.”

The second proposed muon experiment, Mu2e, received CD-1 approval last month (see Fermilab Today, July 20, 2012). It will explore another property of muons predicted by theory, the transformation of muons into electrons.

Tags: Fermilab
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It’s “nus” to me about these experiment names

Thursday, August 2nd, 2012

Fermilab

When arriving at Fermilab, one of the first people I spoke to was a graduate student in the g-2 collaboration.

“What’s it like working on Gee Two?” I asked.

“Gee MINUS Two, you mean,” the grad student responded to me wearily, like he’d been through this before.

I hope he could forgive my confusion of a subtraction sign for a more commonplace hyphen, but it got me thinking, all these experiment names are a bit confusing to pronounce sometimes.

There are MicroBooNE and MiniBooNE, whose last two capitalized letters almost seem like a prompt to shout “NEH!” at their termini. There’s the dark-matter experiment COUPP, where I think even those involved are unsure if those two p’s are procedurally pronounced or not.

Even the spelling of the neutrino experiment NOvA, which seems fairly straightforward, presents some challenges. That lowercase v in the middle? It’s not one: instead, it’s a Greek letter masquerading as a Latin character, the lone actor on a stage full of Romans. The letter ν, Romanized nu and shaped like a v, is the symbol for neutrinos, hence its appearance in the name. So begins the confusion: is it NOvA or NO”nu”A?

To set the record straight, if you see a nu – also to be seen in MINERvA – just assume it’s a v and carry on with your day.

But then comes Mu2e to further confuse the situation. It too contains a Greek letter – mu, which stands for muon – yet this time it’s spelled out and Romanized. Perhaps it’s because μ’s shape is agonizingly close to that of the Latin u, and most people can’t be bothered to tell the difference. So to prevent people from saying “You 2 e” and mistaking a sophisticated physics experiment for an outtake of Purple Rain, we may as well spell it out.

Also inconsistent is NuMI – there’s that dastardly nu again, this time also Romanized – but I suppose those folks have the same reasoning as with Mu2e. They probably don’t want people calling it “VEE EM EYE” or, worse, “vmee.”

Keep in mind that all these names stand for something. Mu2e stands for “muon to electron,” which is simple enough. MicroBooNE stands for “Booster Neutrino Experiment, Micro-scale.” Contrast that with MiniBooNE, which officially stands for “Booster Neutrino Experiment, Petite Size.” When did “petite” join the metric scale? NOvA is also uncanny, standing for “NuMI Off-axis Electron Neutrino Appearance.” That’s right, an acronym containing another acronym. A meta-acronym. Crazy stuff.

If you’re still sent on a dizzying spiral regarding the proverbial alphabet soup of acronyms, it’s better than it used to be. Experiments used to be named in a simple E- three digit number format. Imagine carrying on a conversation – “E-345 isn’t happy with E-296’s reluctance to read the papers coming out of E-103.” At least we’ve a little creativity now.

To keep up with all of these names, here are a few rules:

- Pronounce the name in the simplest way possible, with the fewest syllables. So yes, the last E in MicroBooNE and MiniBooNE is silent, despite its capitalization.
- If it looks like a mathematical symbol, it probably is.
- You see a nu, you know what to do.
- Almost every experiment name out there is an acronym. If you want to know what they stand for, it’s a fun game to try to guess before Googling it.

Now you are armed to tackle just about any experiment name we at Fermilab can throw at you. For other labs, you’re on your own. Good luck and keep watching the “nus.”

—Joseph Piergrossi

Tags: Fermilab
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What fills space?

Wednesday, July 25th, 2012

Fermilab

This article first appeared in Fermilab Today on July 25.

If you follow the news about physics, you might think that physicists don’t know what they are talking about when it comes to space.

I am not talking about the mysteries of outer space, or cataclysms like black holes. I mean ordinary space itself, the inner space between particles everywhere—what we used to call empty space or vacuum. What’s in it? Sometimes we hear that atoms are “mostly empty space.” Now we read in the papers that the newly discovered Higgs field “fills all of space” and “gives particles mass,” that it acts like a kind of space-filling “molasses,” or that it’s like a space-filling crowd of groupies hanging on as a celebrity’s posse.

