"Delving Into The Universe: Part 1"

   

LARGE HADRON COLLIDER AND THE GOD’DAMN PARTICLE

                                    (By ANISHK YADAV, Engineering Student) 

Universe! Ah, An Endless Yet One Of The Most Intriguing And Exciting Area To Talk About. Where Are We Going Now?, Where It Will Take Us In Future? How Did The Universe Begin? What Is Its Fate? Where Do We Come From? The Answer To All These Questions Lies Inside The Deep And Almost 93 Billion Light-Years Wide Observable Model Comprises Of All Space And Time And Their Contents, Including Planets, Stars, Galaxies, And All Other Forms Of Matter and Energy. Huh! It's Getting Darker!!

Now We Can't Talk About Everything At Once Because It'll Take Billions Of Light Years To Complete That And We Surely Do Not Have That Much Time, So We'll Start From The Beginning...Yes!! The "BIG BANG", Which Is A Cosmological Model Of The Observable Universe From The Earliest Known Periods Through Its Subsequent Large-Scale Evolution. The Model Describes How The Universe Expanded From An Initial State Of Extremely High Density And High Temperature And Offers A Comprehensive Explanation Or A Broad Range Of Observed Phenomena, Including The Abundance Of Light Elements, The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Radiation, And Large-Scale Structure.

So This Was About The Initial Stage Of The Universe Or I Can Say The Baseline. But When We Talk About Us Or Any Thing Existing In This World The First Or The Foremost Baseline Which Comes To Our Mind Is None Other Than An "ATOM", A Fundamental Piece Of Matter.

But What If I Say That The Atom Wasn't There When The BIG BANG Happened. We Know That Atom Comprises Of Three Subatomic Particles: Protons, Neutrons, And Electrons. Now, If The Atom Didn't Exist During/After The Big Bang Then When Did This Happen Exactly. We Want To Know These Answers Because If There Is No Atom, Then There Is No 'Us'. So What Was The Reason Behind The Formation Of Atom? Was It A Force? Or A Phenomenon? Or A Miracle? There Is Only One Way To Answer These Questions, We Have To "REDO THE BIG BANG". Sounds Silly But That's What CERN Did With One Of The Biggest And Largest Science Experiments Of All Time..."LARGE HADRON COLLIDER".

So Get Ready And We'll Be Having A Walk Inside The LHC And We'll Know What It Is, How Does It Work, And Then We'll Come To One Of The Biggest Discoveries Of All Time..."HIGGS BOSON: THE GOD PARTICLE". So Stay Connected Till The End And Let's Begin To Unwrap This Goddamn Thing.!!

 

 

                                  LARGE HADRON COLLIDER

The Large Hadron Collider Or LHC Is A Massive Beautiful Piece Of Human Ingenuity, Engineering, And Also Is The World's Largest And Highest-Energy Particle Collider.  It Was Built By The European Organization For Nuclear Research (CERN) Between 1998 And 2008 In Collaboration With Over 10,000 Scientists And Hundreds Of Universities And Laboratories, As Well As More Than 100 Countries. It Lies In A Tunnel 27 Kilometres (17 mi) In Circumference And as Deep As 175 Metres (574 ft) Beneath France–Switzerland Border Near Geneva.

Large Hadron Collider Or LHC Is Named As, Large Due To Its Size (approximately 27 km in circumference), Hadron Because It Accelerates Protons Or Ions, Which Are Hadrons, And Collider Because These Particles Form Two Beams Travelling In Opposite Directions, Which Collide At Four Points Where The Two Rings Of The Machine Intersect.

 

 

DESIGN OF THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER

The Collider Is Contained In A Circular Tunnel, With A Circumference Of 26.7 Kilometres (16.6 mi), At A Depth Ranging From 50 To 175 Metres (164 To 574 Ft) Underground. It Has Four Crossing Points, Around Which Are Positioned Seven Detectors, Each Designed For Certain Kinds Of Research.

The Seven Experiments Installed At The LHC:

A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE): It Is A Detector Specialized In Measuring And Analysing Lead-Ion Collisions. It Studies The Properties Of Quark-Gluon Plasma. It Produces Several GB/s During Heavy-Ion Running.

A Toroidal LHC Apparatus (ATLAS): It Is A General-Purpose Detector Designed To Cover The Widest Possible Range Of Physics At The LHC, From Precision Measurements Of The Higgs Boson To Searches For New Physics Beyond The Standard Model. It Produces About 1 GB/s.

