As of two months ago, there is one less elusive particle for quantum scientists to track down: the Majorana fermion. A group of nanoscientists from the Kavli Institute, and from the Delft University of Technology’s Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM Foundation) in the Netherlands, has been able to detect the particle for the first time.

The Majorana fermion can revise scientists’ understanding of matter and anti-matter, change ideas about fundamental physics and cosmology, and revolutionize the construction of quantum computers.

The existence of the Majorana fermion, an elementary particle, was proposed by Italian theoretical physicist Ettore Majorana in the 1930s. Majorana, who mostly researched neutrino masses, provided scientists a solution to a set of equations from which elementary particles can be deduced. Most have been found since then. Others, such as the Higgs boson, currently being hunted by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, have not.

All particles have their opposites, or an “anti” version. For example, the anti-particle of the electron is the positron. The Majorana fermion is special, unique to other particles: it is its own anti-particle, essentially made up of matter and anti-matter.

The research group was led by Dutch nanoscientist Leo Kouwenhoven, a professor of physics at TU Delft. Kouwenhoven and his team constructed a nanoscale electronic device, which they created with a nanowire combined with superconducting material and a strong magnetic field. After applying voltage to the device, they were able to detect the particles in the device, in which, according to TU Delft, “a pair of Majorana fermions ‘appear’ at either end of a nanowire.”

“If you take a solid material and you make the right combinations,” Kouwenhoven tells BBC News, “the natural particles living in these condensed matter structures will also obey this defining property of Majorana fermions – that a particle is equal its anti-particle.”

Not only would the discovery provide a better understanding of why there is more matter than anti-matter in the universe, but it could also help physicists confirm a theory stating that dark matter is really composed of Majorana fermions. Dark matter, a mysterious substance that accounts for 74% of the universe, has been puzzling scientists for decades.

The Majorana fermion is also capable of changing the way quantum computers function. Computers made with these particles would be more stable than those that are composed of other particles. They would also be less sensitive to external stimuli. Microsoft, who partially funded the research, hopes to produce quantum computers in the future.

Kouwenhoven and his team published their research in the journal Science on April 12.

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Data from recent experiments at the United States’ Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, indicate hints to a possible confirmation of the Higgs boson’s existence.

In 1964, British physicist Peter Higgs postulated that mass came from elementary particles, namely from a special kind of boson, or the Higgs boson. This particle was thought to exist shortly after the Big Bang – more specifically, at the time when particles gained mass.

The Higgs is predicted by the Standard Model, a chart that describes how elementary particles and the four universal forces (electromagnetic, weak nuclear force, strong nuclear force, and gravity) behave and interact with one another. If the Higgs boson’s existence were to be confirmed, not only would the mysterious particle complete the Model, but it would also fix any inconsistencies.

In December 2011, particle physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or the European Council for Nuclear Research) noticed unexpected energy fluctuations in the data during their experiment. These fluctuations were thought to have been caused by the Higgs boson decaying. (When particles decay, the emit energy).

There were doubts about the Higgs causing the fluctuations; since then, the LHC, Tevatron, and other particle accelerator laboratories around the have collaborated to search for the Higgs boson, hoping to find correlations of spikes of energy in the graphs.

Last Friday, Tevatron became successful. Its CDF and DZero experiments, working separately, found similar spikes, but the energy was much greater. Previously, particle physicists have hypothesized the Higgs boson to have mass ranging from 115 to 135 gigaelectronvolts (GeV). However, this recent energy excess indicates that the Higgs may have a mass of 147 to 179 GeV instead. Nevertheless, the fluctuations were there, and the LHC and other particle accelerator laboratories have noted them too.

“We are not done yet,” Rob Roser, CDF co-spokesperson and physicist at Fermilab, insists in Fermilab’s press release. “Together with our LHC colleagues, we expect 2012 to be the year we know whether the Higgs exists or not, and assuming it is discovered, we will have first indications that it behaves as predicted by the Standard Model.”

To actually detect the Higgs boson is difficult. The particle decays quick enough for instruments not to catch their being. Furthermore, instead of decaying into only one or two particles, it decays into sets of particles, all of which are different each time. In order to make things a little simpler, Tevatron and the LHC will be using different methods to hunt for the Higgs.

