Professional Documents
Culture Documents
A visitor to the Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator where the new particles were
observed.(Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)
Last week, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider the particle accelerator
used to discover the Higgs Boson in 2012 announced that they discovered
two subatomic particles, the baryons Xi_b'- and Xi_b*-.
If that sentence leaves you feeling just a bit mystified, you're not alone.
Physics might be the most complex of all scientific fields, and at times, it can be
hard to explain its fundamental concepts in basic English. But with the help
of Patrick Koppenburg one of the scientists at the Large Hadron Collider
(LHC) involved in this new discovery here's a comprehensible guide to these
new particles, the Higgs, and the ongoing experiments at the LHC as a whole.
These two new baryons weren't a huge discovery, as new particles like this are
found a few times a year. What's more, the existence of these baryons was
predicted by the standard model, our current, best formula for predicting the
behavior of all particles.
Seeing them firsthand, however, is useful. "It's quite easy to predict their
existence, but it's much more difficult to predict their mass," Koppenburg says.
"Observing them allows us to measure it." That data allows physicists to better
understand how the strong nuclear forceholds quarks together.
Under normal conditions, the three quarks that make up these new baryons
never combine in this particular way. But conditions in the Large Hadron Collider
are anything but normal.
The LHC, which was completed in 2008, is the world's largest particle
accelerator. It's a nearly 17-mile-long tunnel ring that lies below the border of
France and Switzerland and allows physicists to conduct some pretty intense
experiments.
In essence, these experiment involve shooting beams of particles around the
ring, using enormous magnets to speed them up to 99.9999 percent of the speed
of light (causing them to whip around the ring about 11,000 times per second),
then crashing them together.
The huge amount of energy present in these collisions leads the particles to
break apart and recombine in some pretty exotic ways. The recombinations
along with other data collected during the collisions allow physicists to test
predictions made by the standard model.
Data from one of the particle detectors at the LHC. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/GettyImages)
The Higgs boson, a type of particle, is one of the primary reasons the LHC was
created. "In building the LHC, what we really hoped to do was either find the
Higgs, or be able to exclude its existence," Koppenburg says.
In July 2012, after analyzing the results of a collision between protons, they
found it.
The particle is evidence of a force called the Higgs field: an invisible field that
pervades all space and exerts a drag on every particle. This drag is why we
perceive particles to have mass a resistance to being moved.
The Higgs field is a sort of keystone of the standard model, as it allows the rest of
its equations to make a whole lot more sense.
Currently, the LHC is shut down for a series of upgrades. It will open sometime in
early 2015, capable of producing much higher-energy collisions than before.
These collisions will allow scientists to keep discovering new subatomic particles,
and also look more closely at the Higgs boson and observe how it behaves under
different conditions.
"We're hoping to find things that were not predicted by the standard model,"
Koppenburg says. "Perhaps particles that are so heavy that they haven't been
produced before, or other kinds of deviations."
The right kinds of deviations, he and other physicists hope, will allow us to
improve our model. Someday, this sort of work could even lead to the creation a
new model that fully describes the behavior of all objects in the universe.