Beyond the God Particle Read Online Free PDF

happened too quickly to be detected. The soldered joints had failed and the electrical circuit opened up. 11
    When the current flow through an electromagnet is suddenly interrupted, i.e., when the circuit is “opened,” there develops a virtually infinite voltage. This happens because nature opposes the interruption and strives to restore the current flow that is required to maintain the magnetic field. This is the basis of spark coils in automobile engines, Tesla coils, and any devices that step up voltage from one value to another, such as a transformer. For the largest magnets in the world, opening of the circuit produced a monstrous spark. At the LHC this human-made bolt of lightning, like a super-bolt from Odin's scepter, blasted through the neighboring magnets and pierced the cryostat, the large vessel that holds all of the liquid helium that keeps the magnet cold and superconducting.
    The result was an explosive release of 3,000 gallons of liquid helium into the confines of the LHC tunnel. The resulting shock wave traveled down the tunnel at the speed of sound. A mile away steel doors were blown off their hinges. At least five of the massive magnets were destroyed, and about fifty others were damaged. The accelerator's entire vacuum tube was corrupted, as debris was sucked back into the beam pipe around its entire 27-kilometer circumference. It is said that the oxygen and nitrogen within the vicinity of the explosion was condensed out of the air itself and lay on the floor of the tunnel in a pool for six hours.
    As a testimonial to modern safety standards, no human being was even slightly injured in this monstrous explosion. The catastrophe occurred at the time of international economic turmoil, however, and threatened the viability of the LHC project. The entire accelerator had to be cleaned out, and major repairs were required along nearly a half mile of the tunnel, including the replacement of five magnets. The event revealed a design flaw with the non-superconducting copper joiners that connect one magnet toanother, maintaining the current flow through the system, and these had to be replaced around the entire 27-kilometer circumference of the machine.
    Though the entire future of the LHC was in doubt for a brief time, CERN persevered and brought it back online within two years. This was a spectacular and heroic feat, the kind of challenge that any risky new and cutting-edge endeavor must overcome, reminiscent of NASA's near-disaster with the Apollo 13 lunar mission. The LHC came back online, and less than four years after the “helium incident” successfully discovered the Higgs boson. LHC's performance since then has been jaw-droppingly spectacular. CERN's achievement with the LHC would surely have put a smile on the face of Albert Einstein—it has certainly drilled through the thick part of the wood.
    At this writing (March 2013), the LHC is down for upgrading and will come back online around January 2015 for what will be the most important survey of the highest energy scales, or shortest distance scales humans have ever probed, at energies well beyond the mass of the Higgs boson.
    So, since the LHC is the world's most powerful microscope, what is it we are looking for?
    “ACH! IF I'D KNOWN THERE WOULD BE SO MANY PARTICLES I WOULD HAVE BEEN A BOTANIST INSTEAD.”
    So said Einstein, supposedly, tongue in cheek, to a colleague in the lunch line at Princeton, who was explaining to the great master something of some newly discovered particles in the early 1950s. Back then these were called the “strange” particles, and they are known today to be composed of things dubbed “strange quarks.” The understanding of the nuclear particles, those associated with the strongly interacting particles found in the atomic nucleus, spanned the 1950s well into the 1970s. This branch of physics is still going on today in a modern form as we contemplate the ferociously energetic collisions at the LHC. Today, in the dawn of