This month is a time to celebrate. This means that the hadron collider has now found a total of 59 new particles , in addition to the Nobel prize-winning Higgs boson , since it started colliding protons — particles that make up the atomic nucleus along with neutrons — in Excitingly, while some of these new particles were expected based on our established theories, some were altogether more surprising.
And the hadron collider has delivered the goods — it enabled scientists to discover the Higgs boson , the last missing piece of the model. That said, the theory is still far from being fully understood. One of its most troublesome features is its description of the strong force which holds the atomic nucleus together. The nucleus is made up of protons and neutrons, which are in turn each composed of three tiny particles called quarks there are six different kinds of quarks: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom.
If we switched the strong force off for a second, all matter would immediately disintegrate into a soup of loose quarks — a state that existed for a fleeting instant at the beginning of the universe. It describes how quarks interact through the strong force by exchanging particles called gluons. You can think of gluons as analogues of the more familiar photon, the particle of light and carrier of the electromagnetic force.
However, the way gluons interact with quarks makes the strong force behave very differently from electromagnetism. While the electromagnetic force gets weaker as you pull two charged particles apart, the strong force actually gets stronger as you pull two quarks apart. As a result, quarks are forever locked up inside particles called hadrons — particles made of two or more quarks — which includes protons and neutrons.
In November, physicists in China unveiled the conceptual design for its own km tunnel , which would first house an electron-positron machine before hosting a proton-proton collider operating at TeV.
Although construction of the Chinese collider could start earlier than the FCC, Benedikt says that there are many similarities between the two designs. It is a simple enough question, but the answer is proving rather tricky: is a circular or linear collider the best way forward to carry out precise measurements on the Higgs boson? This is because protons are not elementary particles and so their collisions produce debris that affects the accuracy of the measurements.
That is not the case, however, when smashing together electrons with positrons and that is why particle physicists want to build such a machine to study the Higgs boson and try to spot any tiny deviations that could give hints of physics beyond the Standard Model. For years, physicists have been designing linear colliders that would operate on the TeV scale. Due to the need to overcome energy losses from synchrotron radiation as electrons are accelerated around the ring, linear colliders offer a higher luminosity — a measure of the rate of particle collisions — compared to their circular counterparts for collision energies over GeV.
Yet at energies below this threshold, circular colliders have better luminosities than linear colliders — and can also host multiple detectors around the ring. If the mass of the Higgs boson was around GeV or more, most would agree that a linear collider offers the best way forward.
But with the Higgs mass being GeV, a rather large luminosity curveball has been thrown into proceedings. This has put circular colliders firmly back on the drawing board and for the past five years physicists have been designing possible alternatives. While circular designs must bear the cost of building a huge underground tunnel, they more than make up in terms of versatility and the fact that physicists have decades of experience in building them.
For example, the same km tunnel could also be used for a proton-proton machine operating at TeV that would be used to hunt for new particles. The technology for both an ILC and a km electron-positron collider is ready, but given the eye-watering price tags for both, all designs would need a large amount of international collaboration.
If only one machine gets built, as looks probable, the question is which one? The battle lines have been drawn. Want to read more? The Large Hadron Collider was first turned on in August of , then stopped for repairs in September until November That's a large amount, but there are over 50 billionaires on the Forbes list actually worth more than that.
The money for the experiments also comes from large institutions such as universities and observer governments such as the United States, India, and Russia. Of course, that money isn't only being spent on finding the Higgs boson alone. There are a number of different experiments being conducted at the Large Hadron Collider, which include the discovery of other subatomic particles, as well as experiments geared towards studying the still unknown territories of physics, such as Dark Matter and Dark Energy.
There's no doubt that these experiments will not only unveil more of the mysteries of the universe, but also enrich our technological capabilities. Building the Large Hadron Collider alone forced engineers to develop new techniques and push existing ones to their limits. CERN itself is responsible for your ability to read this article - the world wide web was developed in part to provide a means for the international community of physics to talk to each other.
And the LHC generates so much data that new methods of computing and data crunching are being developed to handle it. Or why, you may have wondered recently, do we not have a center for epidemic modeling?
In the past century, particle physics has grown into a large, very influential and well-connected community. We have bigger problems than measuring the next digit on the mass of the Higgs boson. Credit: Nick Higgins. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue.
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