CERN Press Release - Particle Chameleon Caught in the act of Changing

31 May 2010

Geneva, 31 May 2010. Researchers on the OPERA experiment at the INFN[1]’s Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy today announced the first direct observation of a tau particle in a muon neutrino beam sent through the Earth from CERN[2], 730km away. This is a significant result, providing the final missing piece of a puzzle that has been challenging science since the 1960s, and giving tantalizing hints of new physics to come.

The neutrino puzzle began with a pioneering and ultimately Nobel Prize winning experiment conducted by US scientist Ray Davies beginning in the 1960s. He observed far fewer neutrinos arriving at the Earth from the Sun than solar models predicted: either solar models were wrong, or something was happening to the neutrinos on their way. A possible solution to the puzzle was provided in 1969 by the theorists Bruno Pontecorvo and Vladimir Gribov, who first suggested that chameleon-like oscillatory changes between different types of neutrinos could be responsible for the apparent neutrino deficit.

Several experiments since have observed the disappearance of muon-neutrinos, confirming the oscillation hypothesis, but until now no observations of the appearance of a tau-neutrino in a pure muon-neutrino beam have been observed: this is the first time that the neutrino chameleon has been caught in the act of changing from muon-type to tau-type.

Antonio Ereditato, Spokesperson of the OPERA collaboration described the development as: “an important result which rewards the entire OPERA collaboration for its years of commitment and which confirms that we have made sound experimental choices. We are confident that this first event will be followed by others that will fully demonstrate the appearance of neutrino oscillation".

"The OPERA experiment has reached its first goal: the detection of a tau neutrino obtained from the transformation of a muon neutrino, which occurred during the journey from Geneva to the Gran Sasso Laboratory,” added Lucia Votano, Director Gran Sasso laboratories. “This important result comes after a decade of intense work performed by the Collaboration, with the support of the Laboratory, and it again confirms that LNGS is a leading laboratory in Astroparticle Physics”.

The OPERA result follows seven years of preparation and over three years of beam provided by CERN. During that time, billions of billions of muon-neutrinos have been sent from CERN to Gran Sasso, taking just 2.4 milliseconds to make the trip.  The rarity of neutrino oscillation, coupled with the fact that neutrinos interact very weakly with matter makes this kind of experiment extremely subtle to conduct.  CERN’s neutrino beam was first switched on in 2006, and since then researchers on the OPERA experiment have been carefully sifting their data for evidence of the appearance of tau particles, the telltale sign that a muon-neutrino has oscillated into a tau-neutrino. Patience of this kind is a virtue in particle physics research, as INFN President Roberto Petronzio explained:

“This success is due to the tenacity and inventiveness of the physicists of the international community, who designed a particle beam especially for this experiment,” said Petronzio. “In this way, the original design of Gran Sasso has been crowned with success. In fact, when constructed, the laboratories were oriented so that they could receive particle beams from CERN”.

At CERN, neutrinos are generated from collisions of an accelerated beam of protons with a target. When protons hit the target, particles called pions and kaons are produced. They quickly decay, giving rise to neutrinos. Unlike charged particles, neutrinos are not sensitive to the electromagnetic fields usually used by physicists to change the trajectories of particle beams. Neutrinos can pass through matter without interacting with it; they keep the same direction of motion they have from their birth. Hence, as soon as they are produced, they maintain a straight path, passing through the Earth's crust. For this reason, it is extremely important that from the very beginning the beam points exactly towards the laboratories at Gran Sasso.

‘This is an important step for neutrino physics,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “My congratulations go to the OPERA experiment and the Gran Sasso Laboratories, as well as the accelerator departments at CERN. We’re all looking forward to unveiling the new physics this result presages.”

While closing a chapter on understanding the nature of neutrinos, the observation of neutrino oscillations is strong evidence for new physics. In the theories that physicists use to explain the behaviour of fundamental particles, which is known as the Standard Model, neutrinos have no mass. For neutrinos to be able to oscillate, however, they must have mass: something must be missing from the Standard Model. Despite its success in describing the particles that make up the visible Universe and their interactions, physicists have long known that there is much the Standard Model does not explain. One possibility is the existence of other, so-far unobserved types of neutrinos that could shed light on Dark Matter, which is believed to make up about a quarter of the Universe’s mass.

[1] Italy's national nuclear physics institute, INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare), supports, coordinates and carries out scientific research in subnuclear, nuclear and astroparticle physics and is involved in developing related technologies. The institute operates in conjunction with universities and is involved in the wider international debate as well as in cooperation programs. The Institute was established by physicists in Milan, Padua, Rome and Turin on 8 August 1951with a view to pursuing and furthering the research started by Enrico Fermi's team of researchers during the 1930s. In over 50 years, INFN has gradually extended and currently includes thirty detachments, four national laboratories and a data processing centre. Furthermore, the area outside Pisa is host to the gravitational observatory EGO, jointly developed by INFN and the French national research centre. As many as 5000 contribute to the institute's endeavours; 2000 of whom are directly employed by it, 2000 university staff and more than one thousand among students and scholarship holders.

