U.S. LHC Users ready for anticipated restart

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory hosted the second annual meeting of the U.S. LHC Users' Organization.

More than 80 scientists attended the second annual meeting of the U.S. LHC Users' Organization, held Sept. 25 to 26 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The users' organization represents about 2,000 U.S. collaborators who work on the LHC.

"USLUO helps the U.S. LHC community work effectively with their colleagues at CERN while they are in the United States and to adapt to work at CERN," said USLUO Chair Harvey Newman, a physicist at Caltech.

At the meeting, members of the ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb experiments provided status reports and updates on the LHC and U.S. LHC Accelerator Research Program. All reports emphasized the amount of good work achieved during the shutdown and anticipation of first beam this November.

In addition, a poster session featured contributions from several graduate students. Yousi Ma of Caltech and Lauren Tompkins of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory won the poster competition.

A presentation from Charles Petit, a science writer for Knight Science Journalism Tracker and former reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and U.S. News and World Report, provided another meeting highlight. He advised physicists to be patient and helpful with reporters, downplay hype around the restart until the LHC is up and running and to answer all questions raised by the press and public. "The public doesn't much understand science," Petit said, "but it likes science."

During an open session, attendees raised issues over the cost of living and increasing burdens of taxation for U.S. collaborators based at CERN. Newman confirmed that USLUO can help compile and distribute information and advocate on behalf of its members regardless of their experiment.

Future USLUO meetings will provide opportunities for young physicists to present their results.

— Jen Nahn

Imperial College London

Imperial College physicists at the Blackett Lab in London. Front row from left: Ray Beuselinck, Ajit Kurup, Leo Jenner, Jurgen Pozimski, John Hassard, Morgan Wascko. Back row from left: Ken Long, Nicolas Osman, Gavin Davies, Joe Walding, Pawel Guzowski, Yoshi Uchida.

Imperial College London's crest

NAME:
Imperial College London

HOME TOWN:
London, England

MASCOT:
We don't really have a mascot, but we do have a motto: "Scientia Imperii decus et tutamen," which means "knowledge is the adornment and protection of the Empire."

SCHOOL COLORS:
Blue and white.

PARTICLE PHYSICS COLLABORATIONS:
Aleph, Babar, CALICE, CMS, COMET/PRISM, DZero, LHCb, LISA, MICE, MUCOOL, Neutrino Factory/Muon Collider, Project X, SciBooNE, SuperNEMO, T2K, ZEPLIN III.

EXPERIMENTS AT FERMILAB:
DZero, MUCOOL, Project X, SciBooNE, and accelerator collaboration with MICE and the Neutrino Factory/Muon Collider.

Currently we have nine faculty (SciBooNE, DZero and the accelerator collaborations with NuFact and MICE), two postdocs (DZero and MICE), five grad students (SciBooNE and DZero), one research fellow (DZero), one Fermilab International Fellow (DZero) and two Fermilab-Imperial Joint Fellows (MUCOOL, Project X).

COLLABORATING AT FERMILAB SINCE:
1972

MAJOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO FERMILAB EXPERIMENTS:
For DZero: trigger, Level Three (and grid) computing, leadership of Higgs search and B physics groups; RF cavity R&D. For SciBooNE: proposal and leadership of collaboration, design of muon range detector and charged current quasi-elastic analysis.

PARTICLE PHYSICS RESEARCH FOCUS:
Discovery of the Higgs (at both the Tevatron and LHC), precise measurements of CP violation parameters in the quark sector, precise measurements of neutrino masses and mixing angles and the hunt for CP violation in the lepton sector, as well as discovery of dark matter, gravitational waves, the search for Majorana neutrinos and development of the next generation of accelerators.

WHAT SETS PARTICLE PHYSICS AT IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON APART?
We are one of the largest particle physics groups in the United Kingdom, with nearly 150 people. We have a broad range of experimental efforts covering accelerators, collider physics and neutrino physics. We also have nine current and former spokespeople from 11 particle physics collaborations among our faculty.

FUNDING AGENCY:
The Science and Technology Facilities Council, Royal Society and Fermilab.

FAVORITE NATIONAL LABORATORY:
Fermilab (but don't ask us what we said when CERN and J-PARC posed the same question).

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Einstein's theory of general relativity may have been flawed

From USA TODAY, Oct. 12, 2009

Is Einstein finally wrong? Far-off galaxies are tugging each other more tightly than Einstein's gravity theory predicts, suggests an analysis of light from distant stars.

Now available in an online physics paper archive, the analysis by Cornell cosmologist Rachel Bean looks at how galaxies attract one another roughly one billion light-years away. Einstein's theory of gravity, General Relativity, suggests that gravity should attract light just as strongly as it attract other matter, but the Hubble Space Telescope's "COSMOS survey" data suggest gravity attracts light less than it does stars in the survey data.

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