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Australia’s role in the LHC: the world’s largest physics experiment And no, the world won’t end tomorrow 9 September 2008 View images
here Just after 6pm today, Wednesday 10 September, the Large Hadron Collider will start up. Twenty years in the making, the A$6 billion machine will smash particles together in an attempt to recreate the conditions of the early universe fractions of a second after the Big Bang. It’s the result of a collaboration between scientists from eighty five countries. “Australian physicists have been involved from the beginning,” says Cathy Foley, President of the Australian Institute of Physics. “A team lead by Geoff Taylor from the University of Melbourne and Kevin Varvell from the University of Sydney have contributed to ATLAS - one of six machines at the LHC that will attempt to detect the strange particles created,” she says. “They have designed detectors and shielding, developed software to model the behaviour of the detector, and software that triggers the collection of information. They’ve been supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council.” The collider is housed in a circular tunnel 27 kilometres long, at a depth of between 50 and 175 metres below the ground. As the particles smash together they will ‘break apart’ into smaller, more fundamental components, giving physicists a fleeting chance to observe those particles, some of which will never have been seen before. “We know we are likely to find something very important, something scientifically quite profound,” says Geoff Taylor. One of the most highly anticipated products of the collider might be the elusive Higgs boson, which could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. If scientists can verifiy the existence of the Higgs boson, it would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory, which aims to bring together three of the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force, leaving out only gravity. Everything about the LHC is large. The ATLAS detector is about half as big as Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Australian companies were involved in constructing copper shields that form part of ATLAS, and in 2003 Professor Taylor’s team supervised the despatch of 14 pieces of shielding to LHC, weighing some 35 tonnes. “The discoveries that will be made at the LHC will rewrite our understanding of how the universe began and the way it operates at the most fundamental level,” says Cathy. She also dismisses the fears that the LHC will create a black hole that will somehow swallow up the earth. “Scientists think the kinds of collisions that the LHC will be generating happen all the time in nature,” she says. Although the particles will be smashed together at speeds that generate large amounts of energy in sub-atomic terms, when you compare it to more everyday events they are less impressive, she notes. “Each collision of a pair of protons in the LHC will release an amount of energy comparable to that of two colliding mosquitoes,” she says. “It’s like a rice-bubble pop.” Cathy, Kevin and Geoff are available for interview – call Niall Byrne on 03 9398 1416. The University of Melbourne and University of Sydney have public/student events with live links to CERN starting at 5.30 pm and 7 pm respectively. Details here. |
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