Reply #7: $3 billion and change. The goal: to find one lousy subatomic particle [View All]

[seemslikeadream]

The physics lab that brought you the Web is reinventing the Internet. Get ready for the atom-smashing, supercomputing, 5-gigabits-per-second Grid Economy.

By Richard Martin

200 feet underground, a proton does 17-mile laps at nearly the speed of light. Guided by powerful magnets, it zooms through a narrow, circular tunnel that straddles the Switzerland-France border. Then a tiny adjustment in the magnetic field throws the proton into the path of another particle beam traveling just as fast in the opposite direction. Everything goes kerflooey.

This will happen 10 million times a second inside the Atlas detector, part of the Large Hadron Collider now under construction at CERN, the famed European particle physics lab outside Geneva. When the LHC is finished in 2007, it will be the largest accelerator in the world. Massive superconducting magnets cooled to near absolute zero by liquid helium will bend 20 micron-wide beams of protons into precise trajectories and crash them into each other.


Photo by Maximilien Brice/©CERN
The Large Hadron Collider, under construction at CERN, is targeting the elusive Higgs boson. But crashing protons is the easy part.


Hadrons are a class of subatomic particles that includes protons and neutrons. When they collide, they explode into dozens of other particles, even more infinitesimal and fleeting. Atlas, five stories high and one of the most complex experimental apparatuses ever built, is designed to see them all.

The cost: $3 billion and change. The goal: to find one lousy subatomic particle.

Specifically, the Higgs boson, the most elusive speck of matter in the universe. Often called the God particle, it's supposed to be the key to explaining why matter has mass. Physicists believe that Higgs particles generate a kind of soupy ether through which other particles move, picking up drag that translates into mass on the macroscopic scale. The Higgs is the cornerstone of 21st-century physics; it simply has to be there, otherwise the standard model of the universe collapses.
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