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1.1.11

LHC plans extra year for Higgs hunt : Nature News

Published online 10 December 2010 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2010.667

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LHC plans extra year for Higgs hunt

Collider may run right through 2012 to find elusive particle.

Geoff Brumfiel

ATLAS cavern, installation of Muon chambersThe extra year could be enough for the ATLAS detector to spot the Higgs particle.Claudia Marcelloni / CERN

Scientists are preparing to run the world's largest particle accelerator for an extra year in a bold bid to find the Higgs particle, part of the mechanism that is thought to endow other particles with mass.

If the plan is implemented, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, will run until the end of 2012 — rather than 2011 — before entering a year-long shutdown for a major upgrade. Preparations for the extended run, which would see the 27-kilometre circular collider operating over three continuous years, are being finalized and are likely to be agreed to by CERN's management and council in January.

The decision comes with the belief that new discoveries may be just around the corner. "It would be a shame to stop," says Steve Myers, who is responsible for maintaining and upgrading the accelerator.

“It would be a shame to stop.”

Steve Myers
CERN

At stake is the particle many physicists see as the LHC's raison d'être: the Higgs. Theorists believe that the Higgs particle, together with its associated field, create a sort of cosmic molasses that endows other particles with mass. The mechanism is seen as a necessary extension to the 'standard model' of particle physics, which presently struggles to explain the origins of mass, and why some particles are heavy whereas others weigh nothing at all.

Higgs hunt

Initially, there were doubts about whether the LHC would be able to find the Higgs at the machine's current energies. Since a major accident in 2008, the LHC has been running at half its design energy. CERN managers had planned a 15-month pause in data collecting at the start of 2012, which would allow the machine to be upgraded to full power.

But now there is a growing consensus that the LHC will be able to cover most of the territory in which a standard Higgs particle might be found, even if it isn't upgraded. The best guess of most physicists is that the Higgs weighs somewhere between 114 and 600 gigaelectronvolts (109 electronvolts), according to Sergio Bertolucci, CERN's director for research and computing. Its mass will determine how the particle decays — and how easily it can be detected.

“If we stop the machine with 3,000 people apiece in the experiments waiting for data, there is no way we could get home at night without having slashed tyres on our cars.”

Sergio Bertolucci
CERN

Paradoxically, a heavier Higgs might be easier to spot, Bertolucci says. That's because the heavy Higgs is likely to decay into pairs of rare, heavy particles known as W and Z bosons. Pairs of Ws or Zs would stand out sharply against the other particles created in LHC collisions. If the Higgs were lighter, its signature would blend into the background, making it much harder to detect and requiring physicists to amass and filter through data from months of collisions.

Despite the challenge, Bertolucci says that he is "very optimistic" that the LHC can cover most of the ground over which the Higgs is expected to be found. The machine has performed exceptionally well since the 2008 accident, and he thinks that it will be able to deliver the quantities of data needed over the 2011-12 running period. In addition, he says, managers think that they can collide particles at 8 teraelectronvolts (TeV; 1012 electronvolts), up from the current 7-TeV energies, but still well below the machine's 14-TeV design energy.

Pushing it

Physicists working on the detectors built to find the Higgs are backing the plan. "My personal opinion is that we should put all the cards on the table," says David Francis, a physicist on the ATLAS detector, one of two giant detectors primarily designed to spot the elusive particle. "The experiments are going well, the accelerator is going well," adds Joe Incandela, a physicist at the University of California at Santa Barbara and deputy spokesman for the CMS detector, the second main detector for Higgs hunting. "Let's really push it to where we can get a meaningful data set to do lots of physics."

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Bertolucci says that there are also political reasons to extend the run. The world's second most powerful accelerator, the Tevatron at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, is nipping at the LHC's heels, and if it continues to run, might beat the larger accelerator to the Higgs. Moreover, European plans for high-energy physics, as well as a global plan for a next-generation linear collider, are facing big decisions in the coming years and will be greatly influenced by the LHC's results.

But keeping the machine running for an extra year will have consequences. The delicate alignment of the LHC's superconducting magnets could suffer, requiring extra maintenance, says Myers. And additional computing resources will have to be found to handle the flood of extra data produced by the detectors.

Managers recognize the difficulties, but Bertolucci says they have strong incentives to extend the run: "If we stop the machine with 3,000 people apiece in the experiments waiting for data, there is no way we could get home at night without having slashed tyres on our cars."

The decision will be discussed at a meeting in the French town of Chamonix in late January, and should be finalized shortly after. 

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  • #16683

    Extending its run through 2012 will enable the LHC to play a timely role the predicted end of history on Dec. 21, 2012, as specified in the Mayan calender. Hopefully, we'll all laugh about this in 2013. There remain, however, disturbing and unrefuted scientific reasons to believe that CERN's in-house safety report was a PR whitewash and that the LHC, by potentially generating destructive strangelets and black holes, may be capable of causing global harm.

    International critics groups recently released two extensive and well-documented reports that undermine CERN's safety claims (at LHC-Concern.info and HeavyIonAlert.org). Given the acknowledged uncertainties and planetary stakes, it is unethical for the LHC experiments to proceed – particularly when there is no outside oversight or regulation.

  • #16690

    Why cannot we grasp that mass is more fundamental than pure energy (i.e. its mass is equal to zero)? Pure energies, for example photons, are the excitations of the Einstein spacetime – this spacetime has the MASS DENSITY NOT EQUAL TO ZERO. In the Everlasting Theory, the ground state of the Einstein spacetime is a gas composed of the non-rotating binary systems of neutrinos. Photons are the rotational energies of the binary systems. Vortices of energy transform into mass in the Einstein spacetime because rotational energy decreases local pressure in the Einstein spacetime – from it follows that the binary systems flow into regions with lower pressure. Such inflows increase local mass density so also mass – such is origin of the famous Einstein formula m=E/c^2. This formula is not valid for pure energy in truly empty volume. Photons cannot move in truly empty volume. Energy is an attribute of mass.
    The energy equation applied in the Special Theory of Relativity shows that even energy of a mathematical point moving with infinite speed IS EQUAL TO ZERO. Such points cannot lead to photons so also to mass. Higgs bosons are not in existence.

  • #16730

    Yes. The Higgs does exist.

    "Despite being rather majestic, Boltzmann's deep integration of probabilities into science was adopted by quantum mechanics. It was attacked from the start. The most basic line of attack at the time of Boltzmann's formulation of a statistical interpretation of the thermodynamics was his use of the never-before-seen-measured microscopic "atoms of molecules". Remember Boltzmann advanced his ideas some fifty years before the recognition of atoms by scientist such as Sir J.J. Thomson and Lord Rutherford. Boltzmann's critics were formidable, the finest physicists at the time. Ernst Zermelo, Ernst Mach, and Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald attacked Boltzman relentlessly. Not because his viewed time as one-way, but because he had the audacity to suggest matter was made of atoms. This group became known as the Vienna Circle of "Logical positivists" and insisted that Science could be conducted only when all the objects of study were seen and understood. Their main objection to Boltzmann was that there was no means of verifying the existence of atoms and molecules, whose behavior lay at the foundation of Botzmann's probability-based version."
    -Into the Cool (Energy, Flow, Thermodynamics and Life)

  • #16743

    is it a race to find higs
    or is it about who is finding it?

    I mean whoever finds it it will cost tax payers a lot searching at 2 places at the world for the same thing.

    I'm guessing the who part is more important, instead of its energy value; because that's how prestigious people are. I hope they can prove tax payers wrong on it, as it has cost a lot so far.

  • #16744

    @ Robert

    Robert, in order for anyone to take this kind of thing seriously, you'd have to demonstrate why there is a difference between collisions created in a particle accelerator versus the much higher energy collisions that are caused by cosmic rays in the atmosphere every day.

    The LHC cannot ever hope to reach the energies of these kinds of collisions, and they've been going on for billions of years, without any catastrophes.

    This is why I roll my eyes when I hear about these 'dangers' of the LHC and other colliders.

  • #16784

    @John Cunningham,
    John,
    No catastrophic incidents? What about "our" own universe and perhaps the infinitive number of other universes that might have been created due to collisions of cosmic particles? Who knows? As space-time is infinitive, "catastrophes" happen forever simply said. When our lights go out one day, who cares about the cause?

  • #16792

    The recent evidence of fourth generation of quark and neutrinos virtually excludes the finding of unique Higgs boson. It's just wasting money of tax payers and risking their lives for nothing.

  • #16815

    The safety argument equating the LHC beams with "cosmic rays in the atmosphere," reprised above by John Cunningham, was admitted to be invalid by CERN itself. In fact, CERN's 2008 public safety report states that "collisions at the LHC differ from cosmic-ray collisions with astronomical bodies like the Earth..." (Par. 7). A crucial difference is velocity, for the magnetically focused head-on collisions at the LHC could slow some of the products to below escape velocity to plague us. Thus, in regard to neutral microscopic black holes, CERN admits: "Those produced by cosmic rays would pass harmlessly through the Earth into space, whereas those produced by the LHC could remain on Earth" (CERN, Safety of the LHC, 2008, Par. 7).