On the other hand, astronomers tell us that space is expanding. Last year, the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for the discovery that the cosmic expansion is speeding up. Scientists think that this acceleration is propelled by what they call “dark energy,” which fills and refills that ever-expanding void of intergalactic space. Cosmological space is said to be expanding in some places (between galaxies) and not expanding in others (such as Brooklyn, to choose Woody Allen’s example).

It gets even worse if you dig deeper. For example, the Higgs field is much weirder than the comparisons with molasses or crowds suggest, since it does not actually drag or impede particles, but still somehow shares its mass with them.

Stranger still, consider another space-filling field that also adds mass to everyday substances, in a way different from the Higgs field. The gluons of the strong nuclear force field create most of the mass of atoms through the energy of their incessant motion inside tiny bubbles of space that we call protons and neutrons. Since the mass-giving gluons are immune to the Higgs field, they have no mass themselves, but only add energy because of their motion. Moreover, they are held inside those bubbles by a gluon field that fills empty space everywhere between the bubbles…in just those places in space where the added mass isn’t.

Space is the first concept of physics we all learn as little kids, yet it is entangled with some of the deepest mysteries confronting physics. Confusing, koan-like paradoxes about space are not just pablum: They reflect a real and profound disparity of descriptions, at a deep level of mathematics, about what defines a vacuum, a position, a particle or a time.

It may be that all the space of the universe began, and may end, dominated by the energy of the vacuum, an expanding space devoid of particles. It may be that when examined over very short time intervals, space as we know it does not even exist, but dissolves into a cloud of quantum indeterminacy: It may never sit still, but constantly seethe in microscopic motion. It may be that space has many more than three dimensions on very small scales, while there may be only two truly independent dimensions on large scales. It may even be that all of these exotic possibilities actually apply in the real world.

At Fermilab, we are working on experiments including the Dark Energy Survey, the Holometer and the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider that will probe these ideas in very different ways. If you want to find out more—watch this space!

—Craig Hogan, Director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics

Tags: accelerating universe, expansion of the universe, Fermilab, Higgs field, quantum physics
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Director Emeritus Leon Lederman departs Fermilab

Monday, June 11th, 2012

Fermilab

Fermilab Director Emeritus Leon Lederman sits in front of Wilson Hall. Photo: Reidar Hahn

This article first appeared in Fermilab Today on June 8, 2012.

Fermilab’s Leon Lederman is leaving the laboratory that he served for ten years as its director and for many more as an internationally renowned physicist and science education pioneer.

The directorate is hosting a farewell reception for Lederman today at 3 p.m. on the 2nd-floor crossover. He leaves Batavia, Ill. for Driggs, Idaho. His last day at the lab is Monday, June 11.

Lederman’s early award-winning research in high-energy physics brought him into national science policy circles and in 1963 he proposed the idea that became the National Accelerator Laboratory. In 1977 Lederman led the team that discovered the bottom quark at Fermilab. The following year he was named director and his administration brought Fermilab into its position of scientific prominence with the achievement of the world’s most powerful superconducting accelerator, the Tevatron. He served as director until 1989.

Lederman is the recipient of some of the highest national and international honors bestowed to a scientist. His awards include the 1965 National Medal of Science and the 1972 Elliott Cresson Medal, given by the Frankin Institute. In 1982 he received the prestigious Wolf Prize, an annual prize given by the Wolf Foundation in Israel. He received the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the muon neutrino and was honored with the Enrico Fermi Award in 1992. And just this year, he was recognized for his distinguished scientific career with the 2012 Vannevar Bush Award, given to exceptional lifelong leaders in science and technology.

Lederman advocated for math and science education and for outreach to the neighboring communities. He initiated the Saturday Morning Physics lectures and subsequently founded the Friends of Fermilab, the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, and the Teacher’s Academy for Mathematics and Science.

