CERNs LHC Experiment

In physics, theoretical predictions of new experimental results rely mainly on the mathematical structure of the relevant theory. In this sense, the activity in theoretical physics is analogous to that of mathematics. However, unlike problems belonging to the realm of mathematical investigation, there are physical problems where the theoretical analysis cannot proceed without a knowledge of some experimental data that describe specific properties of the system. These two elements are used below in an explanation of the possibility that the data which will be obtained from CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may show a significant increase of the cross section for Regions of very high energy that have not been explored before.

LHC:
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a gigantic scientific instrument near Geneva, where it spans the border between Switzerland and France about 100m underground. It is a particle accelerator used by physicists to study the smallest known particles the fundamental building blocks of all things. It will revolutionize our understanding, from the minuscule world deep within atoms to the vastness of the Universe. Two beams of subatomic particles called "hadrons" either protons or lead ions travel in opposite directions inside the circular accelerator, gaining energy with every lap. Physicists use the LHC to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding the two beams head-on at very high energy. Teams of physicists from around the world then analyze the particles created in the collisions using special detectors in a number of experiments dedicated to the LHC. There are many theories as to what will result from these collisions. For decades, the Standard Model of particle physics has served physicists well as a means of understanding the fundamental laws of Nature, but it does not tell the whole story. Only experimental data using the high energies reached by the LHC can push knowledge forward, challenging those who seek confirmation of established knowledge, and those who dare to dream beyond the paradigm. # The purpose of LHC: The LHC was built to help scientists to answer key unresolved questions in particle physics. The unprecedented energy it achieves may even reveal some unexpected results that no one has ever thought of.

#For the past few decades, physicists have been able to describe with increasing detail the fundamental particles that make up the Universe and the interactions between them. This understanding is encapsulated in the Standard Model of particle physics, but it contains gaps and cannot tell us the whole story. To fill in the missing knowledge requires experimental data, and the next big step to achieving this is with LHC. #What is the origin of mass? Why do tiny particles weigh the amount they do? Why do some particles have no mass at all? At present, there are no established answers to these questions. The most likely explanation may be found in the Higgs boson, a key undiscovered particle that is essential for the Standard Model to work. First hypothesized in 1964, it has yet to be observed. #Why is there no more antimatter? We live in a world of matter everything in the Universe, including ourselves, is made of matter. Antimatter is like a twin version of matter, but with opposite electric charge. At the birth of the Universe, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been produced in the Big Bang

# Secrets of the Big Bang. The experiment will use the LHC to recreate conditions similar to those just after the Big Bang, in particular to analyze the properties of the quark-gluon plasma.

Outcomes
Geneva, 22 August 2011. Results from the ATLAS and CMS collaborations, presented at the biannual Lepton-Photon conference in Mumbai, India today, show that the elusive Higgs particle, if it exists, is running out of places to hide. Proving or disproving the existence the Higgs boson, which was postulated in the 1960s as part of a mechanism that would confer mass on fundamental particles, is among the main goals of the LHC scientific programme. ATLAS and CMS have excluded the existence of a Higgs over most of the mass region 145 to 466 GeV with 95 percent certainty. As well as the Higgs search results, the LHC experiments will be presenting new results across a wide range of physics. Thanks to the outstanding performance of the LHC, the experiments and the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, some of the current analyses are based on roughly twice the data sample presented at the last major particle physics conference in July. "These are exciting times for particle physics," said CERN's research director, Sergio Bertolucci. "Discoveries are almost assured within the next twelve months. If the Higgs exists, the LHC experiments will soon find it. If it does not, its absence will point the way to new physics." The Standard Model Higgs mechanism is one of a range of ways that fundamental particles could acquire their masses. According to the Higgs mechanism, space is filled with a so-called Higgs field with which particles interact. Those that interact strongly with the field have more mass than those that interact weakly, rather like a streamlined racing car cuts through air more easily than a bus.

