The LHC is back!

Last weekend and this week, the LHC has accomplished many tasks: it first circulated two beams in opposite directions, then made them collide in the heart of the four giant detectors and finally slightly increased their energy. Virtual champagne to the hundreds of people working nights and days to repair the machine, prepare it for new start-up and finally operate it.

Read More at CERN News

Beam of Protons Warms Up LHC

(The first ion beam entering point 2 of the LHC, just before the ALICE detector October 23rd 2009)

This past weekend (October 23-25th) particles once again entered the LHC after the one-year break that followed the incident of September 2008.

Friday afternoon a first beam of ions entered the LHC's clockwise beam pipe through the TI2 transfer line. The beam was successfully guided through the ALICE detector until point 3 where it was dumped.

During the late evening on Friday, the first beam of protons also entered the LHC's clockwise ring and travelled until point 3. Saturday afternoon (October 24th), protons travelled from the SPS through the TI8 transfer line and the LHCb experiment, until point 7 where they were dumped.

All settings and parameters showed a perfect functioning of the machine, which is preparing for its first circulating beam in the coming weeks.

-CERN News

Halo Cloud Explained

A strange halo cloud over Moscow had many in the Russian capital expecting a close encounter last Wednesday.

Millions witnessed an ominous ring-shaped cloud appear over Moscow’s western districts, prompting citizens to stop in their tracks to record the phenomenon and put it on YouTube.

The bizarre sight has taken the Internet by storm, so to speak.

However, scientists from the city’s weather forecast service dispelled fears of extra terrestrials landing in Red Square, saying the event was strictly environmental.

“It’s a purely optical effect, even if a spectacular one. You can see really strange things if you watch the clouds regularly,” weather officials told Russia’s Vesti 24. “Several air fronts have passed Moscow recently, including an inflow of cold air from the Arctic, and they combined to produce such a phenomenon

Indeed halo clouds have appeared elsewhere in the world, a notable example being the 'Dorset Doughnut' seen over Dorset, UK and captured in various images by the Cloud Appreciation Society.

Influence from Future in Large Hadron Collider

For those that can no longer access the NYtimes article. Here is a link to the arxiv article:

Search for Effect of Influence from Future in Large Hadron Collider

We propose an experiment which consists of drawing a card and using it to decide restrictions on the running of Large Hadron Collider (LHC for short) at CERN, such as luminosity, and beam energy. There may potentially occur total shut down. The purpose of such an experiment is to search for influence from the future, that is, backward causation. Since LHC will produce particles of a mathematically new type of fundamental scalars, i.e., the Higgs particles, there is potentially a chance to find unseen effects, such as on influence going from future to past, which we suggest in the present paper.

Dark Energy and Ghost D-Branes

In the recent arXiv:0906.5135, Saridakis and Ward propose a novel dark energy candidate, based on the dynamics of ghost D-branes in compactified Type II string theory. This is an approach which is based on open string dynamics that envisions a post-inflation universe living on branes that wrap cycles in the compact space, with the GUT or Electro-Weak phase transition manifested geometrically.

Ghost D-branes are defined as Dp-branes with a Z_2 symmetry that can flip the signs of the NS-NS and RR sectors (arXiv:0601024[hep-th]). By using ghost D-branes, the authors are able to recover an effective dark energy behaving either as quintessence or as a phantom field, without the need of orientifolds.

The MSSM as a Magnetic Seiberg Dual

It has been known for some time that minimal SUSY SU(5) is ruled out because proton lifetimes are less than the measured limits (t_p >= 6.6 x 10^33 yrs). In arXiv:0909.4105 [hep-ph], Abel and Khoze propose that the MSSM is a magnetic Seiberg dual of an unknown electric theory. Such a proposal would explain why the supersymmetric Standard Model appears to unify but the proton does not decay. The authors put forward a number of possible dual GUTs that may provide a consistent UV completion of the minimal SU(5) model, for example with SU(11)xSp(1)^3 and SU(9)xSp(1)^3 symmetry.

Quantum Cosmological Billiards

In arXiv:0907.3048, Nicolai et al. investigate cosmological singularity resolution in the context of an E_10 coset model. E_10 is the Kac-Moody big brother of E_8, the exceptional Lie group that was all the rage not long ago. The authors conclude there is a 'de-emergence' of space-time near the singularity. They also discuss observables near the singularity where they mention that the conserved E_10 Noether charges do constitute an infinite set of observables and their expectation values remain well defined in the deep quantum regime where the E_10/K(E_10) coset model is expected to replace space-time quantum field theory.