Special Topic of Hadron Colliders
Published November 2010
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has been in the news for the past few years for bad reasons—due to concern in some quarters that its 14 trillion electron volt collisions between protons might precipitate the end of the universe as we know it—and for far better reasons—that it's the best chance physicists have of discovering physics beyond the standard model. Hadron colliders like the LHC collide protons with either protons or antiprotons.
The features of this Special Topic outlined above represent distinct slices
of citation data. By approaching citation data from multiple angles, we can
observe trends and anomalies across categories—leading to more rich
and nuanced stories behind the data.
The baseline time span for this database is (publication years) January 1, 2000-June 30, 2010 (third bimonthly period 2010). This analysis was created using the Web of Science® from Clarivate. The resulting database contained 15,317 (10 years) and 4,328 (2 years) papers; 28,915 authors; 82 nations; 626 journals; and 2,901 institutions. See additional information below in the overview & methodology sections.
Topic Overview
The last element of the
ATLAS experiment is lowered
into the cave at the CERN in
Meyrin near Geneva.
REUTERS/Denis Balibouse.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has been in the news for the past few years for bad reasons—due to concern in some quarters that its 14 trillion electron volt collisions between protons might precipitate the end of the universe as we know it—and for far better reasons—that it's the best chance physicists have of discovering physics beyond the standard model. Hadron colliders like the LHC collide protons with either protons or antiprotons. (The term "hadron" refers to these composite particles made up of both quarks and gluons.)
Hadron colliders can reach higher energies at lower costs than electron-positron colliders. As a result, these machines have accounted for the major discoveries in high-energy physics over the past 30 years—the W and Z bosons, discovered at CERN in 1983 and 1984, and the top quark at Fermilab's Tevatron in 1995.
There are currently three hadron colliders in operation: the LHC, with a peak beam energy of 7 trillion electron volts, the Tevatron at 980 billion electron volts, and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven, with a beam energy of only 100 to 250 billion electron volts. Unlike the LHC and the Tevatron, however, RHIC is capable of colliding polarized protons and studying the spin structure of the proton.
RHIC, as the name suggests, is primarily a heavy ion collider, capable of smashing together gold and copper ions, for instance, to recreate the conditions in the universe in the instant after the Big Bang and particularly the quark-gluon plasma that is thought to have existed at the time. The LHC can also collide heavy ions but is expected to do so only one month a year. Because heavy ion colliders create new hadrons in their collisions, this Special Topics analysis of the literature on hadron colliders over the past decade and over the past two years includes the research with heavy ion collisions as well.
INTERVIEWs MENU
Read interviews, first-person essays, profiles, and other features about people in a wide variety of fields, along with information on journals & institutions in the topic of Hadron Colliders. All of the author comments below are also listed in the site-wide Author Commentaries listings (available by month/year or alphabetically).
JUNE 2010
Zi-Wei Lin
Discusses a Multiphase Transport Model for Relativistic Heavy Ion
Collisions
The paper "Multiphase transport model
for relativistic heavy ion collisions," (Lin ZW, et al., Phys.
Rev. C 72[6]: art. no. 064901, December 2005) is a key paper
in the Research Front Map on Hadron Colliders, with 116 cites at
the time the Special Topics analysis was run. In
Essential Science IndicatorsSM from
Clarivate, it
is also a Highly Cited Paper in the field of Physics, with 133
citations up to February 28, 2011. In this interview,
ScienceWatch.com talks with lead author Dr. Zi-Wei Lin about
this paper and its impact on the field of hadron colliders.
MAY 2011
Nu Xu
Talks About the STAR Collaboration at Brookhaven National
Lab
In this final part in our
series of
interviews with Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL),
ScienceWatch.com correspondent Gary Taubes talks with Dr.
Nu Xu about the STAR Collaboration and its role in hadron collider
research. In our Special Topics analysis of hadron collider
research over the past decade, BNL ranks at #1 by total cites, #2
by number of papers, and #20 by cites per paper, based on 1,529
papers cited a total of 27,320 times. Among these, 369 papers with
4,449 cites dealt with STAR in some way. BNL also ranks at #20
among the 704 institutions comprising the top 1% in the field of
Physics in
Essential Science IndicatorsSM from
Clarivate.
APRIL 2011
Wit Busza
Discusses Brookhaven National Lab's PHOBOS Collaboration
Our Special Topics analysis of hadron
colliders research over the past decade shows that the work coming
out of Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) ranks at #1 by total
cites, #2 by number of papers, and #20 by cites per paper, based
on 1,529 papers cited a total of 27,320 times. BNL also ranks at
#20 among the 704 institutions comprising the top 1% in the field
of Physics in
Essential Science IndicatorsSM from
Clarivate.
Among BNL's papers in our Special Topic, 62 papers with 1,052 cites
dealt with the PHOBOS experiment in some way; one of these papers is
ranked at #4 on the 10-year paper list. In this interview,
ScienceWatch.com correspondent Gary Taubes talks with Dr. Wit
Busza about the PHOBOS experiment and its role in hadron collider
research.
MARCH 2011
Barbara
Jacak Talks About Brookhaven National Lab's PHENIX
Experiment
In
Essential Science IndicatorsSM from
Clarivate,
Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) ranks at #20 among institutions in
the field of Physics. According to our Special Topics analysis of
hadron colliders research over the past decade, the work coming out of
BNL ranks at #1 by total cites, #2 by number of papers, and #20 by
cites per paper, based on 1,529 papers cited a total of 27,320 times.
