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The Large Hadron Collider. The coldest and emptiest place in the solar system The highest energies ever created Cameras the size of cathedrals A machine 27km long. LHC Overview [CERN]. The biggest machine in the world to study the smallest particles in the universe
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The coldest and emptiest place in the solar system • The highest energies ever created • Cameras the size of cathedrals • A machine 27km long LHC Overview [CERN]
The biggest machine in the world to study the smallest particles in the universe • Based in a 27km circular ring 100m underground • Protons and neutrons are examples of hadrons, which are made of quarks: fundamental particles that aren’t made of anything smaller
How can you study particles that are too small to see with light?
This microscope can’t resolve anything smaller than 1 micrometer across (0.000001m) The XY table and microscope [CERN]
Shorter wavelength reveals details down to the size of molecules… • It’s as small as we can look by shining a beam of electromagnetic radiation • You just can’t “see” what’s inside atoms - it needs a different approach
Particle accelerators can give us clues about what is inside atoms themselves • The LHC accelerates particles to nearly the speed of light, and collides them with incredible energy inside huge detectors • Studying the results lets us test our ideas about the very smallest units of matter and energy, far smaller than the atom LHC Tube in Tunnel [CERN]
Our picture of these basic units and the interactions between them is called the standard model • It explains a lot, but there are holes in it • It doesn’t include gravity, or explain what gives particles mass, for example • Scientists expect the missing pieces of the jigsaw to appear when they create very high energies in the LHC The Standard Model [CERN]
Einstein showed that matter and energy are interchangeable: matter is like “concentrated energy” • On a tiny scale, the LHC recreates the incredibly hot, dense conditions close to when the universe began • Hadrons smash together with so much energy that some energy turns into mass, briefly creating particles that haven’t existed since the Big Bang http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Albert_Einstein_1947.jpg
The LHC lets us glimpse the conditions 1/100th of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang: the hot beginning of the universe before it cooled enough for normal matter to exist • It might reveal what the mysterious dark matter and dark energy, that make up 96% of the universe today, actually are • And explain the mystery of what happened to all the antimatter that was made when the universe began but has since vanished… • Or raise completely new questions Big Bang [CERN]
4 gigantic detectors use sensors to measure the direction, charge, mass and energy of the particles as they zip through • Scientists then piece together what happened in each collision CMS endcap being lowered into position [CERN]
1232 superconducting magnets at -271.3C (1.9K), colder than outer space • Ultrahigh vacuum, the emptiest place in the solar system Dipole magnet schematic [CERN]
Proton bunches circle the 27km ring 11,000 times a second • At 99.9999991% the speed of light! Simulated collision of two protons in ATLAS [CERN]
A new view of the building blocks of the universe and the laws that make the universe the way it is Simulated lead-leadcollision in ALICE [CERN]
