In its eight years of life, the Large Hadron Collider has produced a jazzy musical score, two knights, a small mammal scandal, and one of the greatest discoveries in our lifetime: the Higgs boson. But this morning, it's delivering some less exciting news: The signals physicists thought could indicate an undiscovered particle have died out.
The musical instrument of the future might be data from high energy particle physics experiments. Researchers from the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland and other universities debuted the Quantizer with live streaming at the Association for Computing Machinery's Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems this month. While there have been other attempts to show physics data with sound, like the "chirp" that accompanied February's gravitational wave announcement, this is the first time that high-energy physics collision data can be live streamed as music.
You may have seen some headlines floating around the world wide web (irony) last week indicating that a weasel took down the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world. It turns out, many publications (and even a spokesperson for CERN, the organization that runs the LHC) implicated the wrong animal at the scene. According to a CERN press release issued today:
What is it with small mammals and electrical lines? Not even the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, is immune from their meddling. The multi-billion dollar scientific instrument that located the elusive Higgs Boson particle back in 2012 has suffered widespread electrical problems in recent days, thought to be caused by a (now-deceased) small mammal gnawing on a transformer line, according to NPR and New Scientist.
Super colliders are already massive. The Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland features a circular track over 16 miles long. Today, Chinese state media announced the nation's plan to construct a super collider twice as large, with construction beginning in 2020. Like the Swiss project, it will smash particles together looking for the elusive snowflake that is the “God Particle”. Unlike the CERN project, it will do so with a ton more energy.
On July 4, 2020, a panel of scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva announced the discovery of a new particle, the long-anticipated Higgs boson (or something very much like it). The Higgs is the final piece of the Standard Model of particle physics, a theory that accounts for everything we experience in our lives, from rocks to puppies to stars and planets. After decades of searching and billions of dollars, the Higgs discovery marked the end of one era and the beginning of another, which scientists will embark upon in 2013.
