Large Hadron Collider starts and we're still hereFont Size: Decrease Increase Print Page: Print Leigh Dayton | September 11, 2008
LAST night, physicists near Geneva switched on the largest, most powerful scientific tool ever built and the world did not vanish down a black hole, as alarmists had predicted.
Instead, the $US8 billion ($9.9 billion) Large Hadron Collider (see illustration below) successfully sent the first beam of protons -- members of a group of subatomic particles called hadrons -- hurtling around a 27km circular tunnel running beneath Switzerland and France.
The event caused sighs of relief from more than 2000 scientists from 150 institutes in 45 countries, including Australia, who had waited 14 years for the moment.
But their relief had nothing to do with lurking black holes, said cosmologist and theoretical physicist Paul Davies with Arizona State University in Tempe.
"The black hole threat was time-wasting drivel. Even had black holes appeared they would have immediately disappeared," he said.
The point of yesterday's exercise was to begin callibrating the more than 10,000 powerful superconducting magnets and four enormous detectors comprising the collider, run by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, or CERN
Once the collider is up and running scientists will use it to send proton beams around the collider in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light.
The ensuing collisions will smash the particles apart, helping physicists gain insights into the fundamental nature of matter.
"It's an exciting time because this new accelerator is providing us a window to a new regime of matter never studied before," said University of Sydney physicist Aldo Saavedra.
Along with scientists at Melbourne and Wollongong universities and WA industrial partner VEEM Engineering Group, Dr Saavedra has contributed to the development of the ATLAS detector which will be used to look for signs of new physics.
One of the first signs scientists hope to detect is proof of the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle first proposed in the mid-1960s by American physicist Peter Higgs.
The boson is central to the so-called Standard Model of particle physics as it explains how other particles gain mass.
But as Professor Davies says, the "goddamn" particle -- commonly known as the "God" particle -- has until now remained beyond the reach of technology.
"I am sure the 'Higgs' will be found, but if there's no 'Higgs' it would be really exciting because it would falsify the Standard Model and force a rethink," he said.
Professor Davies predicted that while confirming the Higgs boson could take two or three years, it may take mere months to detect "supersymmetry", the "bridge" between subatomic particles and fundamental forces like gravity, electromagnetism and weak and strong interaction.
Physicists also plan to use the collider to recreate conditions just billionths of a second after the Big Bang, which brought time and space into existence.
If so, they might unravel the mystery of the "dark stuff" making up over 95 per cent of the universe.
Astrophysicists believe the ordinary matter making up stars, galaxies, planets and the other stuff of space adds up to less than 5 per cent of the universe. The rest is "dark matter" and "dark energy"' about which little is known.
