 "Photo: ASTRONET")
The Large Hadron Collider could change the future of physics.
Although the collider seems to be located worlds away in Geneva, Switzerland, many Boston University professors and graduate students have been extremely involved in the project.
When the first beams shot out Wednesday, a handful of BU professors were in Geneva to witness the event that many of them had been working on for their whole lives.
"I've never seen bigger crowds - there were 3,000 people who aren't normally here," Jim Shank, a BU physics professor, said. "There is so much excitement, and the press is everywhere. At the first indication of the beam going around, everyone broke out clapping."
While many BU personnel had to celebrate the event from Boston, their excitement was still apparent. And for some professors, the machine's initial trial brought back the memories of years of hard work and of the friends who did not live long enough to see their work realized.
"Alex Marin died in the line of service working on Atlas," Steven Ahlen a BU physics professor, said. "My biggest regret is that he's not here to see what happened today, which is really kind of a moving thing."
A Little History
Since the 1970s, physics has been based on the interaction between two forces. But as energy levels in particle interactions get bigger and bigger, the standard model -- which describes strong and weak electromagnetic interactions -- no longer holds true. That's why the Large Hadron Collider is so innovative: it should allow scientists to completely redefine the way physics is understood.
The machine, which collides protons at 99.999 percent the speed of light, will redefine how all matter is perceived.
"I've spent my whole life on this machine, and we're going to find out in the next five years, tops, exactly what's going on," Kenneth Lane, a BU physics professor, said. "This is the most urgent problem to solve in particle physics, if not all of physics."
Lane began working on the project in 1982, when a group of physicists met in Snowmass, Colo., to decide what the next big step in the field would be. What came out of the meeting was the decision to build what was originally called the Desertron, a particle colliding machine so big that the only place it could hypothetically fit was in a desert.
The project, which was renamed the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), was approved by the U.S. government in 1987, during George Bush Sr.'s presidency, and for the next five years physicists began building the machine in Waxahachie, Tex. However, due to a variety of financial reasons, including higher costs than the government had originally anticipated, the government cut the SSC's funding, and the project was cancelled.
"Cutting the project was the worst thing that ever happened to American high-energy physics," Lane said. "After that we had no big project, and we gave up our world leadership in this field of science."
A number of American scientists began supporting a similar project at a lab called CERN in Geneva. Although the machine that collided protons would be smaller than the SSC, it would also be less costly, because physicists planned to use an already built Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEC) and transform it into what is now the Large Hadron Collider.
Now, 14 years from when the conversion began, and 26 years after the initial idea for a hadron collider was introduced, the project is finally taking form.
The Kinks and Bolts
The LHC is a 16.8-mile long machine buried 300 feet below the border of Switzerland and France, according to Jim Shank, a BU professor, said.
Last Wednesday, scientists succeeded in sending protons through a beam of light along the particle accelerator. In the near future, scientists will begin accelerating beams of protons in opposite directions to form collisions. When protons collide, they break, allowing scientists to study their makeup.
At four points along the circulation route, the protons bump into each other, and a device will measure and record what comes out of the division. Collisions that take place at energy levels of very high magnitudes may produce particles that scientists have never been able to see in a laboratory before.
"The machine will collide two particles, recreating conditions like those in the beginning of the universe when space-time was all weird and slow and tumultuous," Ahlen said. "What we're trying to do is create small regions in space that have a lot of energy."
The machine creates energy levels similar to those almost immediately after the Big Bang, but it does not recreate the big bang itself.
"The higher you go in energy, the further you go back in time," Lane said. "It's not like you're seeing a picture of the universe as if you were God looking at the universe one gazillionth of a second after the Big Bang, but you are producing particles that only existed in the universe at those early times when energy high enough to produce those particles."
The biggest dilemma in the standard model is a missing particle called the Higgs boson, according to Nigel Nation, a BU graduate student. The Higgs particle is what physicists think gives matter mass. If scientists can find the Higgs particle --- which might not even exist -- they will come closer to proving the standard model of physics.
"A previous detector at CERN called it the God particle because the thing is -- we haven't seen it," he said.
The LHC has four particle detectors. Only two of those detectors search for photons, and are designed to record anything new that comes of the Large Hadron Collider. The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) uses magnetized iron to detect particles, and ATLAS uses a much larger air-energized magnet to search primarily for the Higgs boson.
"They are complementary: they use different detector techniques to measure the same thing," Shank said. "There are advantages and disadvantages of both methods."
While both detectors have been praised by scientists, there are a myriad of different theories as to how the Higgs mechanism works in nature, and it may not be detected right away, if at all.
"It's possible to correct models of the universe, and it's possible that we haven't thought of it yet," Ahlen said. "That's the most exciting aspect of it because we may make observations that no one predicted."
The LHC will also likely explain dark matter, a hypothetical form of matter predicted to account for gravitational forces in the universe, Lane said.
Ordinary visible matter makes up very little of our universe, while dark matter makes up 25 percent of our universe, and dark energy makes up most of the rest.
"Dark matter almost by definition interacts only very weakly with ordinary matter like neutrinos," Lane said. "TheLHC will see new things and know that they're not neutrinos, and it will somehow associate with other things that we can detect."
There has also been talk from all areas about the possibility of the LHC resulting in a black hole on Earth, but the almost unanimous voice of physicists seems to oppose this. The chance of a black hole actually being created is very unlikely, because energy levels of high magnitudes are produced constantly in the universe, and they do not always produce black holes.
"I convinced myself by doing the calculations," Ahlen said. "You'd have to run the LHC a long time to make a black hole that could destroy the Earth, and the time scale would be the end of the universe kind of thing."
A Changed Reality
In the middle of the 19th century, the English prime minister visited a physicist named Michael Faraday, who discovered some of the most important laws of electromagnetism, Lane said. When the prime minister asked Faraday what his new electromagnetic device was good for, he replied, "I don't know, but someday you will tax it."
"Offshoots never haven't happened in physics," Lane said. "Something always comes out of it."
The World Wide Web was created by particle physicists because they wanted to be able to exchange large amounts of data quickly, Ahlen said. The breakthrough took place at CERN and is probably just the beginning of what will arise from the LHC.
"Doing data analysis is very difficult, because 40 million times a second beams collide," Ahlen said. "In the Genome Project there are more and more similar types of data problems that the LHC is already dealing with, and the LHC is already showing practical benefits there."
The practical applications of the LHC will be enormous, according to Jeremy Love a graduate student at BU.
"One of the benefits in the very long term would be fusion as an alternative power," Love said. "It's many tens of years off, but as we sort of push the scientific frontier, we get better at discovering and creating new things."
Another long-term benefit that may arise from the LHC is an even faster, better Internet.
"The LHC is the largest collection of superconductors in the world," Love said. "In the process of building this machine, we now have experience building with super conductors, and the research will benefit large effort in computing called open-science grid, which will hopefully be the next generation Internet interfacing off of different computers."
A lot of manpower and magnetism has been put into this project, and the benefits are impossible to predict, according to Shank.
"There are experiments that we just can't forget," Shank said. "Medical accelerator was designed in the past, but the accelerator could be pushed further."
One possible result of the LHC may be another machine that pushes the boundaries of physics to new depths, according to Ahlen.
"History seems to indicate that there's no end of the line to these things, except maybe in terms of cost," Ahlen said. "We need international collaborations for projects at this point, but the cost will always be worth it, and things will happen after the LHC."
Be the first to comment on this article!