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
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Sunday, March 23, 2008
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!
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!
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
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
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
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Update
This blog has been a bit neglected over the past week, so it's time for an update on how things are going with the CERN project.
-We had our first official meeting last Tuesday, and the many undertakings of this project were delegated. We set up committees for each of the different facets of our project. If anybody would like to participate and was not able to attend the meeting, please see me or Joy so we can put you somewhere you'll enjoy yourself. :-)
-The website is still in progress, and more is being added to it weekly. Our web design committee is very talented and I am confident that our finished product will be superb thanks to their html prowess. The link to the website is posted a few posts down.
-We are working to put together a press packet, which will include pictures and articles about this project. We are working on a "CERN for Dummies"-esque blurb that can be given to newspapers and other publications that have an audience unfamiliar with CERN and its happenings. I'm so familiar with CERN (thanks to Mr. Lamee) that it sometimes baffles me when people who have taken physics don't know what it is. Guess us Lincoln physics students are spoiled.
Anyways, the project is well underway and will surely be spectacular when completed. I'm looking forward to seeing the finished product. I'll update this blog weekly with the latest news on Lincoln's CERN project.
-Kaitlin
-We had our first official meeting last Tuesday, and the many undertakings of this project were delegated. We set up committees for each of the different facets of our project. If anybody would like to participate and was not able to attend the meeting, please see me or Joy so we can put you somewhere you'll enjoy yourself. :-)
-The website is still in progress, and more is being added to it weekly. Our web design committee is very talented and I am confident that our finished product will be superb thanks to their html prowess. The link to the website is posted a few posts down.
-We are working to put together a press packet, which will include pictures and articles about this project. We are working on a "CERN for Dummies"-esque blurb that can be given to newspapers and other publications that have an audience unfamiliar with CERN and its happenings. I'm so familiar with CERN (thanks to Mr. Lamee) that it sometimes baffles me when people who have taken physics don't know what it is. Guess us Lincoln physics students are spoiled.
Anyways, the project is well underway and will surely be spectacular when completed. I'm looking forward to seeing the finished product. I'll update this blog weekly with the latest news on Lincoln's CERN project.
-Kaitlin
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