Due to the incident of 19th, the LHC experiment has been postponed to 2009. Investigations at CERN following a large helium leak into sector 3-4 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) tunnel have indicated that the most likely cause of the incident was a faulty electrical connection between two of the accelerator’s magnets. Before a full understanding of the incident can be established, however, the sector has to be brought to room temperature and the magnets involved opened up for inspection. This will take three to four weeks. Full details of this investigation will be made available once it is complete.
Its been quite some time since I have upped something here! Anyways, lets see the topic at hand.
Big Bang
I feel every new thing we set our minds on ends up in the prime question of all! What is the “supreme entity”? Perhaps one of the answers to this may lie in the outcome of this experiment(Or so they say). But we can only go to a point very close singularity(i.e., time = 0 or the time at which big bang took place), but we can never be sure of what happened before that. The whole purpose of this particular experiment is to understand how universe was evolved by accepting that big bang was how the universe was created. So, all we can infer from this is that, as Dan Browne had said, God was behind the big bang and what happened after that has a logic that our scientists have formulated.
CERN(Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire in French or European Council for Nuclear Research in English) is one of the biggest particle physics research facility in the world. The LHC(Large Hadron Collider) is the world’s largest high energy particle accelerator in the world. The prime objective of this collider if to collide opposing beams of protons with very high kinetic energy and traveling with velocities of about 99.999999% the velocity of light. Now, if we keep all of the complex physics out of our way(Which indeed is VERY complex) we can narrow down the purpose of the experiment to this -
The “holy grail” of physicist is that one COMMON model to explain the interaction between the elementary particles(Protons, electrons et. al.). Everything else would just be a special case and approximation of this main model. Such a model is the Standard Model (proposed way back in 1967) that describes three of the four fundamental interactions(Excluding gravity) between elementary particles and this is the best model available as of now. However, every model that is developed, it must be backed with experimental proof. Standard Model describes a particle called as “Higgs boson” . This is of prime importance in the theory. This particular particle is responsible for giving mass to all the elementary particles including itself. The importance of the previous statement is huge as it explains the origin of mass of all the matter in the universe. Hence, these particles are referred to as “God Particles”. But these particles have no spin and to create them and observe them we need a lot of energy and other precision conditions. Till date, no conclusive experimental proof has been obtained.
Large Hadron Collider
Inside LHC
The LHC is the answer to our problem. The LHC is 27 km in circumference and situated underground at the France and Switzerland border crossing the same at 4 points. The collider contains two adjacent parallel beam pipes that intersect at four points, each of the beam pipes containing a proton beam, which travel in opposite directions around the ring. over 1200 dipole magnets help keep the beam in a circular path. To make sure that the beams are focused and there is proper interaction takes place at the intersections additional quadrapole magnets are used. Totally there are about 1600 superconducting magnets in place. As of 10th sept 2008, one proton beam was successfully sustained in the LHC. This has been a major breakthrough in the field of Experimental Physics. This is the most complex experiment ever performed on this earth. There are lots of things that can go wrong ad the most feared perhaps is the formation of “micro black holes” that could eat up the earth or even destroy more of our cosmos. Of course these have been debunked by many leading scientists around the world.
This experiment, if successful , will tell us IF the God Particles exist in reality or not. And if they indeed exist, then even gravitational interaction could be explained under one single model. All in all, this is one of those experiments that will be written in golden letters in the pages of history unless the black hole destroys us all
