Large Hadron Collider to uncover dark secrets soon

Beams of protons circling around opposite directions collided at 7 TeV in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at 13.06, Geneva time; a historic moment. Never before man has reached such an energy ever in the history of science. The whole world is rejoicing and the scientific world is jubilant. It is not only a unique and great achievement but March 30 has also opened up a thousand windows of new concepts and new ideas that were until now shrouded in the darkest preserve of the nature.

There was no dearth of anxious moments. Beams started circling the night before without colliding – suddenly around 7 am there was no beam. Something went disastrously wrong. The proton simply refused to be pushed around. After some clever tricks, around 10.30 hours on March 30 the beam came up again.

Higgs Boson, dark matter candidates, source of dark energy, supersymmetric particles – all these fundamental questions are going to be addressed by the LHC. Further when the two nuclei will go on colliding modes shortly, we shall have a glimpse of the universe through the lens of mini bang, a microsecond after the Big Bang.

Technologically, LHC is a marvel at the same time it is the hottest (a million times the temperature of the interior of the Sun) as well as the coldest place (a couple of degrees Kelvin) in the universe, even colder than the microwave background radiation encompassing the entire cosmos. It is the hiss of the universe, the reminisce of its very creation in a Big Bang and therefore, the hiss of the expanding universe.

Already, the data coming out of the colliding protons are overflowing the computers at the detectors, ALICE, CMS, ATLAS and LHCb. The invention of GRID computing system, which networks all the computers in TIER 1 and 2 around the world, has been so fantastic that immediately after March 30, the facility has been fully operational. Kolkata VECC & SINP are members of the TIER 2.

Fundamental questions, which have bothered human beigns, are going to be addressed and examined critically – Why there is matter and not antimatter?; Is it possible for all the forces to be grandly unified?; What is the origin of mass?

Indeed when the nuclei collides in the near future and (hopefully) creates a plasma of quarks and gluons (the very fundamental building blocks of nature) we shall have much deeper insight in the very nature of strong interaction, that binds neutrons and protons inside the atomic nucleus.

Guido Tonelli, spokesperson of the CMS experiment says: “We’ll soon address some of the major puzzles of modern physics.” A collaboration spokesperson, Fabiola Gianotti says: “LHC experiments are propelled into a vast region to explore and the hunt begins for dark matter, new forces even new dimensions.”

In ALICE detector, Kolkata, VECC & SINP have made major contributions in terms of Photon Multiplicity Detector (PMD) and the “MANAS” chip of the dimuon spectrometre. Naturally, we are all jubilant to have already collected the newest data that man has ever seen. My friend Jurgen Schucraft, spokesperson of ALICE, puts it very aptly: “This is the moment we have been waiting and preparing for.”

The director general of Cern Rolf Heuer in a typically understated sentence tells us: “It is a great day to be a particle physicist.” Cern will run the LHC for 18-24 months with the objective of delivering enough data to the experiment make significant advances across a wide range of physics channels.

As soon as they have “re-discovered” the known standard model particles, a necessary precursor to looking for new physics, the LHC experiment will start the systematic search for the Higgs Boson. With the amount of data expected, called one inverse femtobarn by physicists, the combined analysis of ATLAS and CMS will be able to explore a wide mass range.

Heuer explains: “The LHC has a real chance over the next two years of discovering supersymmetric particles and possibly giving insights into the composition of about a quarter of the universe.”

“Over 2,000 graduate students are eagerly awaiting data from the LHC experiments,” Heuer says. “The privileged bunch is set to produce the first theses at the new high-energy frontier. Two years of continuous running is a tall order both for the LHC operators and the experiments, but it well worth the effort.”

Clearly, a moment has come when the young can make their mark and may become famous for more than fifteen minutes. I say “The world will not be same again.” I further say, “LHC will bring up man to a very different height scientifically and technologically. The LHC has touched men and women of countries across the world of all ages as never before.”

The writer is former director of Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics and at present Homi Jehangir Bhabha distinguished chair professor at Department of Atomic Energy