The LHC, which is an underground circular collider, will smash protons together while using maximum mass energy of 14 GeV. Meanwhile, Tevatron, a synchrotron (a type of circular particle accelerator in which a particle beam travels, guided by a magnetic field), will smash protons and antiprotons together at maximum mass energy of 2 GeV and look for sets of bottom quarks – a type of quark – into which the Higgs boson may decay.

According to Fermilab, ultimately “[d]iscovering the Higgs boson relies on observing a statistically significant excess of the particles into which the Higgs decays and those particles must have corresponding kinematic properties that allow for the mass of the Higgs to be reconstructed.” With the two laboratories experimenting simultaneously, yet with dissimilar methods, particle physicists hope to come across more and better evidence.

“One picture may show a child that is blocked from the other’s view by a tree,” explains Gregorio Bernardi, DZero co-spokesperson at the Nuclear Physics Laboratory of the High Energies (LPNHE) in Paris.

“Both pictures may show the child but only one can resolve the child’s features. You need to combine both viewpoints to get a true picture of who is in the park. At this point both pictures are fuzzy and we think maybe they show someone in the park. Eventually the LHC with future data samples will be able to give us a sharp picture of what is there. The Tevatron by further improving its analyses will also sharpen the picture which is emerging today.”

Like the LHC, Tevatron aims to study the fundamental building blocks of the universe and relationship between matter and energy by trying to create the conditions that existed at the time of the Big Bang. Fermilab receives financial support from the United States’ Department of Energy.

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After more than three years in space, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is extending its view of the high-energy sky into a largely unexplored electromagnetic range. On January 10, the Fermi team announced its first census of energy sources in this new realm.

Fermi’s Large Area Telescope scans the entire sky every three hours, continually deepening its portrait of the sky in gamma rays, the most energetic form of light. While the energy of visible light falls between about 2 and 3 electron volts, the LAT detects gamma rays with energies ranging from 20 million to more than 300 billion electron volts.

At higher energies, gamma rays are rare. Above 10 GeV, even Fermi’s LAT detects only one gamma ray every four months.

“Before Fermi, we knew of only four discrete sources above 10 GeV, all of them pulsars,” said David Thompson, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “With the LAT, we’ve found hundreds, and we’re showing for the first time just how diverse the sky is at these high energies.”

Any object producing gamma rays at these energies is undergoing extraordinary astrophysical processes. More than half of the 496 sources in the new census are active galaxies, where matter falling into a supermassive black hole powers jets that spray out particles at nearly the speed of light.

Only about 10 percent of the known sources lie within our own galaxy. They include rapidly rotating neutron stars called pulsars, the expanding debris from supernova explosions, and in a few cases, binary systems containing massive stars.

More than a third of the sources are completely unknown, having no identified counterpart detected in other parts of the spectrum. With the new catalog, astronomers will be able to compare the behavior of different sources across a wider span of gamma-ray energies for the first time.

Just as bright infrared sources may fade to invisibility in the ultraviolet, some of the gamma-ray sources above 1 GeV vanish completely when viewed at higher, or “harder,” energies.

One example is the well-known radio galaxy NGC 1275, which is a bright, isolated source below 10 GeV. At higher energies, it fades appreciably and another nearby source begins to appear. Above 100 GeV, NGC 1275 becomes undetectable by Fermi, while the new source, the radio galaxy IC 310, shines brightly.

The Fermi hard-source list is the product of an international team led by Pascal Fortin at the Ecole Polytechnique’s Laboratoire Leprince-Ringuet in Palaiseau, France, and David Paneque at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich.

The catalog serves as an important roadmap for ground-based facilities called Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes, which have amassed about 130 gamma-ray sources with energies above 100 GeV. They include the Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov telescope on La Palma in the Canary Islands, the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System in Arizona, and the High Energy Stereoscopic System in Namibia.

“Our catalog will have a significant impact on ground-based facilities’ work by pointing them to the most likely places to find gamma-ray sources emitting above 100 GeV,” Paneque said.

