Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

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. ...

These past few weeks have gone by in a blur. The LHC provided us with the first collisions, then it became the highest energy accelerator, and for a few minutes last night, the LHC became highest energy collider. Crazy...

I have been in the ATLAS control room on shift each of the last three weeks. Each shift was more boring than the last. The first collisions were on a Monday. I had shift that Tuesday. Tonight we actually had a first while I was here...

Hi, Seth here. Amidst the fun of moving and looking for apartments, I’ve also been working more than full time looking at our first collisions and preparing for more. In this entry, I’d like to share with you the very first plot I tried to make from actual collision data. Be...

When I’m out here at CERN, living in France, there are a few things I look forward to when I’m back in the US. Be...

You know you’re a grad student if you spend your Saturday nights watching the Control Room Channel to see some of the first 900 GeV collisions. Although that sounds like a bad Jeff Foxworthy joke, sure enough, here I am with my laptop open and my monkey pants on. ...