ScienceInsider

by Eli Kintisch

The secretive JASON group of academic physicists have given a thumbs up to the current program of refurbishing nuclear warheads in the U.S. stockpile instead of building new, more reliable ones. The report should bolster efforts by the Obama Administration to keep dead the Reliable Replacement Warhead program, a Bush-era program to build new nukes. Bush's Energy Department and Pentagon officials had argued that flaws in the refurbishment program were a key rationale for new bombs, but Obama disagreed. (Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a holdover, tried to revive the program this past summer, but failed.) The strong endorsement of the status quo by JASON, says Arms Control Wonk:

should drive a stake through the heart of the RRW and warhead “replacement” in general.

by Daniel Clery

With the CERN particle physics lab due to start shooting particles around its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) again this month, and the first particle collisions expected in December, anti-LHC campaigners are on the warpath again. A new group calling itself the Committee on CERN Experimental Dangers (ConCERNed) will submit a complaint on 3 November in the next few days (see note after jump) to the human rights committee of the United Nations calling for work with the LHC to be stopped because it threatens life on Earth and so violates the complainants human rights.

Some physicists have suggested that the extreme high energy of the collisions that will take place in the LHC could create postulated entities including mini-black holes and strangelets. Critics say that the tiny black holes could swallow up the Earth or that strangelets could convert all matter in to strange matter. But leading physicists who have studied the matter say that well-established principles all but guarantee that neither catastrophe would occur. The black holes would quickly decay back into the particles that collided to create them. To pull in positively charged nuclei, stranglets would have and maintain a negative electric charge even as they gobble up the nuclei, which would violate conservation of charge.

by Jeffrey Mervis and Adrian Cho

Watch out, Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—the U.S. is not quitting the race to find the famed Higgs boson just yet.

If all goes as planned, physicists at the last dedicated U.S. particle physics laboratory will get to run their particle smasher an extra year. The Department of Energy has requested money in its next budget to run the Tevatron Collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, in 2011. That proposal would give Fermilab researchers a shot at bagging a long-sought particle called the Higgs boson before scientists at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, can spot it with the more-powerful LHC, which is supposed to finally start smashing particle in December.

"I'm behind it, and the Secretary [Steven Chu] is behind it, too," William Brinkman, head of DOE's Office of Science, told ScienceInsider this morning during a meeting of the office's High Energy Physics Advisory Panel in Washington, D.C. "There's a lot of competition" for the approximately $20 million that would be needed, says Brinkman, "but we think there's an opportunity for us to make progress, and we want to do it." The proposal is part of the department's budget request now being reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget prior to the submission of the president's 2011 budget request to Congress in February.

Physicists believe the Higgs boson is key to explaining how all particles gain mass—as Higgs bosons lurking “virtually” in the vacuum drag on all particles.

by Adrian Cho

After 13 months of repairs and modifications, the world’s largest particle smasher is once again ready to start circulating particles, officials at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, announced today. The guts of the Large Hadron Collider’s (LHC’s) more than 1700 large superconducting magnets have been cooled with liquid helium to a frigid 1.9 K, and now that the 35,000 metric tons of hardware are cold, physicists can soon resume feeding particles into the machine’s twin rings, says CERN spokesperson James Gillies. “Were back to the more-routine steps that we went through last year,” he says. “So the first injection tests should begin next week.”

The LHC is designed to smash protons together at energies seven times as high as any previous particle collisions in hopes of discovering new particles and even new dimensions of space. The $5.5 billion accelerator broke down last fall just 9 days after physics first passed particles all the way around its two rings, and researchers have been busy fixing it ever since. Physicists are on track to have beams zipping through LHC’s two rings in late November and to collide the counter-circulating beams at a low energy in December. But with many systems to check—including new systems to protect the machine against a repeat of last year’s catastrophe—researcher may not achieve higher energy collisions for data taking until early next year, Gillies says. “There’s still a possibility for December, but more realistically it’s looking like January,” he says. Even then, just to be on the safe side, officials have limited the energy to half of the LHC’s design maximum.