This week the international team that runs the research carried out using the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) announced the first results in the search for dark matter. At a seminar held at CERN, Professor Samuel Ting, a spokesman for AMS and winner of the Nobel Prize for physics in 1976, presented the evidence found, in particular, an excess of positrons in the cosmic ray flux.
The ESA presented the best map so far of the cosmic background radiation created thanks to the measurements of the Planck Surveyor spacecraft. This map shows the universe as it was before the galaxies were formed when it was about 380,000 years old. The results show some features that aren’t currently explained and may require further progress in the field of physics.
On July 4, 2012 at CERN a press conference presented the preliminary results of two experiments, CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) and ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus), which confirmed the discovery of a boson that had the characteristics expected for the Higgs boson. Last wednesday, at the Moriond conference in La Thuile, Italy, additional data were presented obtained from those experiments that confirm that the particle discovered is really the Higgs boson.
When in Europe was early morning, at CERN personnel have started the shutdown operations of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest particle accelerator in the world. This is what is called Long shutdown 1 (LS1), the first long break scheduled to revise the equipment and upgrade them. The operations are expected to resume in early 2015 at even higher energies.