At the first major particle physics conference of 2011, the European Physical Society's High Energy Physics conference held in Grenoble, France, in July, both ATLAS and CMS were careful to stress that possible hints of a Higgs signal in their data could be explained by statistical fluctuations. Now, with additional data analysed, the significance of those fluctuations has slightly decreased. "Thanks to the superb performance of the LHC, we have recorded a huge amount of new data over the last month," said ATLAS spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti. 'This has allowed us to make great strides in our understanding of the Standard Model and in the search for the Higgs boson and new physics." CMS Spokesperson Guido Tonelli concurred, saying:"It's great that the LHC's fantastic performance this year has brought us this close to a region of possible discovery. Whatever the final verdict on Higgs, we're now living in very exciting times for all involved in the quest for new physics." The Lepton-Photon conference runs until 27 August. There will be a press conference on 25 August at which CERN Director General, Rolf Heuer, will be one of the speakers. CERN's LHCb experiment will present its latest measurements on the Standard Model on Saturday 27 August. Following the Lepton Photon conference, the results from the LHC experiments will be available through the CERN website. The LHC is on track to at least double the amount of data delivered so far to the experiments by the end of the year.

Explanation
How it worksThe LHC, the worlds largest and most powerful particle accelerator is the latest addition to CERNs accelerator complex. It mainly consists of a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way. Inside the accelerator, two beams of particles travel at close to the speed of light with very high energies before colliding with one another. The beams travel in opposite directions in separate beam pipes two tubes kept at ultrahigh vacuum. They are guided around the accelerator ring by a strong magnetic field, achieved using superconducting electromagnets. These are built from coils of special electric cable that operates in a superconducting state, efficiently conducting electricity without resistance or loss of energy. This requires chilling the magnets to about -271C a temperature colder than outer space. For this reason, much of the accelerator is connected to a distribution system of liquid helium, which cools the magnets, as well as to other supply services. Thousands of magnets of different varieties and sizes are used to direct the beams around the accelerator. These include 1232 dipole magnets of 15m length which are used to bend the beams,

and 392 quadruple magnets, each 57m long, to focus the beams. Just prior to collision, another type of magnet is used to "squeeze" the particles closer together to increase the chances of collisions. The particles are so tiny that the task of making them collide is akin to firing needles from two positions 10km apart with such precision that they meet halfway! All the controls for the accelerator, its services and technical infrastructure are housed under one roof at the CERN Control Centre. From here, the beams inside the LHC are made to collide at four locations around the accelerator ring, corresponding to the positions of the particle detectors.

#How an accelerator works

Accelerators were invented to provide energetic particles to investigate the structure of the atomic nucleus. Since then, they have been used to investigate many aspects of particle physics. Their job is to speed up and increase the energy of a beam of particles by generating electric fields that accelerate the particles, and magnetic fields that steer and focus them. An accelerator comes either in the form of a ring (circular accelerator), where a beam of particles travels repeatedly round a loop, or in a straight line (linear accelerator), where the beam travels from one end to the other. A number of accelerators may be joined together in sequence to reach successively higher energies, as at the accelerator complex at CERN. The main components of an accelerator include:

Radiofrequency (RF) cavities and electric fields these provide acceleration to a beam of particles. RF cavities are located intermittently along the beam pipe. Each time a beam passes the electric field in an RF cavity, some of the energy from the radio wave is transferred to the particles. Vacuum chamber this is a metal pipe (also known as the beam pipe) inside which a beam of particles travels. It is kept at an ultrahigh vacuum to minimize the amount of gas present to avoid collisions between gas molecules and the particles in the beam. Magnets various types of magnets are used to serve different functions. For example, dipole magnets are usually used to bend the path of a beam of particles that would otherwise travel in a straight line. The more energy a particle has, the greater the magnetic field needed to bend its path. Quadruple magnets are used to focus a beam, gathering all the particles closer together (similar to the way that lenses are used to focus a beam of light).

Collisions at accelerators can occur either against a fixed target, or between two beams of particles. Particle detectors are placed around the collision point to record and reveal the particles that emerge from the collision.
An accelerator at home

A cathode ray tube (CRT) television set has the basic features of CERNs accelerators. A filament inside the glass vacuum tube of the television set acts as a source of particles. When the filament is heated, electrons are set free by the increase in energy. The electrons are accelerated

and guided through the vacuum of the CRT by an electromagnetic field, generated by a coil of wires. The television screen acts as a particle detector. As the high-energy electrons hit the back of the screen, they are detected and made visible in the color pixels that make up the image.