Among BNL's papers in our Special Topic, 323 papers with 5,317 cites
deal with the PHENIX experiment; one of these papers is ranked at #5 on
the 10-year paper list. In this interview, ScienceWatch.com
correspondent Gary Taubes talks with Dr. Barbara Jacak about the PHENIX
experiment and its particular contributions to hadron collider research
over the years.
FEBRUARY 2011
Flemming
Videbaek on Brookhaven National Lab's BRAHMS Experiment
Our
Special Topics analysis of hadron colliders research over the past
decade shows that the work coming out of Brookhaven National
Laboratory (BNL) ranks at #1 by total cites, #2 by number of papers,
and #20 by cites per paper, based on 1,529 papers cited a total of
27,320 times. BNL ranks at #20 among the 681 institutions comprising
the top 1% in the field of Physics in
Essential Science IndicatorsSM from
Clarivate.
Among BNL's papers in our Special Topic, 55 papers with 732 cites dealt
with the BRAHMS experiment in some way; one of these papers is ranked
at #5 on the 10-year paper list. In this interview,
ScienceWatch.com correspondent Gary Taubes talks with Dr.
Flemming Videbaek about the BRAHMS experiment and its particular
contributions to hadron collider research over the years.
JANUARY 2011
Heavy-Ion
Collisions & Other High-Energy Physics News from Brookhaven
National Lab
In
Essential Science IndicatorsSM from
Clarivate,
Brookhaven National Lab ranks at #20 among the 681 institutions
comprising the top 1% in the field of Physics. Brookhaven's record in
this field includes 4,045 papers cited a total of 96,483 times between
January 1, 2000 and August 31, 2010. According to our Special Topics
analysis on Hadron Colliders research over the past decade, Brookhaven
ranks at #1 by total cites and #2 by number of papers, based on 1,529
papers cited a total of 27,320 times. In this interview,
ScienceWatch.com correspondent Gary Taubes talks with Dr.
Steven Vigdor (pictured), the Associate Lab Director for Nuclear &
Particle physics at Brookhaven, about the Lab's achievements in physics
in recent years.
Note: This is also the ScienceWatch.com Institution Interview for January 2010.
Thresholds
Once the database was in place, it was used to generate list of authors, journals, institutions, and nations. Rankings for author, journal, institution, and country are listed in three ways: according to total cites, total papers, and total cites/paper*. The paper thresholds and corresponding percentages used to determine scientist, institution, country, and journal rankings according to total cites/paper, and total papers respectively are as follows:
| Entity | Authors | Institutions | Journals | Nations |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Thresholds | 181 | 369 | 66 | 23 |
| Percentage: | 1% | 1% | 10% | 50% |
| *Unless otherwise specified, all rankings have a >= 5 paper threshold for all measures. | ||||
Methodology
The baseline time span for this database is (publication years) January 1, 2000-June 30, 2010 (third bimonthly period 2010). This analysis was created using the Web of Science® from Clarivate. The resulting database contained 15,317 (10 years) and 4,328 (2 years) papers; 28,915 authors; 82 nations; 626 journals; and 2,901 institutions.
Keywords
The Internet search terms for this Topic are:
HADRON COLLIDERS, LARGE HADRON COLLIDER, LHC, TEVATRON, RELATIVISTIC HEAVY ION COLLIDER, RHIC, PARTON DISTRIBUTIONS, GLOBAL QCD ANALYSIS, QUARK-GLUON PLASMA, STAR COLLABORATION, PHENIX COLLABORATION, PHOBOS, COLOR GLASS CONDENSATE, BRAHMS EXPERIMENT, TRANSVERSE MOMENTUM, AU+AU COLLISIONS, BLACK HOLES, SHORT DISTANCE PHYSICS, ELLIPTIC FLOW, RADIAL FLOW, HADRONIZATION, RECOMBINATION, FRAGMENTATION, HADRON PRODUCTION, NUCLEAR COLLISIONS, CHARGED PARTICLE SPECTRA, SPS, PARTON COALESCENCE, ANTIPROTON/PION ANOMALY, ALPGEN, MULTIPARTON PROCESSES, BOSON, ATLAS EXPERIMENT, CERN, CONFORMAL RELATIVISTIC VISCOUS HYDRODYNAMICS, CTEQ GLOBAL ANALYSIS, ELECTROWEAK SYMMETRY BREAKING, WARPED EXTRA DIMENSIONS, PYTHIA, PREDICTIONS, SCALAR SINGLET, DECAYS, TOP-QUARK PHYSICS, DARK MATTER PARTICLES, RELIC NEUTRALINOS, WIMPS, KINKS, CENTRALITY DEPENDENCE, JET SUBSTRUCTURE, HIGGS-SEARCH CHANNEL, DARK-MATTER STERILE NEUTRINOS, MINIJET ANGULAR CORRELATIONS.
Reuters PictureS and Featured Images
The Linac 2 is pictured at the
CERN in Meyrin near Geneva.
REUTERS/Denis Balibouse.
The images throughout the Special Topic of Hadron Colliders are from Reuters Pictures. Most pictures directly relate to the papers and locations in the database.
About Reuters Pictures
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Top banner: A graphic showing a collision at full power is pictured at the CMS experience control room of the LHC at the CERN in Meyrin. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse.