February 25, 2008
In search of the Higgs boson
Joel Achenbach has a fascinating article over at National Geographic about The Large Hadron Collider, with amazing pictures by Peter Ginter.
The Large Hadron Collider is an enormous particle accelerator that’s being constructed by CERN, about 300 feet beneath the French-Swiss border. How enormous? Try 17 miles in circumference!
The article is full of crunchy scientific bits about what they plan on doing, but the pictures alone are worth the visit.
Starting sometime in the coming months, two beams of particles will race in opposite directions around the tunnel, which forms an underground ring 17 miles in circumference. The particles will be guided by more than a thousand cylindrical, supercooled magnets, linked like sausages. At four locations the beams will converge, sending the particles crashing into each other at nearly the speed of light. If all goes right, matter will be transformed by the violent collisions into wads of energy, which will in turn condense back into various intriguing types of particles, some of them never seen before. That’s the essence of experimental particle physics: You smash stuff together and see what other stuff comes out.
The project is set to begin in May of this year, and one of their main goals is to detect an extremely rare particle called the Higgs boson. Apparently only 1-in-several-trillion collisions is expected to produce the Higgs, and they hope the device will top out somewhere around 600 million impacts per second.
Posted by Aaron on February 25, 2008, 8:45 pm permalink top | general
Is this the same experiment that was featured in the Dan Brown novel Angels & Demons?
Btw, I thought that novel was much better than his DaVinci Code…
Not sure - I never read either of those books. I do know that it has been in other works of fiction, such as Robert Sawyer’s Flashforward.