Awakening the beast

You would have thought it was the end of the world. Over 1 billion people sat glued to their screens, every major newspaper ran the headline and the blogosphere was alight with one three letter acronym – LHC. That was back in September when the Large Hadron Collider was successfully switched on, but now a series of problems has left the particle accelerator out of action. While the world waits with bated breath, we look at the story so far

A FAULTY electrical connection between two of the giant magnets caused a devastating helium leak. With the affected sectors slowly being returned to room temperature for repair and the scheduled winter shutdown at CERN the LHC is not going to be up and running again until the spring.

It is possibly the most elaborate scientific instrument of all time; a 27 kilometre circular tunnel near Geneva where protons will collide in two counter-rotating beams at speeds almost as fast as the speed of light. The beams, made up of billions of protons, are guided by arrays of powerful superconducting magnets which need to be cooled to -271ËšC, nearly absolute zero, to operate.
This massive feat of science and engineering has seen global collaboration on an unprecedented scale – 10,000 physicists, 500 multi-national research bodies and 55 countries have worked together to create a machine that could answer some of science’s biggest questions. Bringing the best scientists in the world together to collaborate on one project has put the whole field of physics on the brink of a revolution.

Six detectors sit around the ring including two “general purpose” detectors:

Figure 1: The CMS detector slice at surface level, hanging over the 100-meter- (328-foot) shaft. The coppery panels will detect muons, heavy electron-like particles, and the 'nose' will catch anything made of quarks.

ATLAS, which will look for the origins of mass and extra dimensions, and CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid), which will hunt for the Higgs boson and dark matter. The huge detectors are as tall as eight-story buildings and weigh more than the Eiffel Tower. Work at the LHC is far flung from the perception that physics is studious and placid – this is a playground where scientists in hard-hats and knee pads bungee across a landscape of metal, duck beneath waterfalls of cables and scramble into caverns of electronics. Of course there are countless theoreticians waiting to make sense of it all. But what are they looking for?

One of the LHC’s first tasks is to track down the Higgs boson aka The God Particle, the only particle which physicists agree exists but has not yet been observed. Originally conceived by the Scottish physicist Peter Higgs, who has found himself cast back into the limelight at 79, the Higgs boson is the entity that would explain how the building blocks of matter acquire mass. Four other machines have been searching for it for years without success. If discovered then it would confirm the Standard Model as the definitive rule for all particles and forces (except gravity) and would be a big step towards bridging the chasm between quantum theory and relativity. If found then the Higgs would basically prove the physicists right and a gift from Stockholm would surely be wending its way to certain individuals. However, if the LHC shows that the Higgs does not exist, which is a distinct possibility, the result would cause mayhem. Modern physics would go back to square one - pillars of science such as E=mc2 and quantum theory would need a complete rethink. Either way, the LHC has been designed to ultimately prove or disprove the existence of the elusive Higgs boson.

Dark matter is also on the agenda. The accelerator will be capable of producing

Figure 2: Getting around the LHC. In order for technicians to get around the 27-km tunnel that houses the LHC various methods of transportation must be employed.

transient miniature black holes to study the missing matter in the universe. By reconstructing black holes and effectively rewinding to a fraction of a second after the big bang it is hoped that particles will be observed which could explain why the universe is tuned so perfectly for human life. Meanwhile everyone is keeping their eyes peeled for extra dimensions, time travel or anything else tainted with quantum weirdness that hasn’t even been imagined yet.
Whatever the findings, physics and cosmology will be in for an interesting and unpredictable few years – when probing a whole new level of experimental quantum mechanics one should expect nothing less.

The LHC has successfully avoided the same fate as the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), which was on its way to becoming the most powerful accelerator in the world when the US government binned it in 1993 due to spiralling costs. By agreeing to design the LHC into an existing tunnel leftover from the decommissioned Large Electron Positron collider at CERN, costs were kept to a minimum. Its successful completion represents a substantial shift of physics power away from American dominance. However, the total cost of construction and running of the LHC is estimated at 2.7 to 5.4 billion pounds with the UK investing over half-a-billion pounds.

Inevitably the question of importance arises – could the money and the

Figure 3:The detector slice from the back, at the surface. The red portion is iron and the silver ring shows the backs of muon detectors. Credit: Michael Hoch/AdventueArt/CERN

brainpower have been better used? Many have criticised the LHC for taking priority over solving the major world problems. Sir David King, the former Chief Scientific Officer for the UK said “It’s all very well to demonstrate that we can land a craft on Mars, it’s all very well to discover whether or not there is a Higgs boson; but I would suggest that we need to pull people towards perhaps the bigger challenges where the outcome for our civilisation is really crucial.”

Its a hard argument to make to justify the LHC over tackling climate change or poverty in Africa. However the nature of scientific discovery is fickle. In a way, the LHC is to physics what the Apollo programme was to space exploration. Space research has led to Earth satellites that monitor climate change and in the same way particle accelerators offer new technologies for power generation and nuclear waste disposal. The pioneering grid computing designed to deal with the vast data the LHC will produce is already being used for other applications including climate modelling.

In a world where scientific research must demonstrate economic impact to secure funding it is uplifting to see an experiment on such a striking scale intended for the pursuit of knowledge. It reminds us that we share the desire to understand our origins and future. It is a noble task to ask why and this is its ultimate justification. Even if that is not a strong enough case for policy makers, they can rest assured that the likeliness is that technologies designed for the LHC will greatly impact on more applied areas of science and engineering. 

Who would have thought that a particle physics experiment could have got the whole world talking? There is no doubt that tabloids running scare stories about the LHC gobbling up the universe may have played some part in grabbing the public’s attention. No matter how you explain the science, some journalists will always run the impending Earth-eating black hole story! It may have been complete inaccurate sensationalism but there is some evidence that the general public, many who had never heard of CERN or protons or superconductors, really wanted to find out what all the fuss was about. CERN employee Katherine McAlpine’s inspiringly understandable “Large Hadron Rap” has received nearly 4 million views on YouTube. Her unexpected success has put a friendly face on the world of physics by showing that they aren’t afraid to pull their caps 90 degrees and bust a move.

Tragically, the irresponsible doomsday headlines had some bad consequences. Ill-informed parents phoned CERN begging to them to stop for the sake of the children, CERN employees received death threats and a teenager in India committed suicide, terrified the world was going to end. These misfortunes go to show that there is still work to be done on all sides to improve the flow and accuracy of communication. However, the LHC has created a unique opportunity to shift perceptions and inspire a new generation of scientists. CERN has reported the job section of its website has never been so active.

Science never happens fast and to a scientist, pushing back the date of the first collisions at the LHC is frustrating but has no effect on the excitement. Even without the delays, undoubtedly physicists will come against new barriers in the future. When probing the complete unknown, timescales are unpredictable. Who knows, maybe they will need new mathematics or new computation to analyse the data, or more likely the LHC will throw up data that nobody can make any sense of. It will take some true insight to really understand some of the weird results that are bound to be observed.

Let us hope that the public react positively to the heightened sense of drama and continue to follow the story. The truly newsworthy stories are still to come when the researchers start to understand the results. After all, the LHC’s greatest promise is to solve some of the biggest mysteries of the universe and improve our understanding of our place in it. If that isn’t headline news then I don’t know what is.

By Leila Sattary