Compared to Fermi’s LAT, these ground-based observatories have much smaller fields of view. They also make fewer observations because they cannot operate during the daytime, bad weather, or a full moon.

“As Fermi’s exposure constantly improves our view of hard sources, ground-based telescopes are becoming more sensitive to lower-energy gamma rays, allowing us to bridge these two energy regimes,” Fortin added.

NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership. Fermi is managed by Goddard. It was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the United States.

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Last December, three physicists – Jun Nishimura of KEK (High Energy Accelerator Research Organization), Asato Tsuchiya of Shizuoka University, and Sang-Woo Kim of Osaka University – formed a numerical simulation via supercomputer and proved that the universe composed of ten dimensions (nine spatial and one temporal) at the time of the Big Bang.

With the success of their experiment, they proved a portion of the superstring theory to be true, thereby giving the long-proposed theory validity. In addition to proposing that the universe is made up of ten dimensions, the superstring theory – also known as the “theory of everything” – harmonizes the theory of relativity with quantum mechanics, and puts forth the theory that everything is essentially composed of tiny, oscillating strings.

Protons and neutrons in atoms can be broken down into quarks, which then  can be further broken down into strings. The manner in which the strings vibrate affects the properties of particles, determining which particle is which, and accounts for the existence of the four fundamental forces (electromagnetic, weak nuclear, strong nuclear, gravity).

The superstring theory was put forth more than forty years ago. Much of it is theoretical since it can only be proven through mathematics and not yet with experiments. To account for the missing six dimensions, theoretical physicists have proposed that we have not yet been able to detect them because they are believed to be miniscule. We would also have difficulty visualizing them because we can only sense the three dimensions we inhabit.

Truly, it was more of a trick to prove how the nine spatial dimensions (leaving out the one dimension concerning time) developed into three over time than to prove nine initially existed and account for where the other six went. Throughout the years, various models and scenarios have been made based on calculations but failed. Finally, Nishimura, Tsuchiya, and Kim created the simulation of the Big Bang through superstring theory calculations, from which they developed virtual matrices that represented interactions between strings.

In his interview with Life’s Little Mysteries Nishimura explains, “What we do in this simulation is to generate hundreds or thousands of matrices, each of which describes the whole history of the universe during some finite time interval. We then have to take an average over the matrices to get the physical information as to how the universe evolves in time.”

In the end, Nishimura and his colleagues were successful. The numerical simulation not only shows that there really were nine dimensions at the time of the Big Bang, but also shows how three dimensions broke off from the other nine over time and how they compose our present observable universe.

This new finding greatly supports the superstring theory, giving it more of a chance, though the experiment only validates part of the theory because the simulation provides only part of the solution. Other factors have yet to be proven. However, this type of simulation with supercomputers may solve other cosmological mysteries, such as dark matter and dark energy.

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When particle physicists at CERN, the underground particle physics laboratory located on the Franco-Swiss border, thought they detected a neutrino that traveled faster than light, Einstein’s theory of relativity, which states that particles that have mass can approach the speed of light but cannot match or exceed it, was challenged in September 2011.

Finding no flaws with their experiment, and despite knowing that something must have been wrong, they published their findings. An uproar in the science community resonated. Neutrinos contain little very mass – but they have mass nonetheless. Hence, they cannot possibly be superluminal. Furthermore, if these neutrinos really were superluminal, they would not only go against the theory of relativity, but also upset the laws of energy conservation and momentum.

Ramanath Cowsik, Utpal Sarkar, and Shmuel Nussino, three of the many physicists who were skeptical of CERN’s findings, undertook the challenge of performing the same experiment. Three months later, in late December, they found the fault.

One of the major experiments at CERN, OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Racking Apparatus), conducted this particular experiment, collaborating with the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) in Gran Sasso, Italy. OPERA and LNGS created neutrinos by smashing protons into a stationary target. Pions (a light type of meson, which is an elementary particle) were produced and focused into a tunnel, where they decayed into muons and neutrinos. The muons stopped at the end of the tunnel, blocked by a barrier, but the neutrinos were able to pass through and arrived at the laboratory in Gran Sasso – 60 nanoseconds earlier than particle physicists anticipated. It was then that OPERA tentatively concluded that they produced superluminal neutrinos.

