LHC@home

Speaking as a mere physics groupie, I thought this was a good survey of what the LHC is all about.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=as-lhc-draws-nigh-nobelis

Here's a qoute from the article:

"The LHC was built first and foremost to seek out a subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, which solves the conundrum of why the photon (the particle that conveys the force of electromagnetism) has no mass, whereas its counterparts, the W and Z bosons (the operative particles in the weak nuclear force that causes radioactive decay), do.

Physicists believe that the Higgs breaks a symmetry between these forces, similar to the way Earth's gravity makes it appear that space has an up and a down. It does so by acting like molasses that other particles have to plow through. The end result is mass as we know it.

Most of the panelists said they were confident that the LHC would uncover the Higgs, because its presence (or at least something like it) is so strongly implied by the standard model of particle physics, which describes the three forces that hold atoms together. (In addition to electromagnetism and the weak force is the strong nuclear force that keeps individual protons and neutrons from dissolving into more basic particles called quarks.)

Discovering the Higgs would close a three-decade-long chapter in the history of physics. "We are all enormously excited that the LHC is about to turn on," said David Gross of the University of California, Santa Barbara, co-winner of a 2004 Nobel for elucidating the strong nuclear force.

Part of the enthusiasm stems from the fact that the standard model was so successful that physicists have no firm clues on how to proceed beyond it. Even more interesting than the Higgs, panel members said, would be the discovery of particles responsible for dark matter as well as an explanation of why the universe has a preponderance of matter over antimatter, either of which would break new ground in fundamental physics.

And then there's the far-out stuff: George Smoot of the University of California, Berkeley, who shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for mapping the faint cosmic microwave background radiation that gave evidence of the big bang, mentioned the prospect of finding signs of extra dimensions of space implied by string theory. "I have really high hopes—perhaps too high," he said."

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