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DISCOVERING THE QUANTUM UNIVERSE

DISCOVERING THE QUANTUM UNIVERSE. Jonathan Feng University of California, Irvine Physical Sciences Breakfast Lecture Series Beckman Center of the National Academies 28 November 2006. QUANTUM UNIVERSE?. Quantum theory governs the very small (atoms). The Universe is very big.

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DISCOVERING THE QUANTUM UNIVERSE

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  1. DISCOVERING THEQUANTUM UNIVERSE Jonathan Feng University of California, Irvine Physical Sciences Breakfast Lecture Series Beckman Center of the National Academies 28 November 2006

  2. QUANTUM UNIVERSE? • Quantum theory governs the very small (atoms). • The Universe is very big. • What do these have to do with each other? • In fact, studies of the very small and the very big have become intimately related, and are the focus of an experimental program whose flagship is the Large Hadron Collider.

  3. VERY SMALL: STATUS REPORT atom electron nucleus proton neutron up quark down quark 10-10 meters (thickness of human hair ~ 10-5 m) 10-14 meters 10-15 meters < 10-18 meters

  4. Atoms Light Frederick Reines 1995 Nobel Prize for the Detection of the Neutrino BASIC BUILDING BLOCKS

  5. PUZZLES • Periodic table is…periodic. All atom masses are integral multiples of proton/neutron masses. What about elementary particles? vs.

  6. ELEMENTARY PARTICLE MASSES top quark Mass proportional to area: Are these made of something else? Are there more quark-, neutrino-,and electron-like particles? ne nm nt e m t  u d s c b . . . Z W photons gluons

  7. electron top quark Normal particles bouncing off Higgs particles h? THE HIGGS BOSON • In fact, with only the known particles, the current theory is incomplete: it predicts that all particles are massless and travel at the speed of light. • A hypothetical particle, the Higgs boson, beautifully fixes this problem, but we’ve yet to find it.

  8. VERY BIG: STATUS REPORT galactic cluster solar system galaxy universe 1012 meters 1017 meters 1023 meters > 1026 meters

  9. COMPOSITION OF THE UNIVERSE

  10. h? PUZZLES • What is dark matter? It is required to understand why galaxies don’t fly apart, but it can’t be any of the known particles. vs.

  11. EXTRA DIMENSIONS • How many dimensions are there? a) 3 b) 4 c) 10 d) 11 e) none of the above

  12. Edwin Hubble Hubble (1929): The universe is expanding

  13. Small Dimensions • The universe does not expand into space – space itself expands • Extrapolating back, space was small – the Big Bang • Other dimensions could exist but still be small. Some theories even require extra spatial dimensions. For example, string theory requires 6 more.

  14. E = mc2 • Many of these questions involve hypothetical particles. How can we investigate them? • Einstein: E = mc2. Energy can be transformed into mass. • To make new, heavy particles, simply smash together known particles at high energy.

  15. E. O. Lawrence’s Cyclotron (1930s) Livingston Plot: Moore’s Law for Particle Colliders PARTICLE COLLIDERS

  16. Large Hadron Collider 18 miles in circumference Operation begins in 2007

  17. The Accelerator Two proton beams rotate in opposite directions 100 m underground in Geneva on the French-Swiss border. The beams collide at 4 interaction points, which are surrounded by detectors.

  18. LHC Detectors

  19. Jonathan Feng Arvind Rajaraman Andy Lankford Yuri Shirman Mu-Chun Chen Daniel Whiteson Anyes Taffard UCI Faculty Working on the LHC Theorists Experimentalists

  20. UCI @ ATLAS • The main UCI experimental responsibilities are in triggering and data acquisition. • Data acquisition: the data collected by each detector is • 1 Terabyte/second • 10,000 Encyclopedia Britannicas/second • 10 Libraries of Congress/minute • 3 300GB hard drives/second • 100 full length DVD movies/second • 10,000 times the rate your computer can store data

  21. UCI @ ATLAS Triggering: finding needles in haystacks D. Akerib

  22. LHC AS MICROSCOPE High beam energies  short wavelengths. The LHC will provide extremely high resolution to probe substructure. Quark seen by the LHC (high resolution) Quark seen by current colliders (low resolution)

  23. LHC AS HIGGS HUNTER The LHC will discover the Higgs boson – if it’s there!

  24. LHC AS TIME MACHINE LHC Cosmology (~2010) Cosmology (current) Dark Matter Particle’s Mass (GeV) The LHC will produce energies last seen 1 picosecond (10-12 s) after the Big Bang, and may produce dark matter particles. Deviation from Observed Dark Matter Density (%)

  25. LHC SOCIOLOGY In each experiment, ~2000 collaborators from ~40 countries (and growing) The procedure for sharing data and credit is not completely clear and is a topic of heated debate

  26. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS HEPAP Subpanel colleagues Available at registration desk and at http://interactions.org/quantumuniverse/qu2006/

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