1 / 21

Particle Physics : Now and the Future

Particle Physics : Now and the Future. David Milstead Stockholms Universitet. The most important questions in modern physics The most important experiment in modern physics Physics as a career. Open questions for the curious physicist . What are the fundamental building blocks

janna
Download Presentation

Particle Physics : Now and the Future

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Particle Physics : Now and the Future David Milstead Stockholms Universitet The most important questions in modern physics The most important experiment in modern physics Physics as a career

  2. Open questions for the curious physicist What are the fundamental building blocks of matter and what are the forces which act on them ? Why do particles have masses ? Why does nature seem to dislike anti-matter ? What is dark matter and dark energy ?

  3. Nature’s building blocks (so far) proton force W,Z,g,g Standard Model of Particle Physics

  4. Forces between particles g e- e- Electromagnetism Z e+ e- Weak g q q Strong ? Gravity Looking for a single super force !

  5. Antimatter Matter - Anti-matter is rare (<<1%). Why ?

  6. How do particles get mass ? Massa t u d c e s b Peter Higgs theory explains why particles get mass. To prove the theory we must find a new particle: Higgs boson

  7. Energy in the Universe Dark matter 25% Dark energy 70% Atoms We can’t understand 95% of the energy in the universe

  8. Supersymmetry A new family of particles Predicted to appear at the LHC One of them could be dark matter

  9. Story so far • Protons are made up of quarks. What are quarks made up of ? • Are there more quarks ? • Can we find a single super force ? • We can’t understand 95% of the universe’s energy – what is dark matter? • Where did the anti-matter go ?

  10. Go back to the start Solar system Nu (15 billion years) Big bang First mammals First DNA 10-2 10-36 10-6 sekunder Matter-antimatter asymmetry The electromagnetic weak forces separate, Higgs Quarks become bound in protons + dark matter, dark energy.

  11. Measuring large and small objects microscope binoculars Telescope Naked eye Accelerator Accelerators collide high energy particles to recreate the early universe and look inside a proton!

  12. Collide a particle with a proton and study quarks We can also produce new particles via E=mc2 -Higgs, SUSY etc..... The second most useful relation in physics

  13. LHC Large Hadron Collider collides protons with energy 7 TeV It starts in 2007 Each proton beam has energy = aircraft carrier at 10 knots

  14. LHC vs Stockholm’s underground LHC Blue line Length 27km 16 km Depth 100m 20-30m

  15. ATLAS experiment Five levels high 7,000,000kg42mlength 22mwide 22mhigh 2,000physicists 150universities 34countries The goal is to discover new particles!

  16. Balloon (30 Km) CD stack with 1 year LHC data! (~ 20 Km) Concorde (15 Km) Mt. Blanc (4.8 Km) How can we find the Higgs boson/SUSY ? Search through 20,000,000 collisions for one Higgs boson or several SUSY particles LHCs data corresponds to 14 million cds every year We will need 100,000 computers to analyse the data We are developing the WWWs successor: the Grid

  17. Finding the Higgs boson We start with this • 800,000,000 proton-proton interactions per second • ~100,000,000 channels • 0.0002 Higgs per second And look for this signature in the mess

  18. Nature’s mirror doesn’t work Process B is a mirror image of process A. Process B uses the anti-particles of process A. We can measure a difference between them. Could explain why the early universe lost its anti-matter!

  19. Summary of the physics LHC is one of the world’s most ambitious scientific projects It will address many of the most important questions in modern physics - What is mass ? - Matter anti-matter - Dark matter + much more.. Particle physics looks forward to a bright future

  20. Research Physics as a career • 3-4 years undergraduate (BSc/MSc) + 3-4 post-graduate (Ph.D.) • 2:2 upwards required • Be prepared to travel • Be prepared for several short term post-doctoral jobs • Can jump off at any point to a far more lucrative career

  21. The best and worst aspects of my job Cutting edge physics Travel, new languages and cultures Free to do what I find interesting Nobody asks what I’m doing Applying for new grants/funding Travel – impossible to stay put for a month Nobody asks what I’m doing

More Related