41 A transitional magic nucleus Physicists at the French Large Heavy-Ion Accelerator (GANIL) have succeeded in detecting atomic nuclei of silicon-34 in a highly specific excited state. These nuclei, which are spherical in their ground state, then become highly deformed. Silicon-34 thus provides a transition state between so-called magic nuclei (whose specific number of neutrons endows them with sphericity and stability) and nuclei with a number of neutrons that should make them magic, but which are in fact more unstable and deformed whatever their state, since the number of neutrons they possess exceeds that of their protons. Physical Review Letters August 2012 online Simulation of the production of a Higgs boson in the LHC’s Atlas detector. Observing a particle consistent with the Higgs boson --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On July 4, 2012, physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, near Geneva, announced that they had discovered a particle consistent with the Higgs boson in the mass region around 125-126 GeV. Jointly predicted in 1964 by Peter Higgs, Robert Brout and François Englert, the Higgs boson is the last piece missing from the Standard Model, the current theory of elementary particles. But it is one of the most important particles of all since, according to theory, it explains why some elementary particles have mass. Detecting it was so crucial that it led to the construction of the most powerful particle accelerator ever designed, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The CERN researchers analyzed the huge amounts of data collected by the LHC until December 2012 in order to determine the properties of the newly discovered particle. The preliminary results based on all the 2012 data from the LHC’s ATLAS and CMS experiments, which first detected the new particle, appear to confirm that it is indeed a Higgs boson, even though its type is yet unknown. The specialists now need to determine whether this Higgs boson is unique, as predicted by the Standard Model, or whether it is just the first of a series of particles with exotic properties that might open the way to an entirely new physics. So watch this space! Physics Letters B September 2012 Palladium-110 may help to determine the nature of neutrinos The ISOLTRAP collaboration at CERN has succeeded in determining with great precision the energy that would be associated with the neutrinoless double-beta decay of palladium-110 to cadmium-110. If this decay were observed, it would provide evidence that the neutrino, unlike other particles of matter, is its own antiparticle. The half-life of palladium-110 is shorter than that of other isotopes used to study double-beta decay. This result therefore paves the way for more effective investigation of the true nature of neutrinos. Physical Review Letters February 2012 This collision of two protons, which might have produced a Higgs boson, was recorded by the CMS detector in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). 2012 A year at CNRS
RA2012_en
To see the actual publication please follow the link above