Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

While visiting friends and family over the holidays, I was surprised by the number of people asking how I am paying for graduate school. Lots of loans? Not a lot of people know, so I thought I’d share: attending graduate school in a hard science is typically free. ...

Dennis Overbye, the New York Times reporter with a physics degree from MIT and the newspaper’s local LHC expert, wrote a nice essay about the joy of doing physics. In it, he goes through the usual question of why anybody but physicists should care about the LHC. ...

The attempted terror attack on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit was basically the same flight I had taken less than two weeks prior on my way home from CERN. Already my least favorite part of international collaboration was traveling by air...

[Sorry if this is a little dry compared to my usual posts, but this is more of a news report for the HEP community.] Last time I mentioned the INSPIRE system as an exciting development in high energy physics literature databases (no, that’s not an oxymoron). ...

Well, someone ought to keep feeding the beast on the holiday, so I will do it. Lots of people are taking a well-deserved rest this week, but the world of high-energy physics does keep motoring along...

While this won’t catch the as much press as the LHC’s upcoming steps towards a physics run, but there are big changes coming up in 2010 to the way high energy physics literature is organized. Th...

It’s that time of year again. This past Friday the CERN theory group had its annual Christmas party, featuring its unique brand of silliness: the CERN-TH Christmas play. ...

Yesterday, the LHC collided its last particles for 2009. It has been an exciting end to the year, and the beginning of a new era in particle physics. The collider and all the experiments have proven that they work very well, and are ready for the first physics run...

CERN is closing and turning off the heat for two weeks starting this Saturday. This is the typical annual closing – mostly done to save money. In France/Switzerland, electricity costs about three times as much in winter months compared to other months. ...

Seth here, I have an apartment lined up now, but I’m still living at the Guest House at Lawrence Berkeely National Laboratory while I wait to move in. ...

The successful restart of the LHC ranks #9 on Time magazine’s list of the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2009. That’s not bad considering that the LHC only had its first collisions last week and is still some time away from having the integrated luminosity to make big discoveries. De...

I’ve been reading a lot of the comments to the blogs and realized that it’s a little unclear what physicists mean when we say we’ll find the Higgs. All the bloggers have posted pretty event display plots which are a visual representation of what we get in the detector. You ...

Hi everyone. With lots of exciting successes with the LHC startup, I thought it would be good to teach everyone a bit about Feynman diagrams...

Now that the LHC is really operating, the machine and the science are very much in the news again. Most of the coverage is quite positive (including some very nice words in our local press), but I have to take issue with the tone of an article that appears in today’s New York Times. ...