    The higher energies of some cosmic rays would result in a faster exit of the products, which may contribute to the dark matter of the galaxy. The cosmic ray argument was relocated in 2008 to dense neutron stars and white dwarfs, but flaws were found in the new argument as well (see Sec. 4 of paper by German astrophysicist Rainer Plaga at http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.1415v3 ). Moreover, astrophysicists believe that neutron stars consist in part of strange matter, the outcome critics fear for Earth from strangelet production at the LHC.

  • #16837

    Amazing, To put so,so much emotional energy into an outcome that tires and children would be slashed by others in the experiment of no experiment should someone embodied in the process should mis-step or default to a natural position of stasis within the compound to save their career.
    The particle "Understands" your positioning and the test has been completed,actually and the resultant flow is only to stage the next scenario by the system operator.
    Have fun boys,deciding who to deplete,and who to save for the final disposition.

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23.12.10

A physics pathway to the Riemann hypothesis

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10.11.10

IBM Launches Five-Year Effort To Develop Quantum Computing | Popular Science

By Rebecca Boyle Posted 11.10.2010 at 2:10 pm 5 Comments

Quantum Computer Courtesy D-Wave

Ramped-up research efforts at IBM and other labs in the U.S. and Europe could lead to more powerful and more prevalent quantum computers in the near future.

IBM is breathing new life into a quantum computing research division at its Thomas J. Watson Research Center, reports New York Times. The computer giant has hired alumni from promising quantum computing programs at Yale and the University of California-Santa Barbara, both of which made quantum leaps in the past year using standard superconducting material.

Groups at both universities have been using rhenium or niobium on a semiconductor surface and cooling the system to absolute zero so that it exhibits quantum behavior. As the Times reports, the method relies on standard microelectronics manufacturing tech, which could make quantum computers easier and cheaper to make.

The Santa Barbara researchers told the Times they believe they can double the computational power of their quantum computers by next year.

Quantum computing uses spooky action at a distance to conduct superfast calculations. Rather than using transistors to crunch the ones and zeroes of binary code, quantum computers store data as qubits, which can represent one and zero simultaneously. This superposition enables the computers to solve multiple problems at once, providing quick answers to tough questions. But observing a qubit strips it of this duality — you can only see one state at a time — so physicists must figure out how to extract data from a qubit without directly observing it. That’s where quantum entanglement comes in handy; two qubits can be connected by an invisible wave so that they share each other’s properties. You could then watch one qubit to see what its twin is computing.

None of this is simple, however; there are several competing methods for making the qubits, including laser-entangled ions, LED-powered entangled photons, and more. Google is working with a Canadian firm called D-Wave that has claimed 50-qubit computers, although skeptics have questioned that number. In most systems, the number of entangled qubits remains small, but Yale researchers believe they will increase in the next few years, the Times says.

Even better: with all this practice, physicists are getting a lot better at controlling quantum interactions. Their precision has increased a thousand-fold, one researcher said. That’s good news for anyone studying quantum mechanics.

[New York Times]

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28.10.10

IBM and Oracle change the game: A surprising alliance on OpenJDK

IBM and Oracle surprised many with their joint announcement on October 11 that they would join forces to advance the OpenJDK project. Most commentators agree that the move, which redefines the Java ecosystem by bringing together two of its biggest players, is good news for the future of Java technology.

More than 60 percent of respondents to a Javalobby poll (600 at last count) said that they believe IBM's decision to co-sponsor the OpenJDK project is good for Java technology. By deciding to focus joint development efforts on OpenJDK, the companies have effectively ended speculation about an IBM-led Java fork, and what it would mean for the multibillion dollar Java industry. With these worries off the table, said Mike Milinkovich of the Eclipse Foundation, "we can get back to innovation."

At the heart of the Oracle-IBM announcement are hard choices made by an industry in flux, from multinational corporations with long-term technology investment to smaller companies and individuals deciding whether to continue developing software on the Java platform. This article presents an overview of the key factors and players involved in, or affected by, the Oracle and IBM decision. At the end of each section, you'll find pointers to web resources that address aspects of the alliance.

