LARGE HADRON COLLIDER - SCI & TECH
News: Explained
| A beginner’s guide to the Large Hadron Collider
What's in the news?
● The
LHC, built by the European Organization
for Nuclear Research (CERN), is on the energy frontier of physics research,
conducting experiments with highly energised particles.
Large Hadron Collider:
● The
Large Hadron Collider is a giant, complex machine built to study particles that
are the smallest known building blocks of all things.
Working:
● In
its operational state, it fires two
beams of protons almost at the speed of light in opposite directions inside a
ring of superconducting electromagnets.
● The
magnetic field created by the superconducting electromagnets keeps the protons
in a tight beam and guides them along the way as they travel through beam pipes
and finally collide.
● Just
prior to collision, another type of magnet is used to ‘squeeze’ the particles
closer together to increase the chances of collisions.
● The
particles are so tiny that the task of making them collide is akin to firing
two needles 10 km apart with such precision that they meet halfway.
Significance:
● The
Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment specializes in investigating the slight differences
between matter and antimatter by studying a type of particle called the
"beauty quark", or "b quark".
Go back to basics:
Quarks:
● Quarks
are elementary particles that come in six
“flavors”: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom.
● They
usually combine together in groups of twos and threes to form hadrons such as
the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei.
● But
they can also combine into four-quark
and five-quark particles, called tetraquarks and pentaquarks.
● These
exotic hadrons were predicted by theorists about six decades ago around the
same time as conventional hadrons but they have been observed by LHCb and other
experiments only in the past 20 years.