Keeping in mind the theory of relativity and the laws of conservation of energy and momentum, and taking a second look at how particles decay, Cowsik and his colleagues formed their own calculations.

“Simple calculations, based on the conservation of energy and momentum, dictate that the lifetimes of those pions should be too long for them ever to decay into superluminal neutrinos,” Cowsik says in the press release provided by Washington University, where he works as a professor of physics in Arts & Sciences and the director of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences.

Performing the experiment at IceCube, a neutrino observatory in Antarctica below ice that detects neutrinos formed by cosmic rays that collide with the atmosphere, Cowsik, Sarkar, and Nussino mimicked the experiment conducted at CERN, observing the pions decay by letting protons collide with the ice. They observed that the neutrinos at IceCube had much higher energy than the neutrinos at OPERA.

“We’ve shown…that if the neutrino that comes out of a pion decay were going faster than the speed of light, the pion lifetime would get longer, and the neutrino would carry a smaller fraction of the energy shared by the neutrino and the muon,” explains Cowsik. “But the observation of high-energy neutrinos by IceCube indicates that these high-energy pions do decay according to the standard ideas of physics, generating neutrinos whose speed approaches that of light but never exceeds it.”

He and his colleagues deduced that the pions must have also had high energy. It turns out that pions with a lot of energy would last longer and take more time to spontaneously decay. They then would not be able to decay to create superluminal neutrinos. It was then concluded that it would have been impossible for the neutrinos to travel faster than or meet the speed of light during OPERA’s experiment, and that such will always be impossible.

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Last week, particle physicists at CERN came closer to finding the Higgs boson (otherwise inaptly known as “the god particle”), a hypothetical elementary particle that would explain the origin of mass.

Named after British physicist, Peter Higgs, who first hypothesized that mass came from elementary particles, the Higgs boson is believed to have existed during the few seconds after the Big Bang when particles first obtained mass. Not only is it the missing piece of the Standard Model, which explains how subatomic particles and the universal forces are related and how they interact with one other, but it will be able to fill in some of the inconsistencies within the model.

Located between the border of Switzerland and France, CERN – Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or European Council for Nuclear Research – is a particle physics laboratory composed of particle accelerators. One of these particle accelerators is the largest in the world, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and consists of an underground circular tunnel.

The LHC’s purpose is to figure out what the universe was like on a subatomic level one second after the Big Bang by smashing together protons – a type of subatomic particle – at nearly the speed of light. ATLAS and CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) are two of the six major experiments at the LHC that are simultaneously, yet separately, determining the existence of the Higgs boson.

Proving the existence of the Higgs boson would be tricky. Because it is a hypothetical particle, the Higgs has to be created, which is also difficult. For one, its life span would be short because of its rapid decay, and it could only be detected by special instruments. ATLAS and CMS are looking to detect the Higgs, not by the state of it existing, but rather, by its decaying state.

To do so, these two experiments have to create the particle. Thereafter, they look for the Higgs by detecting the energy it has released upon its decay. The energy, which should ideally read around 116-130 GeV, is then recorded on graphs. While recording the data of the energy from the decaying, ATLAS and CMS have seen spikes at similar energies on their respective graphs at like times. However, some particle physicists believe that these spikes may be energy fluctuations.

“The excess is most compatible with a Standard Model Higgs in the vicinity of 124 GeV and below,” says Guido Tonelli, a particle physicist working as the spokesperson for CMS, “but the statistical significance is not large enough to say anything conclusive. As of today, what we see is consistent either with a background fluctuation or with the presence of the boson.”

To actually confirm the Higgs’ existence, ATLAS and CMS have to find more spikes in the same places at even greater energies to make sure that they are not merely fluctuations.

If scientists were truly able to confirm the Higgs’ existence, they would essentially discover a new basic understanding of the foundation of the universe and its origin – and possibly explain the elusive nature of dark matter and dark energy. Results, however, will have to wait. Tonelli further states, “Refined analyses and additional data delivered in 2012 by this magnificent machine will definitely give an answer.”

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