Posted on 12/18/2006 4:02:58 PM PST by blam
Source: Imperial College London
Date: December 17, 2006
Preparing For The Biggest Experiment On Earth
An international team of over 2,000 scientists, led by Professor Tejinder Virdee from Imperial College London's Department of Physics is stepping up preparations for the world's largest ever physics experiment, starting next year at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland.
The enormous CMS particle detector is being assembled piece by piece under the supervision of Imperial's Professor Tejinder Virdee.Ads by Google Advertise on this site
Professor Virdee is the lead scientist on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) particle detector experiment, which will aim to find new particles, detect mini black holes and solve some of the mysteries of the universe such as where mass comes from, how many dimensions there are and what constitutes dark matter. Particles are the building blocks of matter and are even smaller than atoms. Scientists hope the CMS experiment may also help them progress towards a unified theory to explain all physical phenomena – a theory that has eluded scientists up until now.
The CMS experiment has so far involved thousands of scientists and engineers working for 15 years to design and build the massive particle detector, which is currently being lowered – huge bit by huge bit - into a chamber 100 metres below the French town of Cessy, near the Swiss border. Next year, CERN's Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator will be switched on for the first time, accelerating beams of particles around a 27km circular tunnel underneath the Swiss/French countryside. These particles then collide with each other – with higher energies than in any experiment ever before – at the precise location where the particles are passing through the CMS detector.
Professor Virdee explains: "When the particles smash into each other inside the CMS detector the high energy conditions created in these collisions will be similar to those that occurred in the first instants of the universe, immediately after the Big Bang. The unique conditions created by these collisions will create many new particles that would also have existed in those early instants. Resultant particles will fly away from the site of the collision in all directions. The different layers of our complex detector will measure the properties of these particles, track their paths, and measure their energies. An extremely powerful magnet built into the detector will bend the paths of electrically charged particles, which will help us identify the different types of particles produced in the collisions."
One of the particles that Professor Virdee and his colleagues are hoping to detect is the Higgs-Boson, a particle which has been theorised but never actually recorded. "It would be a real coup if we recorded, for the first time ever, the existence of the Higgs-Boson particle," says Professor Virdee. "Scientists believe the Higgs-Boson is the particle that gives the property of mass to other particles such as electrons and so on. If we can prove that it exists and that this is the case, we will have taken a big step towards a much fuller understanding of how the universe works, and indeed, what happened in the instants immediately after it was formed."
The CMS detector is one of four experiments sited at different locations on the 27km ring of CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The construction of CMS is an international effort, with different parts of the various layers of the detector being made by scientific collaborators from 37 different countries.
Constituent parts of CMS, weighing up to 2000 tonnes, are currently being lowered, by a specially-adapted shipbuilding crane, down 100 metres into the cavern where they will be re-assembled and prepared for data taking over the course of the next year. It is anticipated that the particle accelerator will be switched on just before Christmas 2007, at which time data will begin to be recorded.
It's the end of the world as we know it...
It's the end of the world as we know it...
and I feel fine, LOL
He bought the STS dog and pony show with our SCSC money.
Now this is a comforting thread. Every time I read about physics I find that everything physicists used to know was wrong but now they've got it all figured out.
Actually, it has. There are some natural Cosmic Rays that are actually more powerful and energetic than what the Large Hadron Collider can crank up that have hit the Earth's atmosphere....
And we're still here and the earth hasn't been destroyed.
Unfortunately it's hard to set up instruments around where one of those Cosmic Rays randomly hits, hence the need for the Collider.
I wish we had built the super-collider in Texas.
What things we would have found out!
Ed
Going to be pretty lame if experimental proof of other dimensions beyond 3+1 is found, probably the biggest discovery in the history of science, and it's in France instead of Texas.
Yes. But remember what we did find out!
What good is the camel's nose in the big tent? It does not belong! Politics in science is merely an expression of remorse for use of atomic bombs in Nippon.
Either we are equal or we are not. Good people ought to be armed where they will, with wits and guns.
According to someone much smarter then me "The incoming Gold Ion [Cosmic Ray], being ‘charged’, would be SIGNIFICANTLY affected/slowed by the randomly oriented charge flux in Earth/Atmospheric matter environment LONG before it finally ‘collides’ with any particular planet-sourced ion."
Looks like a primitive Stargate to me...........I would be very scared if some dude with a gold thing on his forehead stepped thru it..........
Want to join the protest march, lol.
In general, I'd warn people not to be taken in by the frenzy of "OHMIGOD THE EARTH WILL BE DESTROYED" stuff on the internet in the months and weeks leading up to when this is turned on - I expect a lot of the usual suspect Apocalyptikook websites will go nuts over this.
Absolutely. Someone will even find it in the writings of Nostradomas(sp).
Hey I have a reason to complain i have my entire life up until 2012, i don't want to die before that ;P.
Yup...breaks my heart.
Ed
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