Scientists hope the world’s most powerful atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, will unlock the secrets of the elusive ‘God Particle’ when switched on later this year.
300 feet below the French village of Crozet lies the world’s most powerful particle accelerator – the Large Hadron Collider. The goal being building such a monstrosity - no less than unraveling what the universe is made of. In a few months this machine will fire two beams of particles at close to the speed of light at one another to essentially see what happens when they collide.
This vast network of electromagnets, sensors and associative machinery has but one purpose – to shatter atomic particles in search of new knowledge and possibly matter from the edge of time itself.
When physicists slam atomic nuclei into one another with unparalleled force in the Large Hadron, they hope to create new particles and situations only present at the very first instants of the universe. One of the particles they seek is the Higgs Boson, commonly know as the “God particle”. This particle contains the missing evidence in the theory that explains some basic characteristics of the universe – exactly how particles gain mass.
It all sounds like something out of science fiction movie when you think of it. Physicists are not exactly excited about describing what could go wrong with the experiments and some fear the byproducts of an experiment gone wrong. In theory anything from creating a black hole to making Godzilla come to life is possible, but scientists are probably more afraid of a failure than blowing France off the map.
There is no doubt that we would be far worse off without such “mad scientific” experiments as X-Rays, gamma rays, radioactivity and a host of other useful phenomena were discovered similarly. Physics has been about change all along and there is no telling what mysteries are still left to be solved.
At the advent of the 20th Century Einstein’s theory of relativity did not even exist and physicists believed that everything worth knowing was known. Taken in this context it is exciting to think that these scientists might actually produce particles that ceased to exist billions of years ago – then again Godzilla was a quite destructive creature too. I guess we will see what happens – hello “Big Bang Particles” or hold on France.
Last week, an international consortium stepped up the pace by announcing in Beijing, China, a design for the world’s most expensive atom smasher - the US$6.7 billion (AU$8.6 billion) International Linear Collider (ILC).
In a double tunnel 31 kilometers long, particle physicists would collide electrons and their antimatter opposites, positrons, at energies of 500 billion electron volts.
The scheme - which could be extended to 50 kilometers and a trillion electron volts - will hurl these particles at close to the speed of light.
The resultant collision could unlock dark matter and dark energy, the invisible, enigmatic substances that together are thought to comprise 96 per cent of the mass of the universe.
Engineering studies for the ILC will start later this year with the idea of making a decision in 2010 on whether to press ahead with building the machine. If all goes well, ground will be broken in 2012 and the collider itself will be fired up at the end of the next decade.
Scientists in the U.S. and Europe, meanwhile, are grappling to be first to detect the most eagerly-sought particle in physics - the Higgs Boson. Construed in the 1960s by a British physicist, Peter Higgs, the Boson is thought to exist in an all-pervading field, giving all other particles their mass.
If the Higgs exists, it would fill a worrying gap in the Standard Model, the century-old notional structure for describing the fundamental nature of matter. But if the Higgs doesn’t exist, it will be back to the drawing board.
The Europeans are months away from switching on the world’s most powerful smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is being built at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland, using a 26-kilometer underground ring.
The LHC will whizz protons, which are far heavier particles than electrons, to energies of up to 14 trillion electron volts.
Until a few months ago, it seemed that the prize of the Higgs would almost certainly go to the LHC. It alone had the power to explore the theorized particle’s mass, which was deemed to be a maximum of 166 giga-electron volts (GeV).
But researchers at the Tevatron collider, at the famous Fermilab facility near Chicago in the U.S., believe they could be in with a chance. New calculations suggest that the upper limit for the Higgs is 153 GeV, which is within the Tevatron’s range.
Meanwhile, physicists at Stanford University in California said they have conducted an experiment that proves the viability of a low-cost collider technology called a plasma accelerator.
Instead of using a giant magnet and a huge tunnel to accelerate the particles, their accelerator uses a tunnel just three kilometers long to speed up a beam of electrons.
By passing the electrons through a cloud of ionized gas, or plasma, that is just one meter across, the team were able to double the particle’s energy - a massive booster effect, they report in the British journal Nature.
Only a tiny fraction of the electrons in the beam were accelerated this way, though, and the beam itself is not ‘concentrated’ enough to get a good yield of particle collisions.
According to Wormser, “Plasma accelerators are a promising technology and may be the solution for the future, but on a timescale of 20 to 25 years at least.”
Courtesy of National Geographic
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