June 12, 2003. Copyright 2003. Graphic News. All rights reserved.

$8bn bid to find answer to life, the universe and everything

LONDON, June 12, Graphic News: EuropeÕs largest particle physics research centre has started work on the most powerful Òatom smasherÓ ever built. Seventy five metres (225 feet) below the Franco-Swiss border lies a massive snow-white cavern which is to become the home of Atlas, a 7,000-tonne particle detector.

Atlas and three other detectors form the backbone of the $8 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which is due to start up in 2007. If all goes to plan, the instrument -- standing as high as a five-storey building -- will lead the search for the holy grail of physics, an elusive sub-atomic phenomenon formally called the Higgs boson, but nicknamed ÒGodÕs particle.Ó

The LHC aims to recreate the conditions that existed within less than a billionth of a second after the ÒBig BangÓ explosion that created the known universe around 12-15 billion years ago.  Scientists at CERN, the multi-national European Organisation for Nuclear Research, say this will give a much clearer view of how this created galaxies, planets -- and the life that so far is only known to exist on Earth. 

At the heart of the LHC is a circular, underground tunnel 27 kilometres (16.8 miles) in circumference where two beams of protons, travelling in opposite directions, will be accelerated to intense energy levels before being deliberately slammed into one another to create a handful of GodÕs particles.

The 20-metre (65-feet) high magnets used to accelerate the proton beams and keep them focussed during their trajectory around the tunnel are the most powerful ever devised. To achieve this, CERN scientists used superconducting technology at 1.8 degrees above absolute zero (minus 273C). The forces generated are equally extreme. Each beam has an energy equivalent to 60 kilograms of TNT, and yet its diameter is about a quarter of the thickness of a human hair.

What the CERN researchers want to analyse is what happens when the sub-atomic constituents of protons -- known as quarks -- collide. The scientists believe that if the Higgs boson exists, it should materialise in just one out of 10 million million collisions. So even with 800 million collisions a second, the God particle will appear only about once every day, and will exist for only a tiny fraction of a second. Physicists must detect the particle while it is disintegrating.

Finding the Higgs boson, named after Scottish theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, who first proposed its existence in the early 1960s, would help to explain why matter has mass. The theory is that the universe is pervaded by an unseen and mysterious field (the Higgs field) and that atoms, and their sub-atomic particles, acquire their mass by passing through this field.

For years physicists have worked with what is called the Òstandard modelÓ, which accurately explains the world around us and is supported by experimental evidence. The model contains the basic building blocks of matter -- six sub-atomic particles derived from electrons and six derived from hadrons (protons and neutrons found within the nucleas of an atom). Additionally, five bosons, including the elusive Higgs, carry force.

Roger Cashmore, CERNÕs director of research, says if the Higgs boson exists, it must have existed at the beginning of time, long before the creation of atoms and molecules on which life depends. ÒAstronomers are rather limited; they can only go back about 300,000 years after the Big Bang. It is only at that point that electromagnetic waves and lightwaves propagate. We can go back further.Ó

Some 2,000 scientists from 150 research laboratories in 34 countries are involved in the LHC project -- also financially backed by the United States which 10 years ago abandoned an even larger one for cost reasons. 

CERN scientists say the spin-offs from their research into particles using the LHC could include lasers for precision surgery, making nuclear waste safe, the development of high performance computer networks and cancer research.
/ENDS

Sources: CERN, Scientific American