All articles tagged with #cern
CERN has initiated the third long shutdown of the Large Hadron Collider by disconnecting its aging inner triplet magnets. These components, installed between 2005 and 2007, will be replaced by new niobium-tin superconducting magnets that generate fields 40% stronger. This upgrade aims to increase collision rates for the ATLAS and CMS experiments, significantly boosting data collection for fundamental physics research.
CERN’s CMS and ATLAS experiments have found no evidence of microscopic black holes in recent proton collisions, but they have significantly narrowed the energy range where such objects could exist. Using 138 inverse femtobarns of data from 2016-2018, CMS excluded semiclassical black holes below 9.0 to 11.4 TeV, while ATLAS’s 2022-2024 data excluded models up to 9.4 TeV. These null results, achieved through new machine learning techniques, constrain theories involving extra dimensions and help resolve the hierarchy problem by eliminating viable parameter spaces for quantum gravity.
Physicists with CERN's ATLAS collaboration found strong evidence that Z bosons produced in Higgs decays remain quantum-entangled, rejecting a nonentangled alternative at 4.7 sigma (just shy of the 5-sigma discovery threshold). By analyzing the Z bosons’ spin states via four-lepton decays and angular distributions, the result supports Standard Model predictions and demonstrates entanglement at the electroweak scale with massive, short-lived particles. This extends collider tests of quantum information to new regimes and could sharpen future precision tests as more Run 3 and High-Luminosity LHC data become available.
Physicists at CERN used the Large Hadron Collider to collide oxygen nuclei with protons, recreating the birth of cosmic ray air showers in the lab. Analyzing the resulting particle sprays with the ATLAS detector, they achieved tenfold-precision measurements that challenge existing models and help determine the hydrogen versus heavier-element makeup of cosmic rays, shedding light on their origins; results are published in Physical Review Letters.
CERN plans to migrate over 2,200 specialized computers from Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Debian 13 to avoid obsolescence as newer RHEL releases drop older hardware and require newer CPUs. The switch could save on massive IT replacement costs, but it faces hurdles due to CERN’s custom hardware needing specific drivers and bootloaders, and the lack of a standard Debian-based automation workflow—leading engineers to explore provisioning solutions like Debusine.
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is being upgraded to the High-Luminosity LHC to collect about ten times more data and intensify the search for dark matter, the unseen component that makes up a large portion of the universe. Scientists hope to test theories beyond the Standard Model as the lab ponders even larger next-gen projects like the Future Circular Collider, while India’s researchers continue playing a significant role in CERN’s ecosystem.
CERN announced at MiniDebConf that it is leaving its long-time RHEL/CentOS/SciLinux stack in favor of Debian, citing hardware obsolescence tied to the -march=x86-64-v2 flag. The transition aims to have about 2,200+ industrial and embedded systems running Debian 13 by the end of 2026, though onboarding faces tooling gaps for automated builds and multi-version package management.
Physicists at CERN demonstrated quark-gluon plasma can be created with much smaller nuclei—oxygen-16 and neon-20—than previously thought, pushing the lower size limit for this primordial state and offering new insight into the universe’s first moments.
CERN’s ALICE experiment used incoherent J/ψ photonuclear production to probe local gluon density fluctuations inside lead nuclei, scanning with momentum transfer to resolutions from 0.6 to 0.2 femtometers. The data show a suppression of J/ψ production at the smallest scales with about 3-sigma significance, challenging traditional nuclear shadowing and aligning with the gluon-saturation picture predicted by quantum chromodynamics, revealing densely packed gluon states inside nuclei.
The article catalogs nine of the costliest science projects ever undertaken—ISS, Apollo, Large Hadron Collider, Human Genome Project, Curiosity rover, Skylab, Manhattan Project, NEPTUNE, and the Very Large Array—outlining their price tags, aims, and outcomes, and noting their lasting impact and ongoing upgrades or decommissioning as science’s big bets continue to drive discovery.
Crews are lowering 10 million pounds of steel into a former South Dakota gold mine for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). A 43-foot beam weighing about 15,890 pounds travels upright in a 4.5-foot-wide cage down the Ross Shaft 4,850 feet to form the two massive cryostats that will house 17,000 tons of liquid argon each. With more than 2,100 components needing to fit through the narrow shaft, the descent—done dozens of times this summer—is a critical, tightly choreographed step toward first neutrinos in 2031.
India’s six-decade partnership with CERN puts it at the center of the LHC upgrade and the global hunt for dark matter, with Indian labs contributing to magnet systems, cryogenics, detectors and high-performance computing that underpinned the Higgs boson discovery and will push physics beyond the Standard Model as CERN restarts after a $1.5B upgrade in 2030.
After 18 years of discoveries, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider enters Long Shutdown 3 to be upgraded into the High-Luminosity LHC (HiLumi LHC). The upgrade will boost luminosity by about ten times, enabling more detailed data on the Higgs boson and other subatomic phenomena. The renovation includes major overhauls to magnets and infrastructure, with a gradual restart beginning in 2028 and full operation by 2030, marking a new era in particle physics research.
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has entered a four-year Long Shutdown 3 to upgrade into the High-Luminosity LHC, which will raise collision rates by about tenfold and enable roughly 380 million Higgs bosons over its lifetime. The upgrade, which involves replacing thousands of magnets and other components, aims to deliver a much larger data set to probe the Higgs, dark matter, and the early universe. Operations are slated to resume in 2030 and continue into the 2040s, after which a new, higher-energy accelerator may replace it.
Physicists at CERN traced a time-evolving resonance inside the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) that quietly degrades particle beams. Using a four-dimensional Poincaré surface-of-section, they map fixed harmonic lines that predict where particles cluster, revealing the hidden ‘ghost’ and offering strategies to dampen its effects and guide the design of future accelerators.