An electron spin resonance spectrometer using an artificial atom (a superconducting flux qubit) is realized, featuring both high sensitivity (400 spins/√Hz) and high spatial resolution (0.05 pL).

Hiraku Toida

In February, the CMS and MoEDAL collaborations at CERN signed an agreement to hand over to MoEDAL a section of the LHC beam pipe that was located inside CMS between 2008 and 2013. The delicate object, 6 metres long and made of beryllium, will now be sliced and fed into a highly precise magnetic sensors in order to allow MoEDAL to look for magnetic monopoles: hypothetical particles with only a single magnetic pole – north or south – unlike north-south dipoles we are familiar with.

Paul Dirac posited the existence of magnetic monopoles in 1931, and, although never observed, they could be produced in collisions within the LHC. They would not travel very far after being produced, binding with the beryllium nuclei of the beam pipe and remaining there awaiting discovery.

The MoEDAL collaboration will cut the beam pipe at a special facility at the Centre for Particle Physics at the University of Alberta in Canada and ship the pieces back across the Atlantic to ETH Zurich in Switzerland to look for electromagnetic anomalies in them. Many theories attempting to unify all of the known forces into a single force (so-called “Grand Unified Theories”) require the existence of monopoles and finding them could open the door to all-new physics.

Something about atoms has never added up. Fundamental particles called quarks get kind of sluggish once they’re caught up in crowds of protons and neutrons – and quite frankly, they shouldn’t.

For decades, physicists have hunted for clues on the quark’s tendency to slow down in larger atoms, but have come up empty-handed. But now, a closer look at old data has finally revealed a clue to explain this strange phenomenon.

A massive team of physicists known as the CLAS Collaboration (after the CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer) recently ran through data gathered from previous experiments at the Jefferson Lab’s Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility.