Lecture 3 - Particle Accelerators: From Producing Higgs Boson to Curing Cancer
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- Speaker: Prof Phillip Burrows - John Adams Institute, Oxford University
Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - Largest, highest-energy particle collider - CERN, Geneva
Overview of the Collider
In the collider, the protons will reach 99.9999991% of the speed of light (going around the 27km ring 11,000 times per second).
It has the emptiest vacuum in the solar system and the coldest places in the galaxy (1.9K or -271℃), provided by the largest refrigerator ever built.
The hottest spots in the galaxy: When the two beams collide, they will generate temperatures one billion times hotter than the heart of the sun.
The biggest detectors ever built are used to sample and record the debris from one billion proton collisions per second.
The data rate is 20 PB of data per experiment per year.
The most expensive computer system is used to analyze the data, with hundreds of thousands of computers around the world being harnessed.
The amount of stored energy in the LHC is 10 GJ.
Happening in the Experiment
An explosion happened soon after the device was switched on. Then all the magnets were sent to be repaired.
In 2012, the first evidence of the Higgs Boson's existence was observed in the experiment.
In 2013, it was confirmed that the Higgs Boson had been found.
Why Build Accelerators
- Uncovering the origin of the universe
- Want to see what matter is made of
- Smash matter apart and look for the building blocks
- Take small pieces of matter, accelerate them to very high energy, and crash them into one another
The Standard Model and Higgs
Higgs proposed a theory (the Higgs Mechanism) to explain how particles acquire mass (how they transition from being massless to massive) by introducing a new particle - the Higgs Boson. Since then, physicists have been searching for such particles.