Every month I read the updates on the progression of the LHC ATLAS project with great interest and excitement for the promising events to come. It’s hard to imagine it’s completion and ultimately its success could be even more profound, but this month’s tragic news does exactly that.
On Friday 30 November, a Turkish plane flying from Istanbul to Isparta crashed as it approached its destination, claiming the lives of all 57 people on board. ATLAS collaborators Professor Engin Arik, Research Assistant Özgen Berkol Dogan and graduate student Engin Abat from Bogaziçi University, as well as CAST experiment members Prof. Dr. Senel Boydag, Associate Prof. Dr. Iskender Hikmet and Research Assistant Mustafa Fidan from Dogus University, were on board.
My thoughts and sentiments to all their friends, families, and colleagues, and to the particle physics and ATLAS community at large.
Such a terrible thing to happen to such extraordinary people on such a paramount project.
For those of you dawngrrl.com veterans, you already know of my excitement for ATLAS and my love for particle physics. As the LHC ”go live” gets closer and closer, I hoped to open some minds as to why I am so engaged, and if nothing else to share my dumbed down version of some really complicated crap. However, my attempts at explaining and defining within the bounds of blogsphere space and time have turned into into nothing but a fascinating disaster. So I hope you take the time to enjoy my post mess, and if not, don’t fret, more on shoes tomorrow.
Particle physics is the study of how matter behaves in high energy environments. The reason this is so important is because other particles are created in these environments that are not otherwise seen. It is these particles, and how they behave, that we think will help us answer some big questions and fill in some missing holes in The Standard Model (basically how we define our current understanding of matter). There are really 6 major experiments with the LHC and among the many questions sought to be answered “What is the origin of the mass of particles?” is the top runner on my list (next to unification theory - but some other time) of fascinations, and yes, I am going to tell you why! The answer to this is finding the Higgs Boson, or The God Particle, which will prove the existence of the Higgs Field and validate - or disprove - what we think we know!
Imagine a mosquito flying in motion (that’s about 1 TeV - unit of energy). Now imagine that motion (energy) being squeezed into a space a million times smaller then the space of a mosquito!!! Beginning in May of 2008 the large hadron collider at CERN will collide beams of protons at an energy of 14 TeV. The LHC is the largest most significant particle experiment of all time. It is a tunnel 17 miles long under France and Switzerland. Along this tunnel are 6 major collision detectors. They are located underground, in large caverns excavated at the LHC’s intersection points. Two of them, and CMS are large, “general purpose” particle detectors. The other four (LHCb, ALICE, TOTEM, and LHCf) are smaller and more specialized.
ATLAS will initially focus its priority on finding the Higgs Boson. The Higgs boson is a hypothetical elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics. It is the only Standard Model particle not yet observed, but plays a key role in explaining the origins of the mass of other elementary particles, and if it exists, the Higgs boson has an enormous effect on the world around us. If the Higgs Boson is NOT found in this experiment - our standard model - the basis upon which we’ve built our understanding of matter - falls apart and must introduce another explanation such as technicolour to explain the same phenomena. Perhaps the most exciting lines of investigation are those searching directly for new models of physics. One theory that is the subject of much current research is broken supersymmetry. The theory is popular because it could potentially solve a number of problems in theoretical physics and is present in almost all models of string theory.
EITHER WAY - this will make the unknown known, and be the next step in understanding how the pieces of that became the pieces of us, and all the things we can do with those pieces, and how we can study and manipulate them into all the places we’ve only imagined we’d go.
As some of you know, physics is a long time fancy of mine, it strikes my core in a very foundational way. So it is quite a feat for me to convey my excitement for a certain physics experiment currently in production. It’s been in production for some time and as the first tests come closer on the time lime I become more anxious and engaged. I have explained what an LHC (Large Hadron Collider) is to people, why we build them, and what we do with the information we garner from a VHeC. Yet, I have not been able to express the significance, the impact, or provide an easy illustrated way to understand the complexity of the experiment.
The ATLAS team has resolved that communication problem and I am thrilled to share that you. I hope some of you will take a few minutes to go watch some video of well animated explanation of the ATLAS project at CERN.
I think about the dangers, the infinite potential benefits, the world wide scientific and religious impacts, the sheer amount of information, and the famous line from Jurassic Park “They were so busy trying to find if we could, they never stopped to question if we should.” My excitement grows every day. This will impact every living thing in some way, even if ATLAS Shrugs.
I recommend these video shorts in the following order. Come back here and let me know what you think.
A major milestone for the Inner Detector project has been accomplished in early May as cosmic rays going through both the barrel Semiconductor Tracker (SCT) and Transition Radiation Tracker (TRT) have been successfully recorded in the SR1 building on the ATLAS experimental site at CERN.
The first few months of 2006 saw the delivery to CERN of the final components of the ATLAS Semi-Conductor Tracker (SCT), namely the completed SCT end-caps.
The SCT barrel was inserted in the TRT on 17 February, just missing Valentine’s day. This was a change of emphasis for the two detectors. In the preceeding months there had been a lot of focus on testing their performance. The TRT had been observing cosmic rays through several sectors of the barrel. The two detectors had to be painstakingly aligned to be concentric to within a millimetre.
End-cap Toroid Magnets: In building 191 the first cold mass is, after many hurdles, now completely assembled. This means a new phase is started for the End-cap Toroid assembly: the integration of the vacuum vessel with the cold mass.
Im not sure if the date go live testing is still 07, but construction is still moving along. If you want to read some more about why this project is so exciting, thats a pretty good article on what the projust is
This could change the entire way we think about matter! Furthermore - some you know from previous blogs on the project, the data collection and analysis for this is monstrous!
