Analysis
Agilent Congratulates CERN for Measuring Higgs Boson
Agilent offers its congratulations to the team at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, more commonly known as CERN, for discovering—at 99.9999 percent confidence—what is almost certainly the long-sought Higgs boson, an elementary particle that had been predicted to exist for theoretical reasons. Agilent is proud to have provided technology that played a part in this landmark discovery.
CreaWith subatomic particles travelling near the speed of light, digitizers must provide fast measurement throughput, very short “dead time” between measurements and excellent measurement fidelity. This is one of the key reasons CERN is using Agilent digitizers in the control and diagnostics sections of the Large Hadron Collider and the accelerators it feeds.
“In laboratories around the world, Agilent instrumentation has become an integral part of advanced experimental systems,” said Guy Séné, president of Agilent’s Electronic Measurement Group. “We provide the extreme speed and precision needed for system monitoring and control, and for capturing data from the interactions and events in the experiments themselves.”
More than 100 Agilent digitizer modules are currently installed at CERN. These provide sample rates that range from 500 MSa/s to 8 GSa/s with resolution of 8 or 10 bits on one, two or four channels. The digitizers are used to perform wideband beam monitoring and to monitor forward and reverse RF signals in the accelerator cavities. In a literal sense, the beam-monitoring measurements are made possible by Agilent digitizers that provide sufficient speed and bandwidth to capture the signals of interest.
An overview of the Agilent Acqiris solution is available in a new application brief entitled “Monitoring and Controlling Particle Collisions at Nanometer Scale and with Picosecond Duration.” The brief is available for download here.