# How a detector works

The job of a particle detector is to record and visualize the explosions of particles that result from the collisions at accelerators. The information obtained on a particle's speed, mass, and electric charge help physicists to work out the identity of the particle. The work particle physicists do to identify a particle that has passed through a detector is similar to the way someone would study the tracks of footprints left by animals in mud or snow. In animal prints, factors such as the size and shape of the marks, length of stride, overall pattern, direction and depth of prints, can reveal the type of animal that came past earlier. Particles leave tell-tale signs in detectors in a similar manner for physicists to decipher. Modern particle physics apparatus consists of layers of sub-detectors, each specializing in a particular type of particle or property. There are 3 main types of sub-detector:

Tracking device detects and reveals the path of a particle Calorimeter stops, absorbs and measures the energy of a particle Particle identification detector identifies the type of particle using various techniques

Tracking devices

Tracking devices reveal the paths of electrically charged particles through the trails they leave behind. There are similar every-day effects: high-flying airplanes seem invisible, but in certain conditions you can see the trails they make. In a similar way, when particles pass through suitable substances the interaction of the passing particle with the atoms of the substance itself can be revealed. Most modern tracking devices do not make the tracks of particles directly visible. Instead, they produce tiny electrical signals that can be recorded as computer data. A computer program then reconstructs the patterns of tracks recorded by the detector, and displays them on a screen. They can record the curvature of a particle's track (made in the presence of a magnetic field), from which the momentum of a particle may be calculated. This is useful for identifying the particle.
Calorimeters

A calorimeter measures the energy lost by a particle that goes through it. It is usually designed to entirely stop or absorb most of the particles coming from a collision, forcing them to deposit all of their energy within the detector.

Calorimeters typically consist of layers of passive or absorbing highdensity material (lead for instance) interleaved with layers of active medium such as solid lead-glass or liquid argon. Electromagnetic calorimeters measure the energy of light particles electrons and photons as they interact with the electrically charged particles inside matter. Calorimeters can stop most known particles except muons and neutrinos.
Particle identification detectors

Two methods of particle identification work by detecting radiation emitted by charged particles:

Cherenkov radiation: this is light emitted when a charged particle travels faster than the speed of light through a given medium. The light is given off at a specific angle according to the velocity of the particle. Combined with a measurement of the momentum of the particle the velocity can be used to determine the mass and hence to identify the particle. Transition radiation: this radiation is produced by a fast charged particle as it crosses the boundary between two electrical insulators with different resistances to electric currents. The phenomenon is related to the energy of a particle and distinguishes different particle types.

#Data analysis
Research in particle physics can throw up a torrent of experimental data within a short space of time. For example, the data recorded by each of the big experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is enough to fill around 100 000 DVDs every year! The challenge of analyzing these results thoroughly is an immense task that extends beyond the capability of any single supercomputer. To push the existing technology to fulfill the demands of science, a new way of handling data is essential. The most effective solution for meeting the data analysis challenge lies in a global computing infrastructure called the Grid. This is a form of distributed computing, where computers located all over the world can be accessed via the Internet to harness their overall processing power. This method of resource sharing in effect creates a single huge and powerful computer brain to benefit all the network collaborators. The Grid relies on the existing underlying hardware of the Internet (communication networks), with a specially developed software called middleware. This organizes and integrates the geographically dispersed resources into a coherent entity and enables access to the resource. To handle the complexity of the scientific tasks, the Grid includes major computer centers dedicated to supplying its resources with high-speed connections. Many Grid systems are developing and evolving. These may be private or public, regional or global, and may be multi-purpose or

dedicated to one particular project. The Grid is a work in progress: hundreds of researchers and software engineers around the world are developing the underlying technology.

Prediction
Earlier this summer, physicist Tommaso Dorigo of the University of Padua wrote about talk of a tentative hint of the Higgs at the Tevatron, a particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. "It reached my ear, from two different, possibly independent sources, that an experiment at the Tevatron is about to release some evidence of a light Higgs boson signal. Some say a threesigma effect, others do not make explicit claims but talk of an unexpected result, wrote Dorigo. The blog post was low on detail but if the "three-sigma" signature - a reference to the statistical certainty of the rumored result - turns out to be real, it will be one of the great discoveries in the history of science.

