A fantastic experiment

Transcription

1 The Large Hadron Collider A fantastic experiment Duncan Carlsmith, Professor of Physics, University of Wisconsin-Madison

2 What is the LHC? The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a new proton-proton colliding beam accelerator located near Geneva Switzerland.

3 The accelerator Trillions of protons travel a 16.5 mile-long tunnel and collide 11,000 times a second.

4 A kind of time travel Collisions recreate conditions one trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. The energy can materialize into new heavy kinds of matter.

5 Two huge microscopes: ATLAS and CMS The ATLAS detector Person

6 CMS Person

7 The news reports Primordial Train Wreck In Search of the God Particle Will Collider Destroy Earth? It's the End of the World as We Know It

8 Nothing the earth hasn t seen before LHC collisions are not a danger to Earth. Cosmic ray collisions with Earth can far exceed the LHC in energy. Nature has performed 1 Artist s rendition of cosmic ray shower million LHC experiments on Earth. The Universe performs 10 million LHC-like experiments every second. Shower in a bubble chamber

9 The science I will tell you a bit about the science behind the LHC. Science has made progress since you were in high school. The LHC may make revolutionary discoveries.

10 A history of physics My grandfather was born in 1897 in Hilo. Atoms were hypothetical, galaxies had not been conceived, the US was not electrified. Flash forward 100 years. Matter is composed of quarks and leptons in an expanding universe. The US consumes 29 PWh (29 million megawatthours) of energy annually. We get MRIs of our knees, download WIKIPEDIA articles to iphones... Credit science, especially physics.

11 The microscopic universe today

12 Seeing elementary particles A decay chain of some quarks and leptons seen in by ionization trails ina liquid hydrogen bubble chamber

13 Science links Inner & outer space in One universe Cosmology Particle physics

14 dark matter Dark matter gravity distorts images of background galaxies seen through a galaxy cluster. Dark matter outweighs matter and holds galaxies together.. CI // NASA, ESA, M.J. Jee and H. Ford (Johns Hopkins University)

15 matter is a small piece of the universe

16 The mass mystery Mass is a form of energy: E=mc 2. Elementary particle masses range from <1 ev (neutrinos) to 175 billion ev (top quark). Masses are fundamental. The electron mass sets the size of atoms. Muonic atoms are smaller by a factor 200. Honey, I shrunk the kids! has been done. Higgs model: Material particles are naturally massless but slowed by a ubiquitous condensed uniform superstuff. This Higgs field is everywhere.

17 The Higgs particle Like water, the Higgs field is dynamical. Waves in the Higgs field can be radiated from the heaviest particles (W,Z,t quarks). The energy quanta are Higgs particles which materialize in a predictable way. Observation of Higgs particles is like marine life discovering the water environment through sound.

18 Simulated signatures New boson decaying to quarks Higgs decay to ZZ to four muons New discoveries might look like this. quark-gluon plasma in Pb-Pb collisions

19 The location Geneva is about the size of Madison and home to the UN, the IRC, and many NGOs. 40% expats

20 CERN European Laboratory for Particle Physics Founded member countries More than 10,000 scientists More than 1000 from U.S. universities

21 Map of CMS Collaboration

22 US ROLE 1700 scientists, students, engineers, technicians from 89 universities and 7 national laboratories in 32 states People from the HCAL group at one institute

23 University of WI- Madison UW physicists play important roles in both CMS and ATLAS

24 New global computing World wide grid for 34 countries linking national projects Open Science Grid in the US 150 million sensors time 4 experiments times 600 million collisions per s=>15 petabytes of data per year

25 The competition Fermilab CDF My other experiment A matter-antimatter collider at outside Chicago, presently the highest energy machine, is studying b and t quarks and W and Z bosons, and searching for the Higgs. The Higgs may still be discovered here.

26 Status of the LHC Collision in CMS First collisions at injection energy in December 2009 Restart scheduled for 16 March 2010 ATLAS event

27 Angels and Demons A racy novel, a distorted view of CERN Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own. "Illuminati," he stammered, his heart pounding. It can't be "Serving the brotherhood is an honor," the killer said. "Phase two begins shortly. Get some rest. Tonight we change the world."

28 Conclusion/Appeal No one can predict what new applications will be born of basic research. - President Obama, proposing doubling science budget at National Academy of Science, 27 April 2009 The LHC will look deeper into the stuff of the universe than ever. Basic research is a public endeavor. It is source of hope but funding is precarious. Talk to your representatives!