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS): It Is A General-Purpose Detector With Similar Physics Goals As ATLAS, But Different Technical Solutions And Design. It Is Built Around A Huge Superconducting Solenoid. It Produces About 1 GB/s.

The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment: It Specializes In The Study Of The Slight Asymmetry Between Matter And Antimatter Present In Interactions Of B-Particles (particles containing the b quark). It Produces About 0.6 GB/s

The Large Hadron Collider forward (LHCf) experiment: It Is A Small Experiment That Measures Particles Produced Very Close To The Direction Of The Beams In The Proton-Proton And Proton-Nucleus Collisions At The LHC.

The TOTal Elastic and diffractive cross section Measurement (TOTEM) experiment: It Is A Small Experiment Searching For Hypothetical Highly Ionising Particles Such As Magnetic Monopoles.

Monopole and Exotics Detector at the LHC (MoEDAL): It Measures The Effective Size Or ‘Cross-Section’ Of The Proton At LHC. To-Do This TOTEM Must Be Able To Detect Particles Produced Very Close To The LHC Beams.

ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, And LHCb Are Big Experiments Installed In Four Huge Underground Caverns Built Around The Four Collision Points Of The LHC Beams. TOTEM Is Installed Close To The CMS Interaction Point, LHCf Is Installed Near ATLAS And MoEDAL Is Close To The LHCb Detector.

 

Important Parameters For LHC

QUANTITY	NUMBER
Circumference	26,659 m ~ 27 KM
Dipole Operating Temperature	1.9 K (-271.3 C)
Number Of Magnets	9593
Number Of Main Dipoles	1232
Number Of Main Quadrupoles	392
Number Of RF Cavities	8 Per Direction
Energy Of Protons	6.5 TeV
Energy Of Ions	2.56 TeV/u
Peak Magnetic Dipole Field	7.74 T
Distance Between Bunches	~7.5 m
Luminosity(Protons)	Peak Luminosity: ~1.2 x 10^34 cm^-2 s^-1
Number Of Bunches Per Proton Beam (Design Value)	2808
Number Of Protons Per Bunch(At Start)	1.2 x 10^11
Number Of Turns Per Second	11,245
Number Of Collisions Per Second	1 Billion

 

 

MECHANISM

Brief Mechanism Of A Proton Accelerated Through The Accelerator Complex At CERN Is As Follows: 

• Hydrogen Atoms Are Taken From A Bottle Containing Hydrogen. We Get Protons By Stripping Electrons From Hydrogen Atoms. 
• Protons Are Injected Into The PS Booster (PSB) At An Energy Of 50 MeV From Linac2. 
• The Booster Accelerates Them To 1.4 GeV. The Beam Is Then Fed To The Proton Synchrotron (PS) Where It Is Accelerated To 25 GeV. 
• Protons Are Then Sent To The Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) Where They Are Accelerated To 450 GeV. 
• They Are Finally Transferred To The LHC (both in a clockwise and an anticlockwise direction) Where They Are Accelerated For 20 Minutes To 6.5 TeV. Beams Circulate For Many Hours Inside The LHC Beam Pipes Under Normal Operating Conditions.
• Protons Arrive At The LHC In Bunches, Which Are Prepared In The Smaller Machines.

For Each Collision, The Physicist’s Goal Is To Count, Track And Characterize All The Different Particles That Were Produced To Reconstruct The Process In Full. Just The Track Of The Particle Gives Much Useful Information, Especially If The Detector Is Placed Inside A Magnetic Field: The Charge Of The Particle, For Instance, Is Obvious Since Particles With Positive Electric Charge Bend One Way And Those With Negative Charge Bend The Opposite Way. Also, The Momentum Of The Particle Can Be Determined: Very High Momentum Particles Travel In Almost Straight Lines, Low Momentum Particles Make Tight Spirals.

 

Main Achievements Of The LHC So Far

 

• 10 September 2008: LHC First Beam 

• 23 November 2009: LHC First Collisions 

• 30 November 2009: A World Record With A Beam Energy Of 1.18 TeV 

• 16 December 2009: A World Record With Collisions At 2.36 TeV And Significant Quantities Of Data Recorded 

• March 2010: First Beams At 3.5 TeV (19 March) And First High Energy Collisions At 7 TeV (30 March) 

• 8 November 2010: LHC First Lead-Ion Beams 

• 22 April 2011: LHC Sets New World Record Beam Intensity 

• 5 April 2012: First Collisions At 8 TeV 

• 4 July 2012: Announcement Of The Discovery Of A Higgs-Like Particle (Later Verified As Higgs Boson Only)  At CERN (HIGGSdependence DAY)

• 28 September 2012: Tweet From CERN: "The LHC Has Reached Its Target For 2012 By Delivering 15 fb-1 (around a million billion collisions) To ATLAS and CMS" 

• 14 February 2013: At 7.24 A.M, The Last Beams For Physics Were Absorbed Into The LHC, Marking The End Of Run 1 And The Beginning Of The Long Shutdown 1

•  8 October 2013: Physics Nobel prize To François Englert And Peter Higgs.

