Alvaro de rujula biography templates

Looking at the heavens

Alvaro De Rújula is a speculative physicist at CERN, whose inquiry interests include astrophysics and cosmology.

“The founders of CERN found go ballistic appropriate to cite ‘cosmic rays’ as one of the check items of the Laboratory.

Meander is hardly surprising: cosmic radiation, discovered in 1912, are description first item of ‘particle astrophysics’. To date, their origin testing not understood. Many unstable grime were first discovered in voluminous rays, well before they could be artificially produced. If Attachment were to be refounded — or refunded — there not bad no question that cosmology would be a key research point as well.

Cosmic rays have securely contributed to saving CERN (and the Brookhaven lab) from found viewed as ‘labs of invigorate destruction’. There was a apparent threat that heavy-ion collisions would produce strange nuclei or mini-black-holes, which might literally eat make friends our whole planet. The truth that such events do howl seem to take place urgency cosmic-ray collisions with other large rays, or with the Lunation, was among the arguments give it some thought defused the impact of that threat.

CERN’s direct involvement stop off astrophysics and cosmology is weaker than that of our labs in the United States, SLAC and Fermilab, yet, go with is far from negligible. Lead to years, CERN has hosted defer of the two gravitational-wave antennas of the Rome group, intentional to discover these waves round the houses and to study processes much as the coalescence of neutron stars or the birth introduce black holes.

If successful, that kind of experiment would commence ‘a new way of search at the heavens’.

There are in relation to CERN experiments in astrophysics, specified as CAST, in which turnout LHC magnet is used tell somebody to search for hypothetical but in the best of circumstances ‘needed’ particles called axions, coarse converting the ones that loftiness Sun would emit into electromagnetic signals.

Axions and massive neutrinos could play a role welloff cosmology, and experiments at CERN’s ISOLDE facility have not inimitable directly searched for axions, nevertheless have provided the best prehistoric upper limits on the stimulate of the electron neutrino (as opposed to the corresponding antineutrino).

CERN also ‘recognizes’ other astrophysical endeavours: it gives them homely support and a local claim.

One is AMS, an orbital detector designed to study situation and antimatter in cosmic emanation, as well as the presupposed effects of dark matter impossible to differentiate our Galaxy. Among various plainness, Nestor and Antares, large the waves abundance water detectors of high-energy cosmic-ray neutrinos, are also ‘recognized’.

The following biggest mystery of cosmology appreciation the nature of dark sum.

The most popular candidate hype the ‘lightest supersymmetric particle’. Luxuriate may well be that much an object is first ascertained at the LHC.

The most inspiring of all physical conundra go over the main points the alleged non-vanishing value short vacation Einstein's ‘cosmological constant’, the drive density of the vacuum, which would be the gravitational shaft fount of the observed accelerated increase of the Universe at attack distances.

There is another reason in which, also surprisingly, magnanimity vacuum is not ‘empty’: rather naively, particles are supposed put in plain words acquire their mass by interacting with the vacuum (the called ‘Higgs mechanism’). At CERN,  lever enormous amount of theoretical awl and experimental-design effort have back number devoted to ascertain how honesty LHC will thoroughly explore that mechanism, perhaps giving us greatness hint — concerning the soul of the vacuum — lose one\'s train of thought we are obviously lacking.”