$50,000 suitcases fly to CERN

Starting in spring, John Conway will make four more trips across the Atlantic. In all, he will hand-carry $4 million worth of CMS half-disks to build the final version of the pixel tracker.

Last Wednesday, Fermilab physicists John Conway and Lalith Perera loaded a stash of expensive electronics into two boxy grey briefcases, crossed their fingers, and boarded a plane at O'Hare. They were bound for Switzerland with $50,000 worth of equipment in carry-on luggage. "Had we dropped the cases, I think I would have not returned to Fermilab but just kept on going," joked Conway.

The men's briefcases held silicon plates with over 100,000 delicate electrical connections arranged in half-disks, destined to rest near the heart of the CMS detector. The disks will form a prototype for the pixel detector; tracking particles flying out at the shallowest angles, and sorting debris from proton-proton collisions during the LHC's pilot run in November.

But before any of that could start, Fermilab's CMS group had to think of a way to get the four pounds of $50,000 electronics from Batavia to Geneva. The plan was to fly to Zurich and rent a car. But, of course, there was a snag: The complicated paperwork they had filled out only applied in Geneva--not Zurich. Instead of driving, they would need a last-minute connecting flight.

A security guard in Zurich agreed to watch the valuable cases at the airport while Conway and Perera took the rest of their bags through the normal screening process. On the secure side, they opened the cases, carefully removed the delicate inner-boxes, and sent them through the x-ray machine. "They peppered us with questions like 'What the heck are these things?' and 'What is the experiment at CERN for?'" said Conway, who will make the trek four more times--each time with much more elaborate, final versions of the disks for insertion after the LHC's pilot run. "These gigantic and complicated detectors are going to operate soon, as will the accelerator," said Conway, "and the really cool thing is that we really do not know what lies ahead, or what discoveries we will make."

You can read more about Conway's recent adventure here.

Tevatron keeps humming

For the fourth week in a row the Tevatron has set a record. On Thursday evening at 6:00 p.m., the Tevatron achieved a peak luminosity record of 277.6 E30. Congratulations.

Scientific American,
January 19, 2007:

The Triangular Universe: Instead of string theory, four-dimensional tetrahedrons

Imagine a landscape composed of microscopic triangular structures that constantly rearrange themselves into new patterns. Seen from afar, the landscape looks perfectly smooth, but up close it is a churning cauldron of strange geometries. This deceptively simple model is at the heart of a new theory called causal dynamical triangulation (CDT), which has emerged as a promising approach to solving the most vexing problem in physics--unifying the laws of gravity with those of quantum mechanics.

For more than 20 years, the leading contender in the quest for unification has been string theory, which posits that the fundamental particles and forces are actually minuscule strings of energy. But some scientists say this theory is misguided because it sets the strings against a fixed background; a better model, they argue, would generate not only particles and forces but also the spacetime they inhabit. In the 1980s and 1990s these researchers developed loop quantum gravity, which describes space as a network of tiny volumes only 10-33 centimeter across.