 

The LHC Wasn't Made Only For The Discovery Of This Higgs Boson Particle. There Were No Expectations That They Will Ever Found A Particle Like The God Particle. But That Doesn't Mean Higgs Discovery Isn't Great, It's Just The Beginning Of Whole New World Underlying With Billions Of Particles Yet To Be Discovered And LHC Is Ready For New Hunts In The Field Of Physics And More Intriguing Stuff.  

 

                                     HIGGS BOSON: THE GOD PARTICLE

 

In 1964, A Group Of Scientists Including Peter Higgs And François Englert Proposed The Idea Of A Mechanism That Would Suggest The Existence Of The Higgs Particle. This Idea Helped Encourage The Eventual Design And Creation Of The World-Famous LHC. The Higgs Boson, You May Have Heard Of It But What Is It And What Would The World Be Like If There Were No Higgs Boson.Well, Then There Would Be No World. Its Particles Wouldn't Be Able To Stick Together And They Just Float Around Aimlessly Forever And Where Would That Leave You..."NOWHERE". That's Where You Wouldn't Exist.

So To Know More About This Whole Higgs Thing And Why Do We Need It, We Have To Know A Little Bit About The “Quantum Field Theory” And The “Standard Model Of The Elementary Particles” Not The Whole Theory But Just The Basics For Now.

 

QUANTUM FIELD THEORY

Quantum Field Theory Or The QFT Describes The Fundamental Particles As The Excitations In Fields, Fields That Fill Our Entire Universe. For Example, The Electron Is An Excitation In The Electron Field. Imagine That Every Point In This Universe Has A Certain Level Of Electron-ness. In Empty Space, That Level Hovers Around Zero. But Even In The Vaccum, The Electron Field Is There. But Now, Add Some Energy To That Field At A Particular Spot, Just Like Plucking A Guitar String. The Field Vibrates And That Vibration Is Our Electron. Just Like This, Every Elementary Particle Is A Vibration In Its Own Field. These Vibrations And Field Interact With Each Other, Transferring Energy, Momentum, Charge Etc Between Particles And Fields. It was Strange That QFT, As It Stood In The 1950s Gave A Perfect Description Of The Electron, And Yet Predicted That The Electron Should Have No Mass. The Basic OFT Equation Of All The Components Of The Atom Leave Them Massless. But This Means That The Particle Should Travel At The Speed Of Light And Experience No Time. But That Is Not The Case. We Know That Electron Spins Back And Forth And Evolves, So It Is Not Timeless Or Massless We Even Weighed It. Even The Tiny Neutrinos Have Mass. Now Let's Consider Photon, It Is Definitely Massless. It Travels At The Speed Of Light And It Experiences Its Entire Existence In An Instant. It Undergoes No Internal Evolution, It Has Spin But Never Flips. A Photon Only Changes If It Bumps Into Something Else. But The Photon And Electron Both Are The Excitations In Their Own Fields. So Why Does The Electron Have Mass And The Photon Does Not?. Simplest Way To Interpret Is That While The Photon Can Cross The Entire Observable Universe Without Bumping Into A Single Thing. But The Electron Is Never Not Bumping Into Things. There's Something In The Substrate Of Space Everywhere That Impedes The Electron. It's The HIGGS FIELD.

 

 Standard Model Of The Elementary Particles

All Objects In The World Consist Of Matter And All Matter Is Made Up Of Atoms. Remember Atoms Themselves Are Made Up Of Protons, Neutrons, And Electrons. These Particles Are Made Of Even Smaller Subatomic Particles Such As Quarks. Scientists Have Created This Standard Model Of Particle Physics To Describe Subatomic Particles And How They Interact With Each Other. The Standard Model Can be Applied To Many Things Including Electricity, Magnetism, And Radioactivity. But The Standard Model Had A Hole In It. Scientists Were Unable To Fully Explain How These Subatomic Particles Gained Mass. This Is Where The HIGGS FIELD Comes In. It Is A Field Of Energy That Exists Throughout All Of Space And Is Composed Of Higgs Bosons Which Are Elementary Particles. All Subatomic Particles Pass-Through And Interact With The Higgs Field. Some Of These Particles Like Photons Whizzed Through And Barely Interact With It Resulting In Very Small Mass. Other Particles Like Quarks Drag Through Interact With The Field A Lot And Results In a Larger Mass. With This The Higgs Boson Is Able To Fill In The Hole In The Standard Model.