OpenJDK as an Oracle-IBM project

OpenJDK is the open source reference implementation for the Java platform; it encompasses Java SE, the Java language, the JDK, and the JRE. OpenJDK specification requests are subject to vote by the Java Community Process. An upcoming vote will determine whether the new proposed OpenJDK roadmap is accepted by the JCP executive committee.

Mark Reinhold, chief architect of the Java Platform Group at Oracle, has stated that IBM engineers working on OpenJDK will probably "contribute primarily to the class libraries, working with the rest of us toward a common source base for use atop multiple Java virtual machines." The two companies will likely continue to work independently on their respective JVMs, "where most of the enterprise-level feature differentiation" is found, he said.

OpenJDK governance?

The OpenJDK project has an interim governance board tasked with creating a constitution for the OpenJDK community. As Simon Phipps has pointed out, the board's status appears to be in limbo as of this writing.

Win some, lose some

The decision to reach out to IBM as an OpenJDK partner was clearly a strategic one for Oracle. Oracle's vice president of software, Adam Messinger, said that the move reflected the pressure on both companies to move quickly and address the challenges posed by evolving multicore hardware. "The agreement is a reflection of the strategic reality we both face," he said.

The OpenJDK alliance de-isolates Oracle, said RedMonk's Stephen O'Grady, effectively affirming and centralizing its role in the Java ecosystem:

If Oracle was going to pick one vendor to stand beside them in their Java efforts, IBM would be the easy choice. Besides the blind trust enterprises place in the firm — "you don't get fired for buying IBM," etc. — Big Blue has an enviable reputation with developers. With IBM now publicly on the same page as Oracle, the latter's task of preserving the ecosystem becomes far, far easier.

It was also a good move for IBM, even accounting for the obvious sacrifice of Harmony. In shifting its engineering resources from Project Harmony to OpenJDK, IBM has solidified its influence on the future of Java technology, albeit clearly under Oracle's stewardship. Both companies have said that they will work together to ensure that the JCP is fortified and enhanced as the primary standards body driving the growth of the Java platform.

Left unresolved are issues of what will happen now to Project Harmony, what the Oracle-IBM alliance means for Google (and by proxy Android), what the OpenJDK alliance (and Google's response) could mean for other vendors in the Java technology space, and how and to what extent the JCP will be reformed.

Further reading: OpenJDK and the Oracle-IBM decision

  • The majority of OpenJDK committers already are employed by Oracle (formerly Sun) and IBM, followed by developers from Google and Red Hat. (Oracle Java/FOSS Ambassador Dalibor Topic has more about this.)
  • IBM's Bob Sutor, vice president of Open Systems and Linux, lays out the reasons for IBM's decision. He addresses both the upside of IBM's improved leverage for ensuring the open source future of Java and the JCP and the upset about the decision's impact on Project Harmony.
  • Stephen O'Grady gives an analyst's insight into the ripple effects of the Oracle-IBM decision across the entire Java ecosystem, including speculation as to why partnering with IBM on OpenJDK was a good move for Oracle.
  • Mark Reinhold explains the thinking behind the new OpenJDK roadmap and its split JSRs.

Back to top

What about Project Harmony?

IBM has been a longstanding backer of Project Harmony, the open source Java runtime developed and licensed by the Apache Software Foundation. To some in the Java community, Harmony has seemed a viable alternative to the official Java platform implementation, should the need arise. Harmony also is seen as a test case for Oracle's position vis-a-vis independent Java implementations and licensing.

Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of open source and Linux®, summed up IBM's decision to redirect its engineers from Project Harmony to OpenJDK, calling it pragmatic:

It became clear to us that first Sun and then Oracle were never planning to make the important test and certification tests for Java, the Java SE TCK, available to Apache. We disagreed with this choice, but it was not ours to make. So rather than continue to drive Harmony as an unofficial and uncertified Java effort, we decided to shift direction and put our efforts into OpenJDK.

While the move leaves Harmony's future uncertain, whether and how the project will evolve is in the hands of developers. IBM's decision "is not a good thing for Harmony" said Harmony creator and Apache board member Geir Magnusson. "But keep it in perspective: For the Apache Foundation, it's up to the community what will be done. We do what the community wants."

Initial reaction to the decision has ranged from variations on "game over (and not just for Harmony)" to the suggestion that parts of Project Harmony could make it into OpenJDK. Some have also speculated that the platform could continue to evolve under the backing of another corporate sponsor; namely, Google.

