The Quantum Frontier: The Large Hadron Collider
Don Lincoln
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 0801891442
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The highest-energy particle accelerator ever built, the Large Hadron Collider runs under the border between France and Switzerland. It leapt into action on September 10, 2008, amid unprecedented global press coverage and widespread fears that its energy would create tiny black holes that could destroy the earth.
By smashing together particles smaller than atoms, the LHC recreates the conditions hypothesized to have existed just moments after the big bang. Physicists expect it to aid our understanding of how the universe came into being and to show us much about the standard model of particle physics―even possibly proving the existence of the mysterious Higgs boson. In exploring what the collider does and what it might find, Don Lincoln explains what the LHC is likely to teach us about particle physics, including uncovering the nature of dark matter, finding micro black holes and supersymmetric particles, identifying extra dimensions, and revealing the origin of mass in the universe.
Thousands of physicists from around the globe will have access to the LHC, none of whom really knows what outcomes will be produced by the $7.7 billion project. Whatever it reveals, the results arising from the Large Hadron Collider will profoundly alter our understanding of the cosmos and the atom and stimulate amateur and professional scientists for years to come.
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apparent, the four LEP experiments put the remaining time to excellent use. There is no greater epitaph for any experiment. The period of time between 2000 and 2005 was marked by feverish activity. The LEP accelerator and all four experiments needed to be dismantled and removed. The LHC components needed to be assembled, with the first of the bending magnets installed in 2005. Final magnet production occurred in 2006, and the final bending magnet was lowered into place on April 26, 2007. With
particles with positive electrical charge and two negative. The fifth particle has such a large energy that it is difficult to say if it is curving clockwise or counterclockwise. So, because of this ignorance, we are unable to say whether this particle is positive or negative. Further, this particular particle underscores an important limitation of this technique. For instance, if the particle is moving with so much energy that you can’t tell whether it’s moving clockwise or counterclockwise,
courtesy CERN and the LHCb collaboration. The designers of the VELO system made many clever engineering choices, but one is of interest to us here: Unless great care is taken, silicon is susceptible to damage by radiation. In normal operation, the beams would pass through the center of the hole in the center of the VELO disks. However, when the beam is being put into the LHC, it is larger and the danger of mis- steering it is greater. Thus the VELO is split into a left and right side, and the
inches) long, with the layers closer to the beam being shorter. The inner two layers are silicon pixel detectors, while the outer ones are of the strip type. Altogether, the ALICE silicon detector is comprised of about 12.5 million detectors. The next layer of ALICE uses ionization techniques. Charged particles cross the detector, which is mostly filled with gas. The charged particles ionize the gas by knocking electrons off the atoms. Strong electric fields guide the electrons to waiting
accelerator scientists.) With current equipment, it is thought that the collision energy of the LHC can be raised to maybe 15 TeV, using the magnets now installed. A major energy increase, say a doubling to 28 TeV, will take new magnets and consequently a major R D program. The third attribute for a particle beam, the brightness of the beams, is more amenable to an improvement. The CERN accelerator scientists are already seriously discussing how to increase the LHC beam’s brightness by a factor
