What is the Large Hadron Collider, now readying to seek answers to fundamental questions of particle physics?
- July 5, 2022
- Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
- Category: DPN Topics
No Comments
What is the Large Hadron Collider, now readying to seek answers to fundamental questions of particle physics?
Subject: Science and Tech
Section: New discovery
Context: The world’s most powerful particle collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will begin smashing protons into each other at unprecedented levels of energy beginning July 5.
What is Large Hadron Collider?
- It is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator
- It is a giant, complex machine built to study particles that are the smallest known building blocks of all things
- Structurally, it is a 27-km-long track-loop buried 100 metres underground on the Swiss-French border.
How it is worked?
- In its operational state, it fires two beams of protons almost at the speed of light in opposite directions inside a ring of superconducting electromagnets
- The magnetic field created by the superconducting electromagnets keeps the protons in a tight beam and guides them along the way as they travel through beam pipes and finally collide
- Just prior to collision, another type of magnet is used to ‘squeeze’ the particles closer together to increase the chances of collisions
- The particles are so tiny that the task of making them collide is akin to firing two needles 10 kilometres apart with such precision that they meet halfway.
- Since the LHC’s powerful electromagnets carry almost as much current as a bolt of lightning, they must be kept chilled
- The LHC uses a distribution system of liquid helium to keep its critical components ultracold at minus 271.3 degrees Celsius, which is colder than interstellar space
- All the controls for the accelerator, its services and technical infrastructure are housed under one roof at the CERN Control Centre
- The beams inside the LHC are made to collide at four locations around the accelerator ring, corresponding to the positions of four particle detectors – ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb
Previous runs & ‘God Particle’ discovery
- In 2012, scientists at CERN had announced to the world the discovery of the Higgs boson or the ‘God Particle’ during the LHC’s first run.
- The discovery concluded the decades-long quest for the ‘force-carrying’ subatomic particle, and proved the existence of the Higgs mechanism, a theory put forth in the mid-sixties
- The Higgs boson and its related energy field are believed to have played a vital role in the creation of the universe
- This led to Peter Higgs and his collaborator François Englert being awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 2013
What is Higgs Boson?
- In 2012, the Nobel-winning discovery of the Higgs boson(also known as ‘God particle’) validated the Standard Model of physics, which also predicts that about 60% of the time a Higgs boson will decay to a pair of bottom quarks.
- In 1960s Peter Higgs was the first person to suggest that this particle might exist.
- The Standard Model of particle physics is the theory which describes three of the four known fundamental forces (the electromagnetic, weak, and strong interactions, and not including the gravitational force) in the universe, as well as classifies all known elementary particles.
- Scientists do not yet know how to combine gravity with the Standard Model.
- The Higgs particle is a boson.
- Bosons are thought to be particles which are responsible for all physical forces.
- Other known bosons are the photon, the W and Z bosons, and the gluon.
Boson:
- In particle physics, a boson is a subatomic particle whose spin quantum number has an integer value.
- Bosons form one of the two fundamental classes of subatomic particle, the other being fermions, which have odd half-integer spin
- Every observed subatomic particle is either a boson or a fermion.
CERN:
The European Organization for Nuclear Research known as CERN is a European research organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world
Established in 1954, the organization is based in a northwest suburb of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border and has 23 member states
It is an official United Nations Observer