CERN SMASH!

I missed posting last week because I was in Geneva visiting CERN! Marika was flying home via the city, and my brilliant mother-in-law suggested we take a tour of the facility. I thought I'd take this week to explain a bit about how the collider works.

The first CERN particle collider

CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research, but the umbrella of "nuclear research" extends farther than you may think. When researchers needed a way to share data between sites over the world, they developed a communication network between their computers that became the World Wide Web. We actually saw the very first web server, kept in a dimly lit room (its natural habitat), so I couldn't get a picture.

The main thing CERN is known for though is the Large Hadron Collider. I talked a bit about particle accelerators in my second-ever post on this blog, but that was just about getting particles up to a certain speed, not colliding them with other particles (aside from my brain).

The purpose of particle colliders is to create new particles by smashing together pairs of other particles. The key lies in what is probably the most famous equation in science:

This equation connects energy to mass, but energy comes in many forms. In this case, we give the initial particles kinetic energy by accelerating them. When they collide, that can be converted into mass energy to create higher mass particles.

The various particles in the Standard Model each have different masses, with the Higgs Boson being the heaviest. Heavier particles have more energy, which means we need faster initial particles to produce them. We can modify the equation above to include the velocity:

As the velocity, v, gets closer to the speed of light, c, the energy gets bigger and bigger. This is why you can never get up to light-speed: You'd need infinite energy. By accelerating lighter particles though, we can hope to create heavier ones.

While the Standard Model is now complete, there are other theories to go beyond it. The LHC is currently being upgraded to handle even higher energies in the hopes of confirming or refuting these theories. I loved seeing all the bits of science history they have there, and I encourage anyone passing through Geneva to go take a look!