100 metres underground on the Swiss-French border is a 27km tunnel, built by the European physics community to probe fundamental properties of the universe.
This is CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, where right now physicists are building the biggest scientific instrument in history, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), due to start working in May 2008.The LHC will accelerate protons to near the speed of light, before smashing them together to see what new particles are created at such extreme energies.
Thousands of physicists from all over the world will participate in experiments on the LHC to try and answer such profound questions as:
• What gives matter its mass?
• What is the invisible 96% of the universe made from?
• Why does nature prefer matter to antimatter?
As well as potentially providing answers to these questions, discoveries arising from the LHC could lead to ‘spin-off‘ applications in important fields such as medicine, computing and energy generation. For example, particle beams are already used in medicine for cancer therapy and in the production of radio-pharmaceuticals. In the future particle accelerators could be used in surgery to provide laser beam scalpels with improved precision.
The most computing power ever…
When the LHC is up and running there will be 600 million collisions per second taking place inside the four detectors. Although only data from the most interesting looking collisions will be captured, this will still amount to 15 petabytes of experimental data each year. That’s equivalent to a stack of CDs 20 km high! No single computer or computer cluster is capable of storing and processing this amount of data, so physicists are creating the LHC computing Grid, a network of computers in different countries, sharing immense computer power and storage capacity over the internet. Innovations in computing are no new thing at CERN. During the 1990s the World Wide Web was invented there, as a way for scientists to share their results easily.
The coldest place ever…
The particles in the accelerator are kept on-track by a strong magnetic field, which can bend and focus the proton beams. Superconducting magnets are used and these require extremely low temperatures. In early 2007, a 3.3 km section of the LHC was cooled to just 1.9 degrees Kelvin (-271 degrees Celsius) just a couple of degrees above the lowest temperature possible, absolute zero, and colder than outer space.
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