CERN and their new 6 Billion Dollar Baby

CERN (Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire) or in English European Organization for Nuclear Research. CERN who’s base of operation is in Switzerland but crosses the border into France is this month after a few minor delays is finally firing up there LHC (Large Hadron Collider). The LHC is 27km long  giant circular partical accelerator that’s a couple of hundren metres under the ground.  I was invited to get a tour of the LHC before in fired up and for a super nerd like me that was like a dream come true =p . This 6 Billion Dollar partical physics experiment is CERN’s baby once  its turned on sometime this month no one will see the inside of the tunnels its in for about a year as they maybe catch a slight case of death as the tunnels will be radioactive.

 So whats the big fuss about the LHC and CERN in general you ask??? Well CERN was set up by a group of Scientists which included Louis de Broglie and Neils Bohr as a kind of sorry for giving the world the atom bomb. This Scientist wanted to set up a center for European science only a few years after the Second World War ended. CERN was set up for nuclear research but out of that came partical physics and that what happening at CERN now. The main aim of the new LHC is to find Higgs Boson. This is a partical that is believed to give atoms and other sub-atomic particals there mass! This is kind of important part of physics. Now how are they going to do this you ask? There going to re-create the first few billionths of a second of the big bang. Now that’s what a call a cool day work at the office!

How are they intenting on re-creating the big bang. Well first of all they need a lot of magnets! I think the number is about 5000 Tons of magnets I think. These are all inside the LHC these keep the particals going around and around in a circle while there travling around giant circle a couple of thousand times a second. The magnets keep them in the center of the tunnel as they do not want to hit the sides. The magnets are cooled to -270­­­­­­­_­^oC so don’t forget your wooly hat if your down there! They have electricity running through the magnets and that’s why they have them cooled so they are super conducting, so none of the electricity wasted, at all!!!!

 They can only run the LHC at night as it takes up so much power that if they ran it juring the day some parts of Geneva would be without power, as it kind of takes up most of the power generated by the local nuclear power station. The particals that I have been talking so much about are just protons, or hydrogen atoms that are given so much energy that there electrons aren’t orbiting them anymore. Each proton is given 7 TeV ( Tera Electron Volts) or energy. This is about as much energy that a housefly uses to flap its wings. This does not sound like a lot but when you think about how many trillions of atoms are in a fly that’s a lot of energy. These protons are sped up inside the LHC to near the speed of light and then smashed against each other and kind of like a photo is taken and then the physicists put the puzzle of partials that are all pieces of proton back together. This is basically how partical physics happens. The photo is actually a bund of detectors that see the tiny little particals bust off in all differet directions.

What are the every day uses of such partical physics experiments as they are normaly super expensive too run. Well I think the one thing that we all have heard of is a PET Scan. PET stands for Positron emission tomography. This can basically make a 3D map of a part of the body that you want to see if working properly. This is done by adding a chemical into the body called Fluorodeoxyglucose which looks like molecularly like sugar that we have in our tea but one of the oxygen atoms is missing and there is a fluoride atom there instead (as you maybe be able to guess from the name).

This is what the PET Machien does for get the image 

Without partical physics experiments we would not have this amazing diagnostic tool. A lot of the work going on into these experiments in partical physics does not seem to have any practical use’s now or today but once we have the answers to the questions we are looking for all it takes is one person to look at the answer a little differently and think wow can we does this with x. This is how new technologies are born every day. Science finds things out and then we have technologists in the group to think up of ideas of how to use it in every day things. The detectors that are used in CERN are technological feats in themselves so there are many different aspects of science used in CERN. So as you can see CERN and the LHC are amazing feats and I think everyone should keep an eye on this. There less then 4weeks to do and if you believe some people this is the first step to having a time machine or creating a black hole. We will see anyway. You can read up about it in more detail on www.cern.ch hope you enjoyed this blog and if anyone has any questions or comments that would be great. Thanks for reading . . . . More too come soon. . . . .