'Things that go bump in the night'

Professor Andy Parker

Last night Toot and I went to a Breckland Astronomical Society meeting where Professor Andy Parker gave a fascinating talk on the discovery of  Higgs Bosons (there could be more than one type) and the search for Quantum Black holes.


'Andy Parker is a Professor of High Energy Physics at Cambridge University, with over 100 publications on aspects of particle physics. His current research interests involve experiments to reveal new physics such as extra space dimensions, quantum-sized black holes, and supersymmetry. He is a founder of the ATLAS experiment for the Large Hadron Collider, and for 6 years he was the project leader for the ATLAS Inner Detector. He was awarded the Pilkington Prize for excellence in teaching in 1997.'




Toot and I were much impressed by Prof Parker's ability to get over complex ideas in a clear and straight forward manner.  We were also wowed by his PowerPoint slides which illustrated the scale and complexity of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern.

Homo Sapiens sure are smart monkeys!  Well some of them are!

Aerial view of Cern
showing the route of the
underground tunnel which
contains the Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider is the world's longest and largest particle accelerator.

Within the tunnel is the particle accelerator in which protons are accelerated to enormous speeds and energy levels. The speeding protons are held on track by enormous batteries of superconducting magnets which are cooled by liquid helium and nitrogen and are thermally insulated by vacuum jackets. The temperature of the magnets is maintained at 2 degrees Kelvin ie. minus 271 degrees centigrade!  The insulating vacuum maintained is more rarefied than the vacuum found on the surface of our Moon!

Atlas is one of the seven particle experiments being undertaken on the LHC at Cern searching for the Higgs Bosun.

The Higgs Bosun is a vibration in The Higgs Field.  At ambient energy levels Higgs Bosuns cannot be detected and that's why the LHC is required to provide the enormous energy necessary to create them.  It is the Higgs Field that through interaction with other particles gives all matter mass.

Schematic showing the Atlas Experiment in the LHC loop

Particles are accelerated around the LHC loop and are made to smash into each other (collide) in the Atlas experiment.  A number of different types of detectors wrapped around the point of collision are used to detect and infer the creation of exotic basic particles.  Millions of collisions are created and monitored to detect a small number of particles which behave like Higgs Bosuns.

Atlas 3D schematic (note the size of people to scale)

The inner detector being installed at the centre of Atlas

A simulated detection of a Higgs Bosun

As the presence of particles behaving like Higgs Bosuns is difficult to detect above background 'noise' the experimental collisions have been repeated millions and millions of times and data gathered has been analysed to identify statistically relevant events.

The detection of  Higgs Bosuns
at about 125 GeV can be inferred
by the blue coloured signal
shown by this graph

Credits: Wikipedia, The Atlas Collaboration Cern and The University of Cambridge Department of Physics Cavendish Laboratory.

For more information see:
http://www.atlas.ch/