Driving the next magnet revolution

Monday, June 4th, 2012

Fermilab

This article first appeared in Fermilab Today on May 22.

Tengming Shen was awarded a DOE Early Career Award to develop a high-performance superconducting material for accelerator technology. <em>Photo: Reidar Hahn</em>

Over the years, engineers have found ways to cram more and more transistors onto a single integrated circuit. As a result of these improvements, they have been able to pack more computing power into smaller machines.

In much the same way, the key to developing better high-energy particle accelerators has been building increasingly powerful magnets to put inside them.

The Department of Energy recently presented an Early Career Research Award to Fermilab scientist Tengming Shen, a 2010 Peoples Fellow working to spur the next magnet revolution.

DOE awarded Shen $500,000 per year for five years for his research into engineering high-field superconducting materials for advanced accelerator technology. If his team succeeds, the work could pave the way for the construction of high-field superconducting magnets for future accelerators such as Fermilab’s proposed muon collider, for energy upgrades of the Large Hadron Collider and for the development of new medical imaging devices.

Shen’s strategy is to search for a better magnet-making material. Scientists currently use two niobium-based materials, NbTi and Nb₃Sn.

“You have to go into a territory that’s new,” he said.

Shen works with superconducting magnets, which conduct electricity without resistance when cooled below a certain temperature. This reduces the amount of energy required to power them and allows them to achieve higher magnetic fields.

To reach this point in his research, Shen has collaborated with other scientists in the Very High Field Superconducting Magnet Collaboration, a partnership among U.S. national laboratories, universities and members of superconductor industry.

Fermilab’s Tevatron was the first particle accelerator to use niobium-titanium superconducting magnets. Before superconducting magnets, scientists had used iron or copper magnets, which required large amounts of electricity and, when used with insufficient cooling, tended to melt.

Fermilab founder Bob Wilson purchased as much niobium-titanium as he could, and Fermilab scientists developed a process for building large superconducting magnets. Members of industry eventually adopted the technology to mass-produce magnets used in MRI machines, now found in most hospitals. The major particle accelerators that have followed – the LHC at CERN, HERA at DESY and RHIC at Brookhaven National Laboratory – all depend on this technology.

Scientists cooled magnets in the Tevatron with liquid helium to 4.2 Kelvin; they reached a magnetic field strength of 4.3 Tesla. The scientists who built the Large Hadron Collider cooled their magnets with superfluid liquid helium to an even colder 1.9 Kelvin and almost doubled that performance to 8.3 Tesla. Fermilab and other U.S. laboratories have recently developed new technology using niobium-tin, Nb₃Sn, which scientists hope will help them make the jump to 12- to 13-Tesla magnets.

The next step, according to Shen, is to push the limit of superconducting magnet technology by exploring new materials beyond the niobium family. This would allow scientists to more than double the energy reach of the LHC without increasing the size of the accelerator, he said.

Shen plans to study a group of high-field superconductors, in particular Bi₂Sr₂CaCu₂O_x. He expects he could use this material to build magnets with a reach of up to 50 Tesla.

Even better, the new material could be used to construct 1- to 5-Tesla magnets that operate at higher temperatures. Whereas current superconducting magnets must be cooled with liquid helium, Shen’s magnets could potentially be cooled with a simpler refrigeration unit.

“Helium is very expensive,” Shen said. “There are many places like Africa, India and China that would like to develop cryogen-free devices.”

The development of high-temperature superconductors could eventually lead to better power lines, faster computers and more energy-efficient transportation, Shen said.

“There are many superconducting materials and many more to be discovered,” he said. “The whole world could be superconducting.”

—Kathryn Grim

Tags: DOE, Fermilab, superconducting magnets
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Grab Your Computer, Grab Your Headphones, and Pop the Popcorn

Sunday, October 2nd, 2011

Richard Ruiz

Update I: Included Medicine Award (Oct 03)

Update II: Included Physics Award (Oct 04)

… it’s Nobel Week! October means three things: Halloween (duh), Fall, and Nobel Week, the week during which the famed prizes are awarded to those who have “conferred the greatest benefit on mankind” [1]. Okay, before I get comments about the subjectivity of those who award the prizes, I gladly admit that the history of the prize is not without controversy relating to those who have & have not won, in both the science and non-science categories.

