Detectors Uncover Hidden Baryons


A team of scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment has announced an exceptional and unique observation of five new baryons, particles composed of three quarks. Quarks are one of the fundamental building blocks for matter, combining to make hadrons.


Tara Shears, Professor of Physics at University of Liverpool and Liverpool’s LHCb group lead, explained why this discovery is significant: “These particles have been hiding in plain sight for years, but it’s taken the exquisite sensitivity of LHCb’s particle detectors to bring them to our attention.”


The LHCb experiment is one of seven experiments collecting data at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and is investigating the subtle differences between matter and antimatter in a bid to answer one of the most fundamental questions – why is our Universe made of matter? UK participation is funded by STFC, with contributions from the participating institutes, the Royal Society and European Union.


These new baryons are high-energy excited states of the Omega c baryon, which were discovered when the scientists reconstructed the short-lived Omega-c baryon from its decay


to a Xi baryon and subsequent decay into a proton, a kaon K- and a pion. By studying the trajectories and energies deposited by all the particles, LHCb scientists uncovered the five distinct new excited Omega_c baryon states.


Professor Shears explained how the UK’s future involvement will be vital: “We need the precision trajectory information from the VELO detector to reconstruct the trail of particles these new baryons produce and information from the RICH detectors to know what these particles are - both detectors that the UK helped build. If we’re uncovering these new particles now, who knows what else is in our data waiting to be discovered?”


Using the vast amounts of data collected during the operational life of the Large Hadron Collider and the fantastic precision of LHCb’s detectors, scientists have been able to confirm the discovery is not just a fluke.


Physicists will now determine the precise properties of these new particles, which will contribute to our understanding of how quarks are bound inside a baryon.


€6.7 million Water Quality Initiative Launched


A new EU-backed initiative to combat the effects of climate change on bathing waters in Wales and Ireland is being led by researchers at University College Dublin (UCB) in partnership with University of Aberystwyth.


The €6.7 million Acclimatize project, announced in March by Welsh Government Finance Secretary Mark Drakeford AM, aims to improve the quality of seashores in both regions to boost tourism as well as support marine and agricultural activities. Backed with €5.3 million from the EU’s Ireland Wales Cooperation programme, the project will use and develop a range of technologies, including smart real-time predictive tools to monitor water quality to protect the marine environment and human health.


The Aberystwyth University team is led by Professor David Kay from the Centre for Research into Environment and Health at the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences. “Climate change is predicted to increase extreme rainfalls which transport pollutants to the coast. The timing and magnitude of these effects is key to predicting their impacts on key resources such as bathing and shellfish harvesting waters. A core element of the Acclimatize project is to predict these effects and suggest mitigation strategies where adverse impacts are predicted as the climate changes.


“The Acclimatize project is designed to develop and implement smart and innovative management approaches which will build resilience and sustainability to our coastal water used for bathing and shellfish harvesting. This will make a significant contribution to the delivery of Our Sustainable Future - A Framework for sustainable development for Ireland (2012) and The Environment Wales Act (2016) both in the areas of natural resources management and climate change to underpin economic growth centred on recreation, tourism and the sustainable management of Wales’ coastal ecosystems,” Professor Kay added. In Ireland, the project will focus on bathing waters in Dublin Bay and is led by UCD Professor Wim Meijer of University College Dublin. “Working in partnership with Aberystwyth University, the Acclimatize project will make a significant contribution to developing innovative management systems to protect our coastal waters from the impact of climate change. As a result, this will support economic growth through improved water quality which will lead to a range of benefits such as increased tourism and shellfish harvesting in Ireland and Wales.”


42168pr@reply-direct.com MRI Scanner Modified to Study the Stuff of Stars


apprentices from STFC’s Daresbury Laboratory, worked to strip and reconfigure the magnet ready for use on the ISOLDE instrument. In early 2017 the magnet was ready for final testing and installation. With help from the CERN cryogenics team, the magnet was cooled using liquid helium before being successfully re-energised to prove that it was ready to work again as a superconducting magnet in its new role. Once fully operational the magnet will perform a vital role at ISOLDE, a nuclear physics facility which provides both low- energy and high energy re-accelerated radioactive beams to observe the properties of atomic nuclei.


MRI magnet being cleaned by STFC apprentice (Credit: Paul Morrall)


After spending 15 years scanning patients at an Australian hospital, an unwanted MRI machine has been given a new lease of life at the world’s biggest science experiment as a scanner of the material that makes up exploding stars.


A team of UK scientists and engineers reclaimed the superconducting magnet from an old MRI scanner, before modifying it for use at CERN to help us better understand how the Universe works. This project cost about £130,000 – whereas producing a bespoke magnet from scratch would have cost £1 million or more.


After reaching the end of its life at the Brisbane hospital, the magnet undertook an epic journey round the world as it was shipped to CERN, the home of the Large Hadron Collider, in Switzerland. A small team from the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), including two young


Professor Robert Page from the Physics department at the University of Liverpool, who leads the international collaboration that will exploit the magnet, said: “The ISOL- SRS project is designing and constructing spectrometers to explore subtle features of the forces that bind atomic nuclei and nuclear reactions thought to occur in stellar explosions.


“This ex-MRI magnet is a vital component of the spectrometer to be exploited at CERN’s world-leading HIE-ISOLDE facility and following its successful recommissioning we are now in a position to embark on this new and exciting science programme with our collaborators from institutions across the UK, Europe and Argonne National Laboratory in the USA.”


The purchase of the ex-MRI magnet and the cost of reconfiguring it for use on the ISOLDE experiment were co- funded by STFC, the University of Liverpool, the University of Leuven and the University of Manchester. It will contain advanced silicon detectors that are being built by a UK-led


team as part of the ISOL-SRS project. 42171pr@reply-direct.com


42173pr@reply-direct.com


Key Role of Immune Cells in Brain Repair


Scientists from Belfast have discovered that specific cells from the immune system are key players in brain repair.


The research study,* led by Dr Yvonne Dombrowski and Dr Denise Fitzgerald at the Wellcome-Wolfson Institute for Experimental Medicine at Queen’s University Belfast, is being hailed as a landmark study in unravelling the mysteries of how the brain repairs damage. This is crucial in the fight against MS, which affects 2.3 million people worldwide and over 4,500 people in Northern Ireland.


MS is the most common neurological disease affecting young adults and is the result of damage to myelin, the protective sheath surrounding nerve fibres of the central nervous system – the brain, spinal cord and optic nerve. In MS, the immune system wrongly attacks the myelin sheath covering nerve fibres in the brain and spinal cord, which can lead to symptoms such as vision loss, pain, fatigue and paralysis.


Until now, medical treatment could limit relapses but could not reverse the damage already done by the condition. The exciting aspect of this new research is that the team have uncovered beneficial effects of immune cells in myelin repair that have potential to reverse myelin damage. The study was an international collaboration including experts in Cambridge, San Francisco, Edinburgh, Maynooth and Nice.


The research breakthrough shows that a protein made by certain cells within the immune system triggers the brain’s stem cells to mature into oligodendrocytes that repair myelin. The discovery means that researchers can now use this new knowledge to develop medicines which will boost these particular cells and develop an entirely new class of treatments for the future.


*Published in Nature Neuroscience 42165pr@reply-direct.com


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