LHC: The fires of creation

On Wednesday, physicists turn on the multibillion-pound machine that will recreate the birth of the universe. Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society writes:

  Get Ready For Big Bang II

4:58pm UK, Monday September 08, 2008

Scientists are preparing to view the beginnings of the universe and study some of the most complicated questions of physics with the powering up of the largest particle accelerator ever built.

A view of the Large Hadron Collider in its tunnel under Geneva

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is 12 stories high and cost £5b. It is buried more than 300ft under the Alpine foothills in a 17mile tunnel along the Swiss-French border.

When the giant machine gets going, the LHC will blast protons - one of the building blocks of atoms - at a velocity just shy of the speed of light, generating temperatures of more than a trillion degrees centigrade.

Each proton beam will pack as much energy as a Eurostar train travelling at 150 kilometres per hour.

In layman's terms, the LHC will take protons and smash them together at high speeds.

The resulting collisions will hopefully replicate conditions found in the moments following the Big Bang - or the beginning of the universe - and scientists will study the fallout.  Read more

Scientists try for a glimpse of Creation AFP Published:Sep 09, 2008 PARTICLE physicists believe they will cross a new frontier of knowledge tomorrow when, 100m below ground, they switch on a mega- machine crafted to unveil the deepest mysteries of matter. Slide Show: The Large Hadron Collider The most complex scientific experiment ever undertaken, the Large Hadron Collider will accelerate sub-atomic particles to nearly the speed of light and then smash them together. The aim is to fill in gaps in our understanding of the cosmos. After nearly two decades, 6billion Swiss francs and the involvement of scientists, engineers and technicians from nearly three dozen countries, the first protons will be injected into a 27km ring-shaped tunnel straddling the Swiss-French border at the headquarters of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. This will be the first step in a long-term experiment to smash sub-atomic components together, briefly generating temperatures 100000 times hotter than the sun and conditions similar to those that prevailed in the first seconds of the existence of the universe. Scientists will pore over the wreckage of the collisions in a search for fundamental particles never before detected. Read more The machine at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, promises scientists a closer look at the makeup of matter, filling in gaps in knowledge or possibly reshaping theories. The first beams of protons will be fired around the 17-mile tunnel to test the controlling strength of the world's largest superconducting magnets. It will still be about a month before beams traveling in opposite directions are brought together in collisions that some skeptics fear could create micro "black holes" and endanger the planet. The project has attracted researchers of 80 nationalities, some 1,200 of them from the United States, which contributed $531 million of the project's price tag of nearly $4 billion. "This only happens once a generation," said Katie Yurkewicz, spokeswoman for the U.S. contingent at the CERN project. "People are certainly very excited." The collider at Fermilab outside Chicago could beat CERN to some discoveries, but the Geneva equipment, generating seven times more energy than Fermilab, will give it big advantages. The CERN collider is designed to push the proton beam close to the speed of light, whizzing 11,000 times a second around the tunnel 150 to 500 feet under the bucolic countryside on the French-Swiss border. Once the beam is successfully fired counterclockwise, a clockwise test will follow. Then the scientists will aim the beams at each other so that protons collide, shattering into fragments and releasing energy under the gaze of detectors filling cathedral-sized caverns at points along the tunnel. CERN dismisses the risk of micro black holes, subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars. But the skeptics have filed suit in U.S. District Court in Hawaii and in the European Court of Human Rights to stop the project. They unsuccessfully mounted a similar action in 1999 to block the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratoryin New York state. CERN's collider has been under construction since 2003, financed mostly by its 20 European member states. The United States and Japan are major contributors with observer status in CERN. Scientists started colliding subatomic particles decades ago. As the machines grew more powerful, the experiments revealed that protons and neutrons — previously thought to be the smallest components of an atom — were made of still smaller quarks and gluons. CERN hopes to recreate conditions in the laboratory a split-second after the big bang, teaching them more about "dark matter," antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time. Meanwhile, scientists have found innovative ways to explain the concept in layman's terms. The team working on one of the four major installations in the tunnel — the ALICE, or "A Large Ion Collider Experiment" — produced a comic book featuring Carlo the physicist and a girl called Alice to explain the machine's investigation of matter a split second after the Big Bang. "We create mini Big Bangs by bumping two nuclei into each other," Carlo explains to Alice, who has just followed a rabbit down one of the hole-like shafts at CERN. "This releases an enormous amount of energy that liberates thousands of quarks and gluons normally imprisoned inside the nucleus. Quarks and gluons then form a kind of thick soup that we call the quark-gluon plasma."  Read more

What  the Scientists hope to find:

Nima Arkani-Hamed, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA:

'I've already bet a year's salary they will find the Higgs particle. There's also a pretty fair chance that they might observe some of the particles that make up the mysterious dark matter in the Universe. Such dark-matter particles may or may not have something to do with supersymmetry. My hunch is that there's a better than evens chance that supersymmetry will show up at the LHC, which would be good as it gives a 'natural' explanation of why gravity is so weak compared with the other fundamental forces. It is also possible that the LHC will shock us by showing that our conventional notions of what constitutes a 'natural explanation' are incorrect.'

Sir Chris Llewellyn-Smith, Director-General of CERN 1994-1999 Director of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, Culham

'My hunch is that a Higgs boson will be found (95% probability), and (with 60% probability) supersymmetry. I would only put 5% on more exotic discoveries. If nothing new were found (5% probability?), it would be a little embarrassing for me, who spent years promoting the LHC and getting it funded. Finding nothing would be very surprising and would force a radical rethink, which - if it led to deep new insights - could make it the most exciting outcome of all.'

Garrett Lisi, Freelance physicist, and "surfer dude" who came up with a new theory of everything.

The most likely result from the LHC is detection of a single Higgs particle. This Higgs is required to break the unified symmetry of electroweak forces into the separate electromagnetic and weak forces we see. Many physicists also think it likely that evidence will be found for supersymmetry, strings, or new dimensions -- but I disagree. If the LHC does see multiple new particles, my guess is these will be several different Higgs, compatible with the breaking of a unified symmetry of all forces existing at the smallest distances. Whatever the outcome, it will be very exciting to uncover nature's beauty at this tiny scale.
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