News on the Large Hadron Collider

The Hadron Collider located beneath France and Switzerland will be switched into the on mode this fall.  Work on the collider has ceased and all that is left is the low hum of electronics.  The collider is located under the Swiss-Franco border in a massive eight story space.  This area is filled with enough niobiumtitanium wire to stretch to the Sun and back five times.

Pictured at left, ATLAS, one of the underground labs surrounding the collider, will study what happens when accelerated protons collide.  The protons will pass from Switzerland to France without benefit of a passport, and smash into one another up to 600 million times a second this September, assuming all goes according to plan.

These collisions will result in the heat, energy and densities that occurred just one trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.  These collisions will reoccur about once a second.  This should give scientists plenty of data to study in order to have a better understanding of, not only how the universe came about, but how the Big Bang itself worked.

In an earlier post I mentioned some controversy over this collider (better known as CERN the atom smasher) being created by those somewhat “opposed” to this experiment.  Fortunately, this controversy isn’t standing in the way of getting this experiment going as of now.

As revealed in Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc2, the enormous energies generated at the LHC will translate into large masses — and, particle physicists hope, many subatomic particles never before seen. Many are betting that they will see evidence of the elusive Higgs boson, a hypothetical particle first proposed in the 1960s that could help explain why some elementary particles have mass. Finding the Higgs would be the an amazing advancement and achievement for what physicists call the standard model, a highly successful theory that unifies three of the four known forces in nature and groups the fundamental constituents of matter into two broad categories.

Scientists are, however, hoping for more. “I’m certainly not going to yawn if they find a Higgs boson; we’ll break out the champagne and won’t answer the phones for a week,” theoretical physicist John Ellis says. “But that’s somehow an expected discovery.”

Researchers are hoping that CERTA will take them beyond the standard model.  They hope to obtain evidence of extra dimensions in space, curled into small volumes so they’re barely detectable; and possibly evaporating microscopic black holes.  Scientists say it is a possibility that CERTA’s collisions will create these.

According to a theory known as supersymmetry, every particle in nature has a heavier partner whose spin differs by a half integer. Supersymmetry would unite two seemingly disparate groups of particles.  So, if scientists are lucky, this experiment may open a whole new set of elementary particles!

“That would be the fantastic breakthrough— that we would finally know what most of the matter in the universe is,” says physics Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas at Austin. “I don’t think there’s anything more exciting likely to come out of the LHC.”

I have an article coming up about evidence of extra dimensions of space and such.  It is quite interesting, so check back for updates on that!

Tags: Astrophysics, Atom Smasher, Big Bang, CERTA, Cosmology, Extra dimensions, Hadron Collider, Microscopic Black Holes, Origin of Universe, particle physics, Physics, Theoretical Physics