Below this field is one of the most complicated machines ever built. A real lifetime machine buried hundreds of metres beneath the French Swiss border. This machine will shoot beams of energy around a 27km long loop and smash those beams of energy together again at the end. This giant loop is the track for the world's newest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider or LHC. It's designed to peer into the origins of the universe and is the brain child of 6,000 of the world's top scientific minds. Geoff Taylor is the head of physics at Melbourne University. But here in Switzerland, he is a key contributor to the LHC project. PROFESSOR GEOFF TAYLOR, UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE: As we come into this new era with the Large Hadron Collider, we are going to be discovering aspects of nature which we couldn't have dreamed of in the past. This is really the most exciting period for physicists, for scientists since the beginning of the 20th century.THORSTEN WENGLER, UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER: It's been a long time coming. We have constructed this for many, many years and to suddenly go into this phase where everything starts to come together and starts to click into each other and to really work as a whole, is immensely exciting. Atlas is the name of the giant detector at the heart of the project. It is being built underground in a six-story deep construction pit. Filled with the world's biggest magnets, layered by 3,000km of wiring and all weighing 7,000 tonnes. All of this so that protons, the heaviest part of the atom, can be smashed at near the speed of light inside the machine, creating conditions that haven't existed since a trillionth of a second after the birth of the universe. DR ALLAN CLARK, UNIVERSITY DE GENEVA: It is a machine which operates at a temperature of 1.9 degrees Kelvin. REPORTER: Which in Celsius terms? DR ALLAN CLARK: Minus 271 degrees. The collider lives at the CERN laboratory outside of Geneva. CERN buzzes. It requires its own relay station to power the collider and above that you will catch the intellectual hum of the world's best scientists. PROFESSOR GEOFF TAYLOR: At the same cafeteria there are sometimes five Nobel Prize winners. It's a very, very rich environment and it's a very testing environment. The students work very, very hard but it's very inspiring. At the cafeteria I meet the head of the at last project. Peter Jenni tells me when the machine gets turned on early next year, anything could happen. PETER JENNI, SPOKESPERSON, ATLAS PROJECT: We have pretty exciting ideas from what could happen but the most exciting for an experiment is that actually something which nobody has foreseen could be discovered. It's really going into a new land in a way. Sometimes people say it's like when people explored new territories. Columbus did find something exciting, not India but something else and maybe something like that may happen. The biggest job of the collider is to sift the cosmic soup for a particle called the Higgs Boson, also dubbed the God particle. PROFESSOR GEOFF TAYLOR: The particles, our basis for understanding what we are made of right now is missing some major ingredients and the Higgs is probably going to be the saviour of the standard. It is going to take us to the next layer of understanding. The Higgs Boson is a theoretical particle that has never been detected. It appears at energy levels that only this new machine can reach and even inside the Atlas, the Higgs Boson may only be visible every 10 trillion collisions. PROFESSOR GEOFF TAYLOR: We are looking for not a needle in a haystack, we are looking for a needle in about 10,000 hay stacks, probably even more like 100,000 hay stacks, depending on how big a needle you are looking for. The extraction of such a small signal from such a large amount of data has not been done before. What makes finding the Higgs particle a multi billion dollar investment, is the fact that it is thought to give everything in the universe its mass. After centuries of probing the big questions, physics still has no answer for where mass comes from. DR ALLAN CLARK: The Higgs is well described as a field permeating the universe which slows everything down, effectively giving it the equivalent of a mass. Peter Higgs suggested that moments after the Big Bang, a field was created which stretches across the entire universe, like a molasses and as particles wade through it, they become heavy. It's taken two decades and $8 billion to design and build the machine capable of testing his theory. Dr Taylor tells me that these experiments are shaking our understanding of the universe to the core. PROFESSOR GEOFF TAYLOR: They are of a scale of Kapernicus, realising that we weren't the centre of the solar system. On the scale of quantum physics brushing aside all the shortcomings of the classical physics that had been developed through the 17th and 18th centuries, we are on the verge of discovering an understanding of how our universe evolved from the very fundamental first few fraction of a second. This pixel detector is the centre of the atlas experiment. The detector tracks the paths of all the new particles that veer off after every collision. High tech devices like this one lead to all sorts of practical spin-offs. The challenges posed by particle physics help create the silicon chips in computers, the x-ray and the medical MRI, even the world wide web was born at CERN to help physicists share massive amounts of information across the globe. PROFESSOR GEOFF TAYLOR: Back in the 90s when we were first talking about these detectors and their complexity, the data coming out of the atlas experiment was equivalent to the entire telecommunications data rates of the world at the time. So there was absolutely no way, without massive technological development, it was ever going to work. Using this kind of cutting edge technology, Dr Taylor and his colleagues will do more than just look for the Higgs particle. They will search for dark matter, the stuff that we can't see but that exerts a strong gravitational pull on everything in space. They will investigate a theory called super symmetry which suggests that for every particle we know of, there may be a twin particle somewhere that we have never found. DR ALLAN CLARK: I knew you would ask that and I purposely did not mention that. I have heard this concern. Of course people have studied such possibilities. The black hole which people talk about is not the same size as the black hole which we expect to have or which we know to have at the centre of the Galaxy. These are small black holes and they decay very quickly. The final touches are now being put on the Large Hadron Collider so it can come online early next year. These men are machining parts to move a 12,000 tonne magnet into place at the end of the atlas pit. PROFESSOR GEOFF TAYLOR: It's mind-boggling to see what has to be done. Those magnets are absolute feats themselves individually. They are the biggest cost of the whole accelerator but they took years and years and years of development and magnetic fields are greater than any industrial size object by a long, long way. This machine is so precise, that all it takes is for one screw to be loose and years of work can be lost. The proton beam can punch through 15 metres of solid copper if it's misaligned and yet, the scientists here are all supremely confident that this machine is going to work. DR ALLAN CLARK: I would say the worst outcome would be the machine did not work. Now this is an impossible outcome. It will certainly work, although it will be a mammoth enterprise to make it work well. The success or failure of this project will seriously affect the future of big science world wide. PETER JENNI: With the LHC, I think the community must prove that we are actually able to master such complex detectors, such a complex program and I am personally convinced that this is absolutely necessary condition for big future projects.
|  | |
| |