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
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4 comments:
The only error I found was in the claim that the acceleration is to the speed of light. It's *almost* the speed of light. According to Scientific American, the collisions will be a total of 99.9999991% the speed of light. (BTW, if you run the Lorenz transformations on that number, the dilations of width, mass and time are pretty impressive.)
Scientific American has an excellent article on the LHC's specs:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-discovery-machine-hadron-collider
Ahh, thanks. I put "nearly the speed of light," but since it's not totally clear, I'll change it. Thank you!
it was clear, Patrick is just being a nerd, and trying to show off
it was totally clear, Patrick is just showing off.
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