Particle Colliders & Armageddon

One of the most expensive and longest experiments in scientific history, was activated today. The experiment is spearheaded by CERN and is housed in a 27km long racetrack type tunnel outside Geneva. It’s called the Large Hadron Collider (L.H.C.) and it hopes to be to particle physics what the Hubble Telescope was to astronomy.

So what exactly does the LHC do? It’s designed to accelerate sub-atomic particles, protons specifically, to near light speeds. At those speeds, the energy that such particles possess is in the order of several trillion electron volts. According to CERN the LHC is capable of making the protons do 11,000 laps around the track every second. I did some math and that works out to about 297×10⁶m/s, the speed of light is 299.792458×10⁶m/s, pretty darn close. It does so using more than 1000 cylindrical magnets arranged end-to-end around the tunnel. These magnets then steer the beam of protons around the circumference. The idea then is to have two beams of protons steered in opposite directions and have them collide in the vicinity of one of the six massive detectors placed around the track. These detectors are very different and each has it’s own specialty. The six are:

• ATLAS - The first of two general purpose detectors. It detects signs of new physics phenomena like origins of mass and extra dimensions.
• CMS - The second of two general purpose detectors, it hunts for the Higgs boson (more about this later) and for clues to the nature of dark matter.
• ALICE - It’s forte is a “liquid” form of matter called quark-gluon plasma. This type of matter existed shortly after the Big Bang.
• LHCb - It detects and tries to find out what happens to anti-matter during such high energy collisions.
• TOTEM - It measures total cross section, elastic scattering and diffractive processes.
• LHCf - It’s a special purpose detector for cosmic ray physics, to study particles generated in the forward regions of collisions.

All this acceleration and detection will, according to the scientists running the experiment, recreate within the LHC, the moments shortly following the Big Bang. This gives particle physicists a close look at certain particles and phenomena that existed only during that time frame. Some of them hope to materialize a hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson, the so called “God Particle”, which, according to theory, endows mass on all other particles. The other big discovery could be the meaningful interpretation of the nature of Dark Matter, stuff that makes up about 25 percent of the known universe. Yet another target for some physicists is the principle of Super-symmetry, which envisages new particle species that are left over from the Big Bang. All this promises to be a fantastic next few years for physicists but the obvious question that has to be asked is whether they will see anything at all. That would amount to a huge setback for particle physics research as well as the community in general.

Understandably, the buzz amongst physicists the world over is huge. A lot of them think that this experiment will bear the answer to how the universe came about and why it is, how it is today. Not all this is without it’s critics. There is a significant number of people who believe that the LHC, once fully operational, will destroy the Earth. It sound more like science fiction that actual science, but the theory is that when quarks and gluons, within the protons, collide at near light speeds they produce mini-blackholes, and that these blackholes could rapidly swell and eventually gobble up Earth itself. The other prevalent theory is that the collisions could produce hypothetical particles called strangelets within the LHC and that could trigger a mass conversion of nuclei in ordinary atoms into more strange matter, eventually transforming the Earth into a hot dead lump. These doomsday predictions have been dismissed by CERN as not possible or as a highly improbable cataclysmic event. Nonetheless, I remain convinced that we are not going to find out anything significant without taking risks or putting everything on the line. Nature has a way of evening out the odds. On a lighter note, we at least have four good years left before Armageddon. (Thanks sogrady!)