Why should we do this, and why in such a way / Geektimes

Here is an analogy: imagine that you were interested in the cities of the Roman Empire and how they functioned. Because of this, you can begin to study Roman architecture. Perhaps you will be interested in how they built their buildings and aqueducts. Then, probably, you will pass to the reliability of their arches and foundations, and from them – to the properties of bricks and mortar. But you are not interested in way and mortar – these are just the means to achieve the goal. You want to consider them as part of the more general issues of designing and building Roman buildings, their beauty and their reliability, which allowed them to survive the centuries.

Nature is the most fruitful and ancient architect. We live surrounded by beauty and mysteries – oaks and volcanoes, sunsets and storms, a beautiful moon and innumerable grains of sand on the beach. A couple of centuries ago, scientists concluded that the diversity of this architecture can be better understood if we assume that matter consists of different atoms – “elements”. So they began to be interested in atoms, the “elementary” building bricks of nature, as they were thought about then.

But, as it turned out, this was only the beginning, because it turned out that there are dozens of different kinds of atoms, seriously differing in chemical transformations and the ability to emit light. In trying to understand the diversity and behavior of atoms, scientists realized that they were also forms of architecture built from even smaller particles: the electrons surrounding the atomic nucleus, which were kept intact by electrical forces that cemented them. And in the nuclei there is also an architecture, with protons and neutrons held together intact by their strong interaction cementing them. Along the way, one more force was discovered, a weak interaction, often more destructive than the creative power.

The discovery of new levels of architecture not only allowed us to explain elementary chemical processes, as well as the emission and absorption of light, but also gave access to Unraveling other secrets – the principles of the work of stars, radioactivity, as well as access to the huge danger hiding in the energy of the nucleus. The approach of “bricks and cement” was the key to uncovering many secrets during the 20th century.

This, of course, is a quasi-historical sketch, and not an exact account of history. The real story of the rich man is more complicated and lies beyond my capabilities.

By 1950, it was known that the protons and neutrons of atomic nuclei have a lot of cousins: other hadrons with such names as pions, kaons, delta baryons , P-mesons, and others. This complexity was a sign of the existence of another architecture. In the early 1970s a new understanding of these particles appeared, as objects consisting of quarks, antiquarks and gluons fastened by strong interaction.

Specialists in particle physics are scientists who are interested in the architecture of nature at the level of bricks and Cement, reliability and destructibility. What are the fundamental building blocks that keep them together or divide them? How do they organize and form the basis of the vast variety of structures that we observe in the universe?

From the early 1960s, it gradually came to understand that the properties of the world we inhabited require the presence of some substance filling the universe – a nonzero field, Definition is the Higgs field – which affects the properties of many particles in nature. Without the Higgs field, the architecture that surrounds us would collapse. Understanding what this field is and how it works is one of the central projects of today’s specialists in particle physics, and the main justification for the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). What secrets will be revealed in the learning process? No one yet knows.

Why did physicists need to build giant “atomic threshers” [atom smashers]?

Oh, how I hate this term! We do not collide atoms, we collide subatomic particles: protons that are 100,000 times smaller than atoms (in radius), or electrons that are 1,000 times smaller than protons! This is how to confuse the clash of the planets with the collision of two oil tankers or two bullets.

Okay, ladushki, calm down already. So why do physicists have to push protons or other subatomic particles? Is it possible to do something less destructive?

Often an analogy is given that the use of colliders in physics (more precisely, of subatomic particle colliders) is similar to breaking exact chronometers into each other in attempts to study their work on the departed parts. This analogy makes sense, but it does not take into account something important.

The collision of subatomic particles of ultrahigh energies is not just an act of destruction. This is, for the most part, the act of creation.

This is an amazing property of nature – if in a small enough space to shove a lot of energy, it can sometimes produce particles that were not there before. It is for this purpose that we arrange collisions of high-energy particles. Technology with energy compression is the only known one that allows you to get new or extremely rare particles that people have not seen before. We, for example, have no other way of obtaining Higgs particles.

So we are not interested in the collision of chronometers. We already know a lot about them – we already understand decently the protons that collide in the LHC. We hope to discover way what the clock did not have – we have already thoroughly studied quarks and gluons, bricks and cement of protons. We must correct the analogy. We rather put the watch together in the hope that a mobile phone will appear as a result of the collision energy.

It sounds pretty crazy. But nature is amazing and unusual, and on the way LHC rare heavy particles are created daily. It is to create Higgs particles, and perhaps other unexpected phenomena, that we are sacrificing protons on the altar of the LHC.