CERN Accelerating science

Read the paper: EXO-11-005

Once upon a time, the only thing that traveled faster than the speed of light was gossip.

Thanks to the Internet, the whole physics world was watching on Friday when Dario Autiero, of the Institut de Physique Nucléaire de Lyon in France, in front of a palpably skeptical roomful of physicists, put a whole new category of speed demons on the table, namely the shadowy subatomic particles known as neutrinos.

Over the course of 16.5 hours ending Wednesday, Sept. 14, the CMS experiment recorded 113.4 inverse picobarns of data, more than three times the 36 inverse picobarns it recorded in all of 2010. The detector's data-taking efficiency was impressively high.

CERN was a special guest this year at the famous Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria. The theme of this year’s festival 'Origin — how it all begins' relates to the diverse research carried out at CERN.

The Top quark is the heaviest of the six quarks of the Standard Model and was discovered only 16 years ago by the Tevatron experiments at Fermilab.

Read the paper: SUS-11-003

The analysis shows no excess of events over the Standard Model expectations. As a result, exclusion limits were placed on searches for squarks and gluinos in the Constrained Minimal Supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model (CMSSM).

It is well known that CERN is an open laboratory, welcoming visitors from around the world on a daily basis. Often these visits are organised by schools or colleges, or are simply part of a family vacation to the Geneva area.

The latest results from the Large Hadron Collider serve as a reality check for expectations that radical scientific discoveries are just around the corner. A month ago, folks were buzzing about prospects that the elusive Higgs boson might soon be found.

The Higgs boson, the most sought-after particle in all of physics, is proving tougher to find than physicists had hoped. [...]