News about various colliders of various vintages:<\/p>\n
The Tevatron has been shut down for the past two months for maintenance and various improvements. It should start up again this coming week, for latest news on its status, see here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Seed magazine is starting a series of articles on the LHC<\/a>. One prediction about the LHC that I feel confident making is that it is going to get a lot of press coverage.<\/p>\n A group called the LHC Theory Initiative<\/a> has been trying for a while to get the NSF to fund new postdocs and graduate student fellowships for physicists working on LHC phenomenology. So far they have been turned down, with the panel that recommended not to fund this presumably concerned that money going to this purpose would be taken away from the standard NSF group grants that fund particle theory groups at many institutions. The full NSF proposal is available on-line<\/a>.<\/p>\n Science magazine has an article about Barry Barish<\/a>, who is leading the Global Design Effort for the ILC.<\/p>\n The same issue of Science has a paper by Steinhardt and Turok<\/a> promoting their cyclic cosmological model as explaining the small value of the cosmological constant, together with an article by Vilenkin<\/a> criticizing them and promoting the anthropic point of view.<\/p>\n Update<\/strong>: Experimentalist Michael Schmitt, sometimes commenter here, has an excellent new blog about accelerator-based particle physics at the Tevatron and LHC entitled Collider Blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n Update<\/strong>: The Tevatron start-up was going smoothly until early yesterday morning when they ran into serious trouble. Here’s the report from the FNAL accelerator update page<\/a>:<\/p>\n At 1:24 AM, Operations reported a raccoon attack on the Linac<\/a> gallery. It seemed to be a coordinated effort. Fortunately, by 1:53 AM, a joint force of operators and Pbar experts managed to drive the raccoons out of their hastily made fortifications. Then at 4:18 AM, the raccoons made what some thought to be a counter attack on the Division Headquarters, but others believed it to be only a simple reconnaissance incursion. No raccoons were either injured or captured during these encounters. Operator losses were low.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" News about various colliders of various vintages: The Tevatron has been shut down for the past two months for maintenance and various improvements. It should start up again this coming week, for latest news on its status, see here. Seed … Continue reading