The ALICE experiment
Feb 22 2012 |
Written by
elliefewings
The closest some of us have got to Large Hadron Colliders and sub-atomic particles is from reading Angels and Demons. However just from being on the campus, you may be closer to the cutting edge of science than you think. By walking past the Poynting Building you are walking past the office of the UK lead on the ALICE project at CERN, Dr David Evans. Also known as the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN is the largest particle physics laboratory in the world and the home of the famous Large Hadron Collider, a 27km tube responsible for scaring civilians worldwide who believed its work may cause the end of the world.
This was of course only speculation as the LHC is actually used to collide sub-atomic particles into each other. These collisions are measured by 6 detectors, one of which is ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment). ALICE’s goal is to recreate an atomic scenario similar to that which occurred a millionth of a second after the big bang, but of course on a much smaller scale. To do this, the nuclei of two lead atoms are smashed together at the speed of light creating a fireball that is fifty times denser than a neutron star and a million times hotter than the sun. This unimaginable temperature and pressure forces the fireball to expand, scattering the subatomic guts of the nuclei in all different directions. In more technical terms these ‘guts’ are known as protons and neutrons, which can be further broken down into quarks. I apologise if this contradicts all that you have learnt in school, but it is time to accept that teachers lied to protect our brain cells from an information overload. Each atom has a nuclei, each nuclei is composed of protons and neutrons, within these protons and neutrons are quarks.
These quarks are not easy to get hold of, they are soldered together by the strongest known force in the universe, not so ironically named the Strong Force! And as you may have guessed, this force is pretty strong, so strong in fact that they have imprisoned quarks inside protons and neutrons for 13.7 billion years. The collisions created by the Large Hadron Collider are the only opportunity to free the quarks from their strong force prison, allowing us a split second to understand how they work.
This is where the University of Birmingham comes in. Dr David Evans leads the team who designed and created the electronic brain of this detector. This allows the machine to make a decision of which precise nanosecond of data to record, picking through the interesting and the normal to give a team the best data possible. Unless you are a particle physicist, you probably struggle to contemplate just how fast this computer has to act. It records 5 GB of data, the equivalent of 1,747,627 emails, or 2,560 songs in one second! The data is then sent to the physicists at Birmingham who are attempting to find out more about the collisions taking place.
So what’s next for Birmingham’s input in ALICE? Well, while the detector is closed over the winter for maintenance, the data collected over the past year is being analysed to try and find out more about the free movement of quarks. As well as this, the scientists at ALICE are planning to collide protons with lead nuclei. Previously proton-proton collisions have been used to compare to the lead nuclei collisions, however protons and lead nuclei have never been aimed against each other. These new collisions are hoping to reveal more about the conditions of the early universe and about the strong force responsible for holding the nuclei of every atom together.
The work being done by the ALICE project examines particles so small that, within the grand scheme of things, they may seem insignificant. However if you care about what we are made of, and where we came from and where we are going, then keep your ears open. We are in an age where all questions are being asked, by CERN, by the ALICE project and by the University of Birmingham.
Shortlink: http://redbrick.me/38821
Written by
elliefewings
on Feb 22 2012. Filed under Science, Tech.
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