[2] CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. India, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.

Source: IPM.ir

The first two months at 3.5 TeV per beam

2 June 2010

Geneva 2 June
Two months is a very short time in the life of a major particle physics project, but a lot can happen in that time as the LHC has shown since 30 March. Colliding beams at 3.5 TeV was an important milestone, a start to the LHC physics programme, but it was just a single step on a very long journey. Since then, we’ve lengthened our stride, and are progressing well towards the key objectives for 2010. The next major milestone came on 19 April with a ten-fold increase in luminosity – in other words, the machine started delivering ten times as many collisions to the experiments in a given period of time than had previously been possible. This came about thanks to two simultaneous developments: firstly the number of particles in each bunch was doubled, and secondly the beam size at the interaction point was squeezed down. The term you’ll hear used to describe the beam size at the interaction point is called beta-star, and the smaller the beta, the better. Before squeeze, beta is 11 m at ATLAS and CMS. The ultimate goal is to reduce it to 0.55 m. Today, we’re running with a beta of 2 m. That may not sound very small, and that’s because it’s not the size of the beam: beta is the distance from the interaction point that the beam is twice the size it is at the interaction point. What’s important for physics is that the lower the beta, the smaller the beam at the interaction point. With beta of 2 m, the beam is just 45 microns across at the interaction point, a quarter the width of a human hair, and its cross section is about five times smaller than with a beta of 11 m.
Four weeks of running under these conditions led to significant quantities of data being accumulated by the experiments, and then came the next big step. Over the weekend of 22 May, we started to run with 13 bunches in each beam.
The first collisions on 30 March were done with one bunch per beam, and the ultimate goal is to reach 2808, so there’s still some way to go. Nevertheless, we set a new luminosity record that weekend of 2 ´ 10²⁹. To put that in context, we achieved 10²⁷ on 30 March, the design figure for the LHC is 10³⁴ and the objective for 2010 is to reach 10³².

All this was achieved during physics running, leading to incredible progress being made by the experiments. They have been running with 90% efficiency, a remarkable achievement for devices of such complexity. Billions of collisions have been recorded and successfully dispatched for analysis via the LHC Computing Grid. The rediscovery of the Standard Model, which is necessary before we can confidently say we’re ready for new physics, is well underway. There are even some intriguing observations about the properties of collisions at this new energy. As a measure of their success to date, the experiments have already published or submitted over a dozen papers to peer reviewed journals and conferences based on LHC collision data.

Physics running is interspersed with periods of machine development essential for further progress to be made. As a foretaste of what the experiments can expect over the next two months, the LHC operations team has notched up some impressive results over the last few machine development sessions. The first of these was to inject bunches with more than the LHC’s design intensity and collide them at 450 GeV. There’s nothing new about 450 GeV, but it’s an important milestone nevertheless since the difficulty of colliding bunches increases with intensity. By comparison, adding extra bunches is a relatively easier task. The icing on the cake of last week’s machine development came when design intensity bunches were brought into collision at 3.5 TeV on 26 May.

Behind this great progress is a guiding principle of caution. The masters of ceremony are those responsible for the systems that protect the LHC and the experiments from stray beam particles. Collimators absorb particles that wander from their intended orbits before they can impinge on LHC magnets or sensitive detector elements, while the LHC beam dump system is there to extract the beams safely in case of need. Any increase in intensity has to be approved by the LHC machine protection teams, and progress is incremental. Each increase in intensity, and therefore stored energy in the machine, is a learning process for the machine protection teams and only when they are ready do increases in intensity happen.

With all eyes on the amount of data being delivered to the experiments, it would be easy to overlook some of the pioneering systems that make the LHC possible. When I asked someone in the CERN Control Centre last week about the cryogenics, they replied that it’s working so well they’d almost forgotten it was there. For the operators of the world’s largest cryogenic installation that’s quite a compliment. And for anyone wondering whether large-scale cryogenics may have broader applications, the LHC is proving to be an interesting test case.

The same goes for the vacuum systems. Beam lifetimes of 1000 hours have been posted, which is truly exceptional for any particle accelerator. Of course, we don’t keep beams for that long: there are many reasons why beams are extracted long before they reach their theoretical lifetimes. So far in the LHC, the longest fill for physics has been 30 hours, which well exceeds my expectations for the first months of running.

A lot can happen in two months, and we are well on course to achieving our 2010 objectives for the LHC. The fact that the LHC’s availability for operation is already over 60% is testimony to the skills and professionalism of all those who operate the machine and its supporting infrastructure, and it is perhaps the one statistic that has made all the others possible. As I write, we’ve recently completed a rather frustrating weekend, with a short circuit in a cable terminal of an electrical cabinet stopping us from running. By Monday morning, however, we’d recovered and will resume LHC running tomorrow after a scheduled technical stop. Glitches such as this are a fact of life in a working lab, and do not detract from the fact that we have much to be pleased with from these two months.  As the figures I’ve quoted above illustrate, however, we still have a long way to travel. My congratulations go to all involved with this great scientific adventure.

source: IPM.ir