The Higgs, sometimes called the "God particle", was proposed to explain why particles have mass. It is the only particle in the standard model of particle physics that hasn't been found. Spotting it would confirm the theory, while ruling it out would point the way to more exotic, new theories. At full throttle, the LHC could provide scientists with new insights into the nature of mass, dark matter and the origins of the universe. But many of them hope that instead of confirming string theory, dark energy, the Higgs-Boson, etc. something entirely unexpected will emerge from the CERN-run experiment, for example the detection of certain types of super symmetric particles, that could be seen as what physicist Michio Kaku calls, signals from the 11th dimension. The detection of certain types of super symmetric particles, aka particles, could be seen as what physicist Michio Kaku calls, signals from the 11th dimension. Several of the world's leading cosmologists, Michio Kaku a prime example, believe that we are but one of many universes. As yet, as we know, there is no evidence of there being other universes out there. Some versions of this theory suggest that there is at least one other universe very close to our own, separated perhaps bu a membrane as little as a millimeter away, which, if true, could be detectable by some energy or forces such as gravity leaking through. In fact, as predicted by brane theorists, this "leakage" could be responsible for the production of dark energy from a parallel universe, its influence felt in our own through its gravitational pull. Many of the multiple universe proponents are waiting eagerly for the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva to smash the basic components of the universe together at near the speed of light along

an 84-kilometer-long underground racetrack, causing an awesomely high energy reaction similar to the temperatures involved at the Big Bang and spew out the secrets to the cosmos. More exciting than the discovery of Higgs Boson, whose function is giving mass to the particles of matter could be the possible creation of tiny, particle-sized black holes. Real data from these experiments will rewrite the theorists' Guide to the Quantum Universe. According to current physics these Nano black holes could not be created at the energy levels the LHC is capable of producing. They could only be created if a parallel universe actually exists, providing the extra gravitation needed to generate the Nano black holes. The Everton has been making steady progress in the hunt for the standard model Higgs. Over the years, data collected by the DZero and CDF experiments at the collider have whittled down the window of possible masses where the particle might be found. Last year, Tevatron physicists predicted that they'd have enough data by early 2011 to either find or rule out the Higgs and estimated they have a 50% chance of spotting it by the end of 2010. The Large Hadron Collider set a new record for the creation of energetic particle beams this spring. The particle accelerator, which surpassed Fermilabs Tevatron in December, smashed its own record, charging particles to 3.48 trillion electron volts, or three times the energy of any beam ever created by human beings and just under half the LHCs proposed maximum capabilities. Getting the beams to 3.5 TeV is testimony to the soundness of the LHCs overall design, and the improvements weve made since the breakdown in September 2008, said CERNs Director for Accelerators and Technology Steve Myers in a press release. And its a great credit to the patience and dedication of the LHC team.

Conclusion:
The theoretical analysis of the previous Section examines the conditions required for the excitation of the closed shells of quarks belonging to the baryonic core. Therefore, it is relevant to scattering processes that include baryons. For this reason, the data obtained from the electron-positron CERN's LEP collider cannot cast light on this problem. Similarly, the TEVATRON proton-antiproton collider cannot be used for this purpose. Indeed, by definition, in a particle-antiparticle collision, all constituents participate in the mutual annihilation. This property is independent of the collision energy. It follows that the quark analog of the Franck-Hertz e_ect cannot be seen in this case. Restricting the discussion to facilities that have been used till now, one finds that the HERA facility is the sole source of data required for a confirmation of conjecture B of Section 3. The HERA data provide us with no more than a hint indicating that for higher energies, the excess of the number of events may be significant. This hint enables one to make conjecture A of Section 2. The operation of the LHC will yield data of proton-proton collisions at very high energy. This experiment differs from those of HERA, where a proton collides with an electron (positron). However, if conjectures A, B hold then the analogue of the Franck-Hertz effect of the closed shells of quarks should be seen in the LHC data.

At the time when this work is finished the LHC has not yet begun to work. Hence, at present, it is still not known whether its data will support conjecture A. As explained in the previous Section, an experimental verification of conjecture A

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