I am just going to ignore all of that and talk about why everyone should be excited about this week. Though before I talk about this week’s Nobels, I feel I should probably give the SparkNotes version of the prizes’ history.

Figure 1: The 2008 Chemistry Prize was awarded for the discovery and development of green fluorescent protein (GFP), which when inserted into a soon-to-be parent is passed onto an offspring who can then glow green. Glowing cat!
(Image: The Nobel Foundation)

[1] http://www.nobelprize.org/alfred_nobel/will/will-full.html

A Brief History of Alfred Nobel

Figure 2: Alfred Nobel. (Image: The Nobel Foundation)

The year is 1866, the Second Industrial Revolution is raging, innovation is surging, and the US Civil War over.

Insert Alfred Nobel: A son of a successful engineer who developed controlled explosives for the demolition and mining industries. The younger Nobel, unsurprisingly, decided be a chemist after playing with nitroglycerin in a French laboratory. As a public service announcement, I should probably mention that nitroglycerin is very dangerous and is a principle ingredient in dynamite. In fact, Nobel was so convinced that nitroglycerine had useful application in construction that he decided to invent dynamite. Needless to say, dynamite made Nobel a very, very, very rich man. At the end of his life, he decided to endow, with the bulk of his fortune, a set of prizes to recognize those who have contributed greatest in the Fields of Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Literature, and Peace. Economics, though not stipulated in the original will, was added later and is funded separately.

Figure 2: The chemical structure of nitroglycerin. This stuff is wicked; the physical chemistry behind its structure worth a gander. Consider this an advertisement to go earn a chemistry degree. (Image: Wikipedia)

What Makes a Prize

The Nobels has come a long way since they were first instituted. Most notably, they no longer are awarded for the greatest discovery or invention from the past year; the prizes now award those results with the most lasting influence and impact. Take last year for example. The 2011 award for Physiology or Medicine went solely to Sir Robert Edwards for having developed in vitro fertilization. You would think something that is, in every sense of the word, responsible for the existence of millions of people would have been awarded long, long ago. I mean, that is what went through my mind last October. Therein lies the novelty of the Nobel Prizes: These days, the awards are given to what seem like common knowledge, because in some sense they are. What one has to realize though is that prior a laureate’s discovery or invention, these ideas and concepts just did not exist. Imagine a world in which no one knew of insulin (Nobel 1923). Weird, no?

This brings me to why Nobel Week is so much fun. Sometimes you know quite a bit about the award-winning discovery and so you get to spend the day reading news articles and science blogs learning all about the topic’s history. Werner Forssmann’s invention of the cardiac catheter (Nobel 1953) has a hysterical history that is well worth a read. At other times, you have no idea what the award citation even means, but you just know it is worth spending a few minutes or even a few hours learning. I mean, why else would a Nobel be awarded? Take, as another example, 2008′s Physics prize. The award citation reads:

“… for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics,” [2]

and

“for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry
which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.” [2]

Yup, it is a mouthful and probably seems a bit obtuse. That is, until you start looking up Wikipedia or news articles (or Quantum Diaries!), and realize how amazingly awesome these discoveries are. I mean, sure discovering spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) sounds nice and fancy but did you know that is why the bosons in the Standard Model of Physics have the masses they do?!? SSB, when applied specifically to the Electroweak bosons (photon, W, & Z) is the Higgs Mechanism, and when applied to fermions, is what generates the higgs boson. SSB is an established scientific fact and is also the driving force behind superconductivity (Nobel 1972) Whether or not the higgs boson exists, however, is completely different story.