Further reading: Project Harmony, past and future

Back to top

Google, Android, and the new cold war theory

While Google isn't the only Java technology vendor with a stake in the Oracle-IBM decision, it may be the vendor with the most to lose, or gain, as this story unfolds. Oracle's suit filed against Google in August (claiming multiple counts of patent and copyright infringement related to Android) was a blow to the open source ethos under which the Java ecosystem has thrived. Calls for a Java fork increased following the announcement, and some feared that developers formerly on the fence about Java technology would decamp.

That Project Harmony is without a strong corporate sponsor could be bad for Google (given that Android is built on a subset of Harmony); or it could be very good, if Google chooses to sponsor Project Harmony itself.

Whatever Google's decision, it will affect not just Android, but how vendors view and leverage Java technology in their own implementations. Moreover, as several have pointed out, we may be entering a new cold-war era — with Google, not Oracle, as the outlier.

Further reading: What's next for Google

Back to top

Reforming the JCP

Oracle and IBM have stated that they will work together to reform and enhance the JCP, ensuring that it continues to be the standards body defining the Java platform and language specifications. Oracle reps have affirmed that JCP approval is essential to Java SE development, starting with the upcoming vote on the revised OpenJDK roadmap announced at JavaOne.

Bob Sutor has said that IBM expects to see "long needed reforms in the JCP [...] to make it more democratic, transparent, and open." Some Oracle reps have also hinted not only that JCP reform is under discussion with the executive committee, but that they believe the community will be pleased with the resulting proposal.

Time will tell how the executive committee, and the community at large, respond to proposed JCP enhancements. According to Apache Software Foundation member Stephen Colebourne, the upcoming JCP vote will be an initial test case, however; not just for the revised OpenJDK/Java 7 roadmap, but for how vendors like Red Hat, VMWare, SAP, and Google react to the Oracle-IBM alliance. Colebourne has also proposed a JCP split that would leave Oracle the explicit sole voting power on the specification of the Java core (Java SE, ME, and the JVM, according to Colebourne), while declaring auxiliary libraries a separate province under the direction of a vendor-independent JCP.

Further reading: JCP reform and open source Java

  • Oracle reps Adam Messinger and Henrik Stahl have both hinted that JCP negotiations could please the Java community.
  • For an idea of how members of the JCP executive committee might view JCP reform, see the DZone panel comments from February 2010.
  • Stephen Colebourne has proposed that the upcoming JCP vote could be a measure of where executive committee members stand on the Oracle-IBM decision. (Reporting by Jessica Thornsby for JAXmag online.)
  • Colebourne has also proposed a JCP split.

Back to top

A healthier Java ecosystem?

The Oracle-IBM alliance is widely viewed as a win for Java technology: it both accelerates the OpenJDK project and enables collaboration and resource sharing among a much larger pool of engineers. The move consolidates the energies of two of the industry's most influential forces (by virtue of technology investment and revenue) on its fundamental project, OpenJDK. And it has effectively put an end to speculation about an IBM-led Java fork, which would have done more harm than good to the Java industry as a whole.

In his comments on the alliance, IBM's vice president of emerging technologies, Rod Smith, stressed its stabilizing effects on the Java ecosystem, for developers, for vendors, and for business. "This should remove some of the uncertainty about the future of Java," he said. Danny Coward (formerly of Sun) hailed the alliance as the beginning of a "new era of co-oper-tition," which Oracle's Adam Messinger said would accelerate innovation on the Java platform.

Stability is good, and so is innovation; both are essential to a healthy Java ecosystem. And while stability may rest on the shoulders of giants, innovation in the Java industry has historically been a disruptive force: an arena where small vendors and independent, loosely networked developers count sometimes more than multinational corporations. It's the interplay between those two powerful interests that keeps the Java industry both healthy and honest, and hopefully thriving.

As Fabrizio Giudici (and Gianugo Rabellino) have pointed out there is one final question, and that's the question of freedom; freedom as defined by the Free Software Foundation and codified by open source licenses. That question may yet determine whether the future of Java is founded on one core platform or two, or more.

Further reading: What makes a healthier Java ecosystem?

  • Fabrizio Giudici evaluates shades of gray in his discussion of definitions of freedom — Rabellino's open source versus open standards — and whether an OpenJDK fork would be worth the price.
  • Writing 10 days before the Oracle-IBM announcement, James Governor called disruptive innovation (and open source governance) the rule for the future of Java technology, and no longer the exception.

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About the author

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Athen O'Shea is a high technology editor and writer, and former editor of JavaWorld.com. As a freelancer, he has plied his trade for developerWorks since 2001.

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