The Guardian, Ian Sample, Tuesday 1 January 2013
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| The Large Hadron Collider at CERN faces a two-year shutdown while engineers do repairs so it can ramp up to its maximum energy in 2015 and beyond. Photograph: Mark Thiessen/National Geographic Society/Corbis |
When it
comes to shutting down the most powerful atom smasher ever built, it's not
simply a question of pressing the off switch.
In the
French-Swiss countryside on the far side of Geneva, staff at the Cern particle
physics laboratory are taking steps to wind down the Large Hadron Collider.
After the latest run of experiments ends next month, the huge superconducting
magnets that line the LHC's 27km-long tunnel must be warmed up, slowly and
gently, from -271 Celsius to room temperature. Only then can engineers descend
into the tunnel to begin their work.
The machine
that last year helped scientists snare the elusive Higgs boson – or a
convincing subatomic impostor – faces a two-year shutdown while engineers
perform repairs that are needed for the collider to ramp up to its maximum
energy in 2015 and beyond. The work will beef up electrical connections in the
machine that were identified as weak spots after an incident four years ago that knocked the collider out for more than a year.
The
accident happened days after the LHC was first switched on in September 2008,
when a short circuit blew a hole in the machine and sprayed six tonnes of
helium into the tunnel that houses the collider. Soot was scattered over 700
metres. Since then, the machine has been forced to run at near half its design
energy to avoid another disaster.
The
particle accelerator, which reveals new physics at work by crashing together
the innards of atoms at close to the speed of light, fills a circular,
subterranean tunnel a staggering eight kilometres in diameter. Physicists will
not sit around idle while the collider is down. There is far more to know about
the new Higgs-like particle, and clues to its identity are probably hidden in
the piles of raw data the scientists have already gathered, but have had too
little time to analyse.
But the LHC
was always more than a Higgs hunting machine. There are other mysteries of the
universe that it may shed light on. What is the dark matter that clumps
invisibly around galaxies? Why are we made of matter, and not antimatter? And
why is gravity such a weak force in nature? "We're only a tiny way into
the LHC programme," says Pippa Wells, a physicist who works on the LHC's
7,000-tonne Atlas detector. "There's a long way to go yet."
The hunt
for the Higgs boson, which helps explain the masses of other particles,
dominated the publicity around the LHC for the simple reason that it was almost
certainly there to be found. The lab fast-tracked the search for the particle,
but cannot say for sure whether it has found it, or some more exotic entity.
"The
headline discovery was just the start," says Wells. "We need to make
more precise measurements, to refine the particle's mass and understand better
how it is produced, and the ways it decays into other particles."
Scientists at Cern expect to have a more complete identikit of the new particle
by March, when repair work on the LHC begins in earnest.
By its very
nature, dark matter will be tough to find, even when the LHC switches back on
at higher energy. The label "dark" refers to the fact that the substance
neither emits nor reflects light. The only way dark matter has revealed itself
so far is through the pull it exerts on galaxies.
Studies of
spinning galaxies show they rotate with such speed that they would tear
themselves apart were there not some invisible form of matter holding them
together through gravity. There is so much dark matter, it outweighs by five
times the normal matter in the observable universe.
The search
for dark matter on Earth has failed to reveal what it is made of, but the LHC
may be able to make the substance. If the particles that constitute it are
light enough, they could be thrown out from the collisions inside the LHC.
While they would zip through the collider's detectors unseen, they would carry
energy and momentum with them. Scientists could then infer their creation by
totting up the energy and momentum of all the particles produced in a
collision, and looking for signs of the missing energy and momentum.
One theory,
called supersymmetry, proposes that the universe is made from twice as many
varieties of particles as we now understand. The lightest of these particles is
a candidate for dark matter.
Wells says
that ramping up the energy of the LHC should improve scientists' chances of
creating dark matter: "That would be a huge improvement on where we are
today. We would go from knowing what 4% of the universe is, to around
25%."
Teasing out
the constituents of dark matter would be a major prize for particle physicists,
and of huge practical value for astronomers and cosmologists who study
galaxies.
"Although
the big PR focus has been on the Higgs, in fact looking for new particles to
provide clues to the big open questions is the main reason for having the
LHC," says Gerry Gilmore, professor of experimental philosophy at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge.
"Reality
on the large scale is dark matter, with visible matter just froth on the
substance. So we focus huge efforts on trying to find out if dark matter is a
set of many elementary particles, and hope that some of those particles'
properties will also help to explain some other big questions.
"So
far, astronomy has provided all the information on dark matter, and many of us
are working hard to deduce more of its properties. Finding something at the LHC
would be wonderful in helping us in understanding that. Of course one needs
both the LHC and astronomy. The LHC may find the ingredients nature uses, but
astronomy delivers the recipe nature made reality from."
Another big
mystery the Large Hadron Collider may help crack is why we are made of matter
instead of antimatter. The big bang should have flung equal amounts of matter
and antimatter into the early universe, but today almost all we see is made of
matter. What happened at the dawn of time to give matter the upper hand?
The
question is central to the work of scientists on the LHCb detector. Collisions
inside LHCb produce vast numbers of particles called beauty quarks, and their
antimatter counterparts, both of which were common in the aftermath of the big
bang. Through studying their behaviour, scientists hope to understand why
nature seems to prefer matter over antimatter.
"Unlike
supersymmetry or the Higgs, there's no theory of antimatter that we can
test," says Tara Shears, a physicist who works on the LHCb detector.
"We don't know why antimatter behaves a little differently to normal
matter, but perhaps that difference can be explained by a deeper underlying
theory of particle physics, which includes new physics that we haven't found
yet."
Turning up
the energy of the LHC may just give scientists an answer to the question of why
gravity is so weak. The force that keeps our feet on the ground may not seem
puny, but it certainly is. With just a little effort, we can jump in the air,
and so overcome the gravitational pull of the whole six thousand billion billon
tonnes of the planet. The other forces of nature are far stronger.
One
explanation for gravity's weakness is that we experience only a fraction of the
force, with the rest acting through microscopic, curled up extra dimensions of
space. "The gravitational field we see is only the bit in our three
dimensions, but actually there are lots of gravitational fields in the fourth
dimension, the fifth dimension, and however many more you fancy," says
Andy Parker, professor of high energy physics at Cambridge University.
"It's an elegant idea. The only price you have to pay is that you have to invent
these extra dimensions to explain where the gravity has gone."
The rules
of quantum mechanics say that particles behave like waves, and as the LHC ramps
up to higher energies the wavelengths of the particles it collides become ever
shorter. When the wavelengths of the particles are small enough to match the
size of the extra dimensions, they would suddenly feel gravity much more
strongly.
"What
you'd expect is that as you reach the right energy, you suddenly see inside the
extra dimensions, and gravity becomes big and strong instead of feeble and
weak," says Parker. The sudden extra pull of gravity would cause particles
to scatter far more inside the machine, giving scientists a clear signal that
extra dimensions were real.
Extra
dimensions may separate us from realms of space we are completely oblivious to.
"There could be a whole universe full of galaxies and stars and
civilisations and newspapers that we didn't know about," says Parker. "That
would be a big deal."
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