Figure 3: The quark sector of the Standard Model of Particle Physics and their discovery dates. (Image: Nobel Foundation)

So back in 1977 a Fermilab team, led by Leon Lederman, discovered the bottom quark (Nobel 1988), and in 1995, the CDF & DZero Tevatron experiments discovered the top quark. Ever wonder how we knew to look for them in the first place? It was because of something called the CKM matrix. It was introduced as a way of organizing the the different ways particles in the Standard Model could interact and decay. However, as gorgeous as this new organization was, in order to work the CKM matrix required the existence of two new quarks. Well guess what, Fermilab found those two quarks and set the Standard Model in stone.

The 2009 Nobel Prizes are equally impressive. Half the prize was awarded for the development of fiber optics, which is the foundation of modern telecommunications, and something called Charged-Coupled Devices (CCD). What took me a few hours to learn is that if you take this sensor, attach a flashbulb, a battery, and maybe a memory card, you get a digital camera. In other words, half the 2009 prize was awarded for inventing the digital camera. The prize winners were simply trying to develop a better way of storing data and inadvertently created an entire industry. A fun fact: the first transistor (Nobel 1967) was made of paperclips. If you are curious about what makes transistors so important, take apart your computer and take a peek. (Please, make sure the computer is unplugged before opening it.)

[2] http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2008/

Does Every Major Discovery/Invention Get a Prize?

No. First off, Nobel Prizes are no longer awarded posthumously. Secondly, from my discussions about this issue, there seems to be a consensus there may be a limit to what is & is not awarded when it comes to the sciences. Now the Swedish Academies always reserve the right to set a new precedent, however, it is unlikely that any organizations will be awarded a Nobel in science categories anytime soon. (This is the complete opposite for the Peace Prize, of course.) What does this all mean? Well, the top quark was a pretty heavy discovery and is well worth its weight in gold, at least in my opinion. However, to whom would you award the prize? No single person at the CDF experiment can justly say she or he discovered the quark; it was a team effort and all CDF personnel can proudly state she or he helped discover the quark.

“Which of the Gang of Six, if the higgs boson is discovered, should get the Nobel, if at all?” is an honest, open question and is well above my pay grade. A similar statement could be made about Supersymmetry.

Turning Nobel Week into Fun-bel Week

Now for the fun part. So during this week, pick your favorite subject, which of course is physics, and go figure out what the whole big hubbub is. Depending on your timezone, this may either be with your morning coffee or afternoon tea. In any case, it is an excuse to learn something new!

Alternatively, you can check back here Tuesday afternoon (Madison/Chicago time) because I am sure many of us will be commenting on the latest news.

This Week’s Schedule

Live Video Player here.

Physiology or Medicine – Awarded for the discovery of the innate and adaptive immune systems! Okay, really this is great. The human body has evolved to be inherently immune to certain pathogens. The human body, in its resourcefulness, can also adapt and become immune to pathogens. The end result is that when the two are combined and wait a few hundred thousand years, you get us!

Physics – Awarded for discovering that expansion rate of the universe, is itself increasing. The universe expands, Edwin Hubble discovered that decades ago. Today’s award winners discovered that the universe expands at an accelerating rate! Bravo!

Chemistry – The prize will be announced on Wednesday 5 October, 11:45 a.m. CET [5:45 am CDT/Chicago].

Peace – The prize will be announced on Friday 7 October, 11:00 a.m. CET [5:00 am CDT/Chicago].

Economics – The prize will be announced on Monday 10 October, 1:00 p.m. CET [7:00 am CDT/Chicago].

Literature – To Be Announced

Regardless of the outcome, I would love to read everyone’s thoughts and speculations before and after the awards!

Happy Colliding

- richard (@bravelittlemuon)

Tags: @bravelittlemuon, Alfred Nobel, chemistry, CKM, Economics, Fermilab, Higgs, Literature, Medicine, Nitroglycerin, nobel, October, physics, Physiology, Quarks, SSB, TooManyTags, top quark, Transistor
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A Brief History of Alfred Nobel

What Makes a Prize

Does Every Major Discovery/Invention Get a Prize?

Turning Nobel Week into Fun-bel Week

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