Finally...a Video!

After a short time incognito (due to the stresses of AP exams), the Lincoln CERN team is back! And this time, with a video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MP8xky_UPsA

Pictures!

Finally, some pictures from our trip! We now have a flickr account:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lhscernteam/

There are also pictures from our 2 days in Paris, so feel free to check those out.
-Kaitlin

ATLAS and CMS articles, by Nathaniel

The race is on. 

Two experiments at the LHC are currently moving at a lightning pace to produce the same event. They are immensely competitive and they each employ similar plans of achieving their goals. Their designs and methods, however, are completely different. 

ATLAS (A Toroidal Lhc ApparatuS) and CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) are designed to explore the origins of matter via the interactions  and collisions of very massive particles, such as protons. When these collisions blast through the center of the detectors, their debris will be sent hurdling in the form of various exotic particles, whose energy is deposited in the detectors and their calorimeters, meaning "energy-measurers." This debris often decays into other, even more fascinating and uncommon particles, whose trajectories are measured and calculated by the computer systems, thus indicating their momenta and other useful data. 

This is where the similarities between these two detectors definitively ends. Though ATLAS utilizes a solenoidal magnet (a loop of wire wrapped around a metallic core, producing a controlled magnetic field) among its inner components, it implements a far more radical design around the outside. This outer magnetic field is produced by ATLAS's eight massive superconducting barrel loops and its two end caps. 

CMS opted for a drastically different magnetic design, using one large solenoid magnet. Due to CMS's attempt to reduce wasted space (hence the name "compact"), it was able to construct a highly effective and competitive particle detector to compete and check ATLAS at only 60% of the size. Some of CMS's components are in place with an accuracy of 5 microns in space. 

Thus, these two detectors have a naturally competitive nature and their approaches are entirely different for finding the legendary Higgs Boson predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. However, upon touring each facility, one must  note the sense of camaraderie and respect among the employees and scientists associated with both experiments. It is truly a golden age for physics when this type of relationship is possible.

Greetings from CERN!

I'm here in the CERN video editing room, updating the blog. We've been taking tons of video footage for the visual team back at Lincoln to manipulate and mold into a final, finished, and polished project. Additionally, we'll be using voice-overs for some of the videos, since we managed to get zilch audio the first day of the interviews. (Very depressing, especially since the physicists' comments on the food in the cafeteria were lost.) We've been to ATLAS, CMS, and the LHC tunnel, and learned plenty of information to use in future articles and for videos. 

ALSO:

WE FOUND THE HIGGS. 

Actually, Peter Higgs. I even shook his hand, haven't washed it yet. (Just kidding, Mom) 

Although finding the particle would have been fantastic, this is trés exciting,  as they might say here in Switzerland.

So long for now, I'm off to do some work, and then at 4:30 PM (16:30) I have an interview with a physicist who, get this, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2003!!! What an exciting weekend, Higgs yesterday, Sir Anthony James Leggett today. There's no place like CERN, end of story.

Good bye!

Questions!

So we'd love for people to send in questions while we're at CERN so we can answer them in videos/on the web. However, we don't really have any place for people to pose questions, so please leave them as comments to this blog post.

Thanks so much,
Kaitlin

Website!

Check out the new website:
cern.tk

Everyone has been working very hard the past couple of weeks, and it's really shown; we have a theme song, a game, a video, a website, and a few articles. The next time this blog is updated, we'll probably be at CERN!

How the LHC Works: an Article

In order for our project to be used by a larger audience, some concepts have to be watered down a bit in order for the uninformed masses to gain knowledge from our publications. I wrote a few paragraphs on how the LHC works and why we would want to collide particles in the first place, to be posted on our website.

Here it is:

Picture this: You’re 100 meters underground, on the Franco-Swiss border. You’re in some sort of a tunnel, and it seems to be circular; about 27 kilometers long. You notice the temperature is extremely cold, if you had to guess, you’d estimate -271 degrees Celsius. All of a sudden, you feel a very strong pull, like a magnet is tugging on you. You start to accelerate through the tunnel, getting faster and faster until you’ve nearly reached the speed of light! With every lap, you feel yourself gain more energy. You see something quickly approaching you. What is it? Looks like a bunch of protons! BAM.


What just happened? Well, the process described above is the typical procedure for protons in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Particles (protons and lead ions) are accelerated in the large tunnel, guided by superconducting magnets chilled by liquid helium. The particles gain energy with each lap around the accelerator ring, with protons each reaching an energy of 7 TeV, yielding a total collision energy of 14 TeV.


Sure, it all sounds exciting, but why would we collide particles in the first place? Well, the LHC was actually built to answer a few key unresolved questions. For example, physicists have been describing the fundamental particles over the past few decades via the Standard Model of particle physics. However, there are a few gaps in the Standard Model that can only be filled in with knowledge gained by experimental data, which will hopefully be provided by the LHC. Another vital task of the LHC is to recreate the conditions immediately following the Big Bang to investigate the properties of matter within the first second of our Universe’s life. Two experiments (ATLAS and CMS) will look for supersymmetric particles to test a likely hypothesis for the make-up of dark matter and dark energy that makes up 96% of our Universe. Additionally, the LHC will be searching for matter-antimatter differences which may help explain why matter prevailed over its opposite. The accelerator will also continue searching expanding on the knowledge provided by Newton and Einstein, searching for the elusive Higgs boson necessary to explain mass, as well as detecting evidence that additional spatial dimensions exist. Basically, we hope the LHC can solve billion-year-old mysteries with collisions lasting mere nanoseconds.

Let me know if anyone finds any problems with it, or thinks I need to be more clear with some concepts.

Thanks,
Kaitlin