At Reuters this morning one is surprised and considerably impressed to find a wade into higher dimensional physics and the potential of the Large Hadron Collider – out of the news for months now as post-breakdown repairs and thriftiness (electricity is not cheap when you have a machine this big) took it out of the limelight. Work there, it says here, is ramping up.

The service’s Robert Evans filed from Geneva a kind of story we saw a lot of (along with warnings it would make black holes that would eat Earth) when the LHC first swung into operation.  It’s a light brush, with many awesome words, through the new physics that the army of scientists hopes to get during the upcoming year on assumption that the colliding beams collide as planned.

It’s not quite clear what inspired the story. One certainly hopes there are more to come about  great discoveries that could vindicate the money spent, excite scientists, and give reporters a chance to try, just try, to explain to the public what the fuss is all about. Evans focusses on hopes to confirm the existence of extra dimensions into which gravity and perhaps particles may leak from the 4-D universe we know best. One can only hope.

I can find no press release. Evans mentions a recent report in the largely in-house CERN Bulletin. The Tracker can’t find that article either. But a clue is in the magazine Symmetry jointly published in the US by Stanford’s SLAC and the DOE’s Fermilab near Chicago.  It refers to a note from the CERN director on progress with the luminosity of the colliding beams and a goal: achieving an “inverse femtobarn” in performance. Barns have to do with collisional cross sections, and femto often with real short time spans, so one assumes this is a  measure of target shooting performance.

Evans has the word femtobarn in his account, too. It takes boldness to get that past an editor.

Pic source,  Guardian,

- Charlie Petit

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