CERN and Future Experiments

I needed to come back down to earth for a minute to see where the trend is going with those who shall lead us poor earthlings into the future of experimental research and profound understandings.

It would be nice to see perspectives by Lubos, PeterWoit the group here(meaning their blogs), as we look in this direction for a moment? Peter might be able to set his Dirac Moduli space views here?:)

Peter Woit for emphasizing the importance of the Dirac operator on the moduli space of Calabi-Yau four-folds and the importance of string theory to him.

The next step will again be taken in Japan, with the new J-PARC accelerator starting in 2009 to send neutrinos almost 300 km, again to the Super-Kamiokande experiment, to probe the third neutrino mixing angle that has not yet been detected in either atmospheric or solar neutrino experiments. This may also be probed in a new experiment being proposed for the Fermilab NuMI beam. One of the ideas proposed at CERN is to probe this angle with an underwater experiment moored in the Gulf of Taranto off the coast of Italy, viewing neutrinos in a modified version of CERN's current Gran Sasso beam.

So having quickly gone today I went to look at John Ellis site, and was formally introduced to some of the things that have been happening with him and avenues of experimentation that seem very interesting to me.

High Energy Physics Group

The Theory of Cosmic Rays

Cosmic rays, which have historically provided the first tool to study high-energy phenomena, are playing a new role in modern physics. The origin of high-energy cosmic rays, gamma rays and neutrinos is still an open question in astrophysics. On-going and future experiments will give us new information on astrophysical sources and on high-energy processes.

It still retains high energy considerations even in face of LHC questions about particle reductionism and the effects of dynamical interrelations as we see this travel in neutrino functions. I wanted to point to further information here in terms of micro-state black-hole detection. I get this soon.

2004 promises to be an exceptionally exciting year in General Relativity and Gravitation: the LIGO/VIRGO/GEO/TAMA network of detectors has begun generating scientific results, ushering in the era of gravitational wave astronomy. These detectors will search for gravitational wave signals of the collision of black holes, neutron star mergers and other astronomical events previously undetectable. The fundamentally new science of gravitational wave astronomy opens up a new window on the universe. Up until now, astronomy has relied on observations of electromagnetic wave signals (e.g. visible light, radio waves). The detection of gravitational waves offers a completely new perspective on the universe: they will enable us to "hear" the cosmic orchestra as well as to see it! GR17 will provide the scientific community with one of the earliest opportunities to discuss the first scientific results of this era.

I wanted to add a little more information here to further bolster this idealization that I have found in Brian Greene's statement about turning our views skyward in the hope of seeing strings and cosmological thinking in a new way.

Flight of the Phenix

If mini black holes can be produced in high-energy particle interactions, they may first be observed in high-energy cosmic-ray neutrino interactions in the atmosphere. Jonathan Feng of the University of California at Irvine and MIT, and Alfred Shapere of the University of Kentucky have calculated that the Auger cosmic-ray observatory, which will combine a 6000 km2 extended air-shower array backed up by fluorescence detectors trained on the sky, could record tens to hundreds of showers from black holes before the LHC turns on in 2007.