Aduro » physics

CERN and the Large Hadron Collider

admin — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 12:22:50 +0000

One of the technological marvels of modern history is the Large Hadron Collider. It is one of the biggest international scientific projects ever undertaken. The structure is located over 170 metres beneath the French/Swiss border. Scientists from all over the world are working together to unravel the secrets of nature, and especially the processes and interactions related to particle mass. By smashing protons together at high energies scientists will attempt to recreate similar conditions to what most likely occurred shortly after the Big Bang. Colliding particles at such high energies will cause annihilation of those particles, and results in the creation of other particles (since the energy has to go somewhere, it does not disappear – check the Law of Conservation of Energy).

After some setbacks, the LHC has now broken several records related to high-energy particle acceleration. The accelerator is capable of colliding protons at 7 TeV (teraelectronvolts) per particle. If all goes well the LHC will be running at full capacity after a planned shutdown in 2012.

Sites related to the Large Hadron Collider:

One of my favourite LHC sites is Colliding Particles. It’s a series of videos following researchers at CERN.

A good explanation of the various experiments and detectors can be found at the CERN LHC public outreach site.

You can always count on the BBC to provide a nicely written guide, click here to go to BBC’s site which contains plenty of interesting facts and media.

String Theory

admin — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 10:22:34 +0000

By now you have probably heard of String Theory. Though do you really understand what it is about? And will it eventually be able to explain many of physics’ great mysteries? If you think the mathematical structure of Quantum Mechanics is complex, wait till you see the mathematics involved in String Theory. It’s so complex that only a tiny group of scientists can fully understand the mathematics. String Theory has changed into a mainstream subject in a relatively short period of time. That, however, has not made it less controversial. Many questions remain, and as time passes will String Theory really be the answer?

Make sure you read the featured COSMOS magazine article by Peter Woit – it’s definitely worth 10 minutes of your time!

The Standard Model is a quantum theory of fields – of which the electromagnetic field was just one variety – and much of our time as students was spent trying to master the complex mathematical techniques needed to understand these quantum field theories. According to the Standard Model, there are three fundamental forces: electromagnetic, weak and strong. There are also a small number of fundamental particles carrying specified charges that determine which forces they experienced, such as photons for the electromagnetic force, and gluons for the strong nuclear force.

The mathematics of the theory is deep and highly sophisticated; the fields responsible for the forces are basic geometrical quantities that mathematicians call ‘connections’. The excitations and interactions of these fields were also responsible for the fundamental particles. The whole thing satisfied a beautiful equation as presented to the world by British physicist Paul Dirac in 1928.

Read more here..

Space Elevator

admin — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 09:56:46 +0000

Like the elevator in your apartment building but going slightly higher. NASA is providing 1 million dollars in prize money to anyone who can build a prototype space elevator. Yet for the third year in a row no individual or company has claimed the money. Can it not be build? According to NASA it can, and other proponents are certain technologies are under development right now. The elevator would transport supplies from Earth to space without needing expensive fuel or batteries of any kind. Currently supplies have to be loaded onto space shuttles or Soyuz transport vehicles and then launched using very expensive, and dated, technology. NASA remains hopeful that in the near future they can pay out the prize money.

For the third time in three years, no team has claimed the prize money in two NASA- sponsored technology challenges to build a robotic climber and a vertical tether that could one day comprise a workable space elevator. In theory, that elevator would transport supplies from the ground to space without expensive fuel or batteries.

Despite the letdown, proponents of the technology were hopeful, and the roughly $1 million in prize money will roll over to next year’s events.

“The good news is that technologies to build a space elevator are possible and are being developed now,” said Ted Semon, spokesman for the Spaceward Foundation, which hosted NASA challenges at The Spaceward Games 2007, which began Oct. 17 and ended Monday in Salt Lake City.

The first contest, called the Space Elevator challenge, required teams to build a robotic climber that could scale a tether 100 meters tall in less than a minute. The chief requirement also was that the climber received energy from a ground source, rather than fuel or batteries. The second challenge, the Strong Tether Challenge, called on teams to build a robust tether of materials that could one day be the conveyer belt into space. MIT, for example, built a tether of carbon nanotubes, a strong new material, but the university team still didn’t win.

READ the entire article by clicking here.