Showing posts with label Collider. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Collider. Show all posts

Thursday, January 20, 2011

The hunt is on: massive Collider unimproved out data

Maximilien Brice/CERN

One of the destinations the ATLAS detector on the large Hadron Collider is search for the Higgs boson, a particle that scientists say is everything in the universe mass. For scale, note the workers at the bottom of the image.


This year, the world's largest scientific experiment live roared. Depth below the French Swiss border, the large Hadron Collider or LHC, accelerating year subatomic particles, together close to the speed of light and smashing you from spent. These collisions are used theories of physics to their limits.


It of hard to explain how much the large Hadron Collider means physicists, but get a sense of when you talk to Srini Rajagopalen. He works on a huge underground detector, ATLAS that records, which produced in the collisions is called


This animation shows a collision between particles in the ATLAS detector on the large Hadron Collider. Note: the video clip has no sound.


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This animation shows a collision between particles in the ATLAS detector on the large Hadron Collider. Note: the video clip has no sound.


He says "I ATLAS have been working since 1996,". "I was down in the pit, as it was completely empty and it was wonderful, it was huge." I watched the detector built; I was in the research and development and the production and testing - put together the whole thing. "


Thousands of researchers like him have set up the best years of their lives to the LHC and its detectors and start dedicated. Switched it on with great fanfare in 2008 and collisions were only a few days away, when a faulty connection explosion in the machine thrown coolant liquid helium. It was a devastating accident, Steven Goldfarb, another researcher on ATLAS, he can is the best face on it.


"" As a lesson in the world, we arranged for the LHC to have a small explosion, so about learning what if liquid helium expands, you could... "he says jokingly.""We really want this to happen, and it us back for a year or so."


' Instead of looking out, we are looking for '


This year the LHC got finally, and means researchers looking to start for new particle finally. At the top of your list: the Higgs one called. Researchers believe the Higgs mass he explains all other particles. His discovery would find a great, and everyone is excited. There's even a song: the ATLAS Boogie Woogie.


Think of the LHC as an underground track. Instead of cars, the machine uses protons, the positive particles in the middle of atoms. Two streams of protons travel in opposite directions around the 17 mile ring and conflict within four detectors the size of buildings.


"This comparison is a bit harsh, but provide two cars crash and every car's got passengers in it and you crash into each other, and bits flying everywhere, right?", says David Francis, a researcher working on ATLAS. "And then your task is previously were what and how many passengers in each car were to identify it."


Unless it is more than just the content of cars - smashing protons together actually new particles makes. Goldfarb compares to turn power on the Collider on the Hubble space telescope.


"If the Hubble enabled and saw in the room had some ideas, what you were going to see, but you do not know, and that's probably the coolest part of what we do" Goldfarb says. "Instead of look looking." "And we are looking for new things."


Sort through the data


The LHC produces hundreds of millions of collisions per second, and sorting through all these collisions to find plenty of computers that are kept in a two-storey building of the ATLAS detector requires something like the Higgs.


The interesting collision get recorded computer. Even most of the data from the collisions, researchers throw away still end up with a lot of data.


"See 19 racks if just down to search the course-19 cabinets of computers with 31 computers in a rack," he says. I think if you do the numbers, you end up with a bunch of DVDs per year, the higher than the Eiffel Tower in Paris - something like "Goldfarb says."


Once researchers have this data, you can start, look for the Higgs. But that is not the only thing, you are looking. Joe Incandella hopes you find a mysterious kind of matter called dark matter. He works at the CMS detector which is five miles away from ATLAS on the opposite side of the ring.


"Our galaxy with this dark matter is loaded but we have no idea what it is," says Incandella. "It is very likely to heavy stuff we could produce with the LHC." "Show all theories is a good chance the we to produce."


This is only the beginning of a list that gets progressively more sci fi. The machine will study antimatter. It is milliseconds after the big bang probe. It could also show up extra dimensions of space, microscopic black holes or something nobody even thought is.


So far not Explorer too much new, but with an Eiffel Tower's worth of data each year seen you are optimistic. And after 15 years of waiting, Srini Rajagopalen says everyone is getting down to business.


"There is a lot of people looking for signs of new physics team," he says. "Finally, we have data." This is, what we were looking for wait for so long. "


Geoff Brumfiel is a reporter with nature.

Science


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