LHC

the greatest experiment on Earth & the origin of mass

Dr. K.P.Satheesh Principal, GCB

The Large Hadron Collider will collide the nuclei of atoms with 10 times higher energy than has previously been achieved (14 TