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Getting Smashed
The Large Hadron Collider hits close to home
On Sept. 10, scientists and engineers around the world – including two groups at the University of Wisconsin-Madison – rejoiced in their era’s crowning achievement: the completion of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Dubbed the world’s largest science experiment, the LHC topped all the charts: most expensive, most sizable and even most dramatic. Its goal was nothing short of revolutionary, hoping to prove that physics is fundamentally right. The machine is an accomplishment comparable to the building of the pyramids or landing on the moon, and perhaps best of all, when they turned it on the world did not end as many feared it might. Good news all around!
UW-Madison’s involvement in direct research with the LHC, and its efforts to provide a positive atmosphere for such research in general, should be a source of deep pride for the state.
The atom smasher
The LHC is what is known as a particle accelerator, or, more colloquially, an atom smasher. For more than 50 years, these machines have been colliding particles (sometimes even actual atoms) to help physicists understand what everything is made of. Some people might be surprised to learn that is something physicists are still trying to figure out, having heard since early school years that everything is made up of atoms, which are in turn made up of electrons orbiting a nucleus, itself composed of protons and neutrons. But in fact, those protons and neutrons are also made of other stuff, things called quarks.
A lesson in eggs
By colliding different particles, physicists can learn what these particles are made of and how they interact with each other, among other things. If this does not immediately make sense, consider the messy results of colliding two eggs. While normally a self-contained, single unit, an egg is actually made up of a number of parts, namely the shell, yolk and albumen, all of which are exposed after a collision. The same basic idea holds true for colliding particles together: their insides come out.
This happens because the collision concentrates lots of energy in one place. The insides of particles need huge amounts of energy to exist by themselves, apart from other particles and thus directly observable, and the collision provides it to them. The main difference between these particles and regular eggs, though, is that egg yolks and albumen do not disappear after a while. Since the insides of particles need so much energy to exist alone, they spend that energy fairly quickly (sometimes in just millionths of a second) before disappearing back into other particles.
Thus, the more energy physicists can cram into these collisions, the better. First, the insides of particles last longer out by themselves if they have more energy. But second and more importantly, the really crazy stuff, the most exotic of the insides of particles, require even more energy simply to exist. To get a look at these exotic insides, physicists have to pump shocking amounts of energy into the collisions; otherwise it is just not enough to get them to come out. (Think of colliding eggs slowly, just enough to crack the shells; more energy equals more yolks and whites dripping out.)
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