In Search if the God Particle:The Large Hadron Collider to be operationalized on Se. 10, 2008

The Large Hadron Collider: End of the world, or God's own particle?

A bewildered Cole Moreton goes in search of the science behind the spin

Sunday, 7 September 2008

AP

The Cern cathedral of science may reveal the universe's secrets, or suck us into a black hole

• Yes, but what is it? That has been many people's reaction to the furore over the Large Hadron Collider, due to be switched on this Wednesday. The biggest, most expensive experiment in history is attracting both scientific hyperbole and hysteria. Some say it will reveal the universe's secrets and lead to the elusive Theory of Everything. A few fear that unleashing unimaginable power beneath the Swiss countryside will result in the end of the world. But how? And what do all these words mean?
  

Large

Is an understatement. A giant circular tunnel, with several loops, stretches for 27km under the land between France and Switzerland. One of its experimental chambers is bigger than the nave of Westminster Abbey.

Hadron

The name for one of the types of particle that make up an atom. These tiny bits of energy will be propelled by giant magnets around the tunnel circuit at almost the speed of light.

Collide

Is what they will do when they meet other hadrons being beamed in the opposite direction, at the same great speed. The resulting explosion will create 100,000 times more heat than the sun, apparently. Thankfully, it will only happen for a moment, in an area a billion times smaller than a speck of dust.

Cern

Pronounced "sern". The French acronym for the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, which built the £5bn collider. The money came from 20 countries, including Britain, which has played a leading role.

The Big Bang

Is what they are trying to recreate. Or rather what happened a trillionth of a second after the universe was created by an explosion, 13.7 billion years ago. For that tiny moment, it is believed everything was molten plasma. This cooled to create everything we see around us. The hope is that by remaking the moment, in miniature, the scientists will be able to see things that are invisible now.

The God Particle

Big name, very small thing; and the first great discovery they hope to make. It is believed we have only detected a quarter of the particles in everything. We don't, for example, know why things have mass. (To get a feeling for what that is, hit yourself over the head with an inflatable hammer, then a real one. The one that hurts has more mass.) In 1964 Professor Peter Higgs of Edinburgh University predicted an unseen particle that provided mass (its official name is a Higgs boson). The hope is it will be detected for the first time. Other possible revelations include so-called dark matter, which in theory "stretches through space like an invisible skeleton".

Read the full story

................................................

From The Sunday Times

September 7, 2008

Large Hadron Collider could help fight cancer

Stand by for advances in health and climate research as the ‘big bang’ machine starts up

Jonathan Leake

The giant new particle collider at Europe’s centre for nuclear research, which is due to start work on Wednesday, is being linked to spectacular spin-offs including improved cancer treatments, systems for destroying nuclear waste and insights into climate change.

“Everyone is looking at the start up of the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] but Cern has many other research programmes with important practical uses,” said Paul Collier, who runs the main control room at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern).

The first beams of particles have been successfully fired around nearly half of the 17-mile tunnel in Switzerland, where Cern is based. Linked research has already spurred useful byproducts.

In a typical year, the huge machine, which will smash particles into each other at enormous speed, should generate enough data to fill 56m CDs. That means physicists have had to create a sophisticated system for organising information extremely quickly. The Grid, as they call it, is likely to become the model for many other systems designed to handle large volumes of data.

RELATED LINKS

• LHC will not turn world to goo - scientists

• How the press demeans science

Another project has suggested a potentially radical new way of dealing with nuclear waste. Cern’s physicists found that firing a beam of protons (a type of sub-atomic particle) into blocks of lead could generate a shower of neutrons (another sub-atomic particle) – and that these could then be used to break down radioactive waste into harmless stable elements.

A Cern spokesman said the technique was being studied by industry. “This technology sprung from insights into matter generated by pure physics,” he said.

Cern has also contributed to medical research, treating cancers with beams of charged particles such as protons, carbon ions and even antimatter.

Antimatter does not exist naturally but Cern can make it using a smaller accelerator, the proton synchrotron. The machine is also involved in generating the protons that will orbit around the LHC. The interest in such beams arises because existing forms of radiation therapy may kill cancers but damage surrounding tissue.

Particle beams could minimise such damage as they can be tuned to pass through healthy tissue and deposit energy only in the tumour.

Cern’s latest research project may prove the most controversial. It is building a laboratory to investigate the theory that the rate of cloud formation in the atmosphere is linked to the level of cosmic rays.

Cloud formation is a vital component of climate and weather, and the project could place Cern at the heart of the debate on whether other factors besides greenhouse gases are involved in climate change.

The researchers will use a proton beam from the proton synchrotron to simulate cosmic rays, firing them into a so-called “cloud chamber” to see whether mini clouds form.

Bob Bingham, professor of physics at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, who is involved with the project, said: “If the beams cause cloud formation it will suggest a link between cosmic rays and climate which has interesting implications.”

On Wednesday scientists will find out whether the LHC’s £3 billion cost has paid off.

In the past few days beams of particles have been fired through three of the LHC’s eight sections, also passing through Alice, and LHCb, two of the four main experiments. Both worked well.

The two other experiments, Atlas and CMS have not seen a beam but appear to be working – as shown by their ability to detect natural cosmic rays.

If Wednesday’s start-up goes smoothly a second beam will be fired into the machine travelling in the opposite direction– with the two forced to collide. The products of those collisions could give physicists their best insight into the structure and origins of the universe.

Read more