Protons should be beginning their warm-up laps in preparation for piling into the main ring of the LHC at CERN on the Swiss-French border.
As you know, shortly after their big launch in September last year, they had a short-circuit followed by a leak of helium that threatened to destroy all their hard work. Now they are back online and ready to try again. At 27km long, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the largest and most complex machine ever built. It is cooled down to 1.9 degrees above absolute zero so it is also the coldest place in the Universe (unless some aliens have built one too) and it is going to accelerate protons to 99.9999991% of the speed of light and smash them into each other 600 million times a second.
A proton is one of the three particles from which all atoms are made, the other two being neutrons and electrons. Protons have a positive charge, electrons a negative one and neutrons have no charge. When these protons collide they hope to answer some pretty big questions.
- What is the origin of mass?
- Why are we made of matter and not antimatter?
- From what is dark matter made?
The energy concentrated in the LHC will make conditions similar to those 10-25 seconds after the Big Bang, soon after the particles and forces that shape our Universe came into being. With this much energy, the LHC should be able to create certain massive particles for the first time in the lab. Physicists hope to find the Higgs boson, the particle that gives everything its mass. They will also be looking for signs of a theoretical supersymmetry that might give us clues about how the forces looked in the early Universe.
“Supersymmetry predicts that every particle we know has a heavy supersymmetric partner. The lightest supersymmetric particle is also a promising candidate for dark matter, the invisible entity thought to amount to 95% of the universe’s mass.”
“The Higgs and supersymmetry are on firm theoretical footing. Some theorists speculate about more outlandish scenarios for the LHC, including the production of extra dimensions, mini black holes, new forces, and particles smaller than quarks and electrons. A test for time travel has also been proposed.”
Questions…
- What charge is carried by (a) a proton, (b) a neutron & (c) an electron?
- Which two of the three main sub-atomic particles are chiefly responsible for the mass of an atom?
- What do you call the form of an element that has a different number of neutrons to usual?
- Which two particles always exist in equal numbers in an uncharged atom?
- Which particle gives an atom its atomic number?
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