Category: Newsletter
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The ALICE ITS upgrade: Pixels for quarks
The ALICE ITS upgrade: Pixels for quarks Introduction ALICE, the heavy-ion dedicated experiment at the LHC, will soon have enhanced physics capabilities with a major upgrade of the detectors, data-taking and data-processing systems which will improve the precision of the extracted characteristics of the high density, high temperature phase of strongly interacting matter, the quark-gluon
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Summer students 2019: A Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious experience
Summer students 2019: A Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious experience Established in 1962, by CERN’s former Director General Victor Weisskopf, the laboratory’s summer students programme welcomed more than 300 undergraduates from all over the world to get a hands-on experience of CERN’s diverse activities. From physics research to software development and from R&D in novel technologies to knowledge transfer,
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Latest results from the Higgs boson couplings to second-generation fermions
Latest results from the Higgs boson couplings to second-generation fermions The discovery of the Higgs boson completes the Standard Model, a very successful theory describing particles of visible matter and their interactions. However, there are still big missing pieces in our fundamental understanding of matter, while certain experimental phenomena point to the existence of new
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ATLAS NSW Upgrade: preparing installation and commission of its first sector
ATLAS NSW Upgrade: preparing installation and commission of its first sector The New Small Wheel (NSW) Upgrade it the most complex and challenging Phase-1 Upgrade project of ATLAS. As all the other upgrade projects for the LHC experiments, the goal is to meet the challenges of the High-Luminosity LHC era and to cope with the
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COMPASS results guiding future exploration of hadron structure in CERN’s North Area.
COMPASS results guiding future exploration of hadron structure in CERN’s North Area. The COMPASS (COmmon Muon and Proton Apparatus for Structure and Spectroscopy) Collaboration at CERN is the most recent one in pursuing the more than 40-years old objective to experimentally elucidate the nucleon’s internal structure, in particular its spin dependence. It uses the M2
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LHCf sheds light on hadronic interaction models
LHCf sheds light on hadronic interaction models The experience of the small LHCf collaboration, matured within the cosmic ray physics community, began in 2004 with the idea of designing a very thin detector to be installed along the LHC beam line, in such a way to cover the so called “very forward region” of the
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Machine learning for new Detector Technologies
Machine learning for new Detector Technologies I have spent a considerable amount of my time as Master student in Physics in the late 70’s performing a fairly prosaic function that nevertheless required the presence of humans (physics professors, trained technicians and of course students): scanning thousands of BEBC pictures with (occasional) neutrino events, a task
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An interview with Nobel Laureate Adam Riess
An interview with Nobel Laureate Adam Riess An interview with Nobel Laureate Adam Riess (Professor of Astronomy and Physics at the Johns Hopkins University) who was jointly awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics, with Saul Perlmutter and Brian P. Schmidt, for discovering the accelerated expansion of the Universe. The acceleration of the universe is
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Nuclear Physics Meets Neutrinos
Nuclear Physics Meets Neutrinos Neutrino beams, such as those currently operating at Fermilab in the USA and J-PARC in Japan, are typically produced by colliding high-energy proton beams with long, thin solid targets. These collisions result in a spray of particles including short-lived hadrons such as pions or kaons. The hadrons are focused using magnetic
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News about the lepton universality anomalies in B decays
News about the lepton universality anomalies in B decays In the Standard Model all leptons are equal. The W and Z bosons as well as the photon couple equally to electrons (e), muons (μ) and taus (τ), a rule that is known as lepton universality. The only exception is the Higgs boson, that couples according