 

 How Higgs Field Is Responsible For Mass And Stability Of Particles

 The Higgs Field Is Thought To Give Mass To Fundamental Subatomic Particles Like The Quarks And The Leptons That Make Up Ordinary Matter. The Higgs Bosons Are Wiggles In the Field Like The Bump You See When You Twitch A Rope. But Then You Will Ask How Does This Field Give Mass To Particle? If This Sounds Confusing To You Don't Worry We Are Gonna Tell You How Exactly It Happens With The Help Of An Understandable Analogy.

Suppose There Is A Large Party At Your Place Filled With Your Close Friends. This Crowd Of Your Friends Represent The Higgs Field. Now, If A Tax Collector Walks Inside Nobody Would Want To Talk To Him And They Could Easily Cross The Room To Get To The Another End. The Tax Collector Wouldn't Interact With The Crowd In Much The Same Way That Some Particles Don't Interact With The Higgs Field (Ex: Photon). The Particles That Don't Interact Are Called Massless. Now Suppose You Entered The Same Room. In That Case, Your Friends Will Immediately Crowd Around You To Discuss About You And Your Life. Because You Interact Strongly With The Crowd, You'll Move Slowly Across The Room. Continuing Our Analogy, You Will Become A Massive Particle Through Your Interactions With The Field(Crowd). So If That's The Higgs Field, How Does The Higgs Boson Fit Into All Of This?

Let's Pretend Our Crowd Of Party Goers Is Uniformly Spread Across The Room. Now Suppose Someone Pops Their Head In The Room To Report A Rumour That A Celebrity Is In The Neighbouring Club. People Near The Door Will Hear The Rumor, But People Far Away Won't. So They'll Move Closer To The Door To Ask, This Will Create A Clump In The Crowd. As People Who Have Heard The Rumor Will Return To Their Original Positions To Discuss Its Implications, But People Further Away Will Then Ask What's Going On. The Result Will Be A Clump In The Crowd That Moves Across The Room. This Clump Is Analogous To The Higgs Boson. It Is Important To Remember That It Is Not That Massive Particles Interact More With The Higgs Field. In Our Analogy Of The Party, All Particle Are Equal Until They Enter The Room. Both Tax Collector And You Have Zero Mass. It Is The Interaction With the Crowd That Causes Them To Gain Mass. I'll Say That Again, Mass Comes From Interaction With The HIGGS FIELD. And The Field Is Accompanied By A Fundamental Particle Known As The HIGGS BOSON, Which Is Used By The Field To Continuously Interact With Other Particles.

 

 Facts About Higgs Boson

• Higgs Particle Is One Of The 17 Particles In The Standard Model And The Particle Is A Boson Which Is Thought To Be The Particles Responsible For All Physical Forces.
•  It Has A Mass Of 125.18 ± 0.16 GeV/c. The Symbol Is H0. Discovered In Large Hadron Collider On 4th July 2012. Mean Predicted Lifetime Is 1.56×10−22 sec. Having 0 Electric And Color Charge And 0 Spin.
• It Can Decay Into: Bottom-AntiBottom Pair (observed), Two W Bosons (observed), Two Gluons (predicted), Tau-AntiTau pair (observed), Two Z Bosons (observed), Two Photons (observed), Various Other Decays (predicted).

• It Is Known As The "God Particle" Because This Particle Helps Give Mass To All Elementary Particles That Have Mass, Such As Electrons And Protons. And Because Its Existence Is Fundamental To The Creation Of The Universe.
• Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Leon Lederman Referred To The Higgs As The "Goddamn Particle." The Nickname Was Meant To Poke Fun At How Difficult It Was To Detect The Particle.
• Some Scientist Believe That This Discovery Will Help Them Give Insight Into Dark Matter Which They Think Accounts For 23% Of The Universe.
• Some Believe That The Study Will Allow Us To Find New Particles That Could Have Practical Uses.
• But Above Everything Else, We Know We Can Thank The Higgs Boson For Allowing Us To Exist In This World.

"THANK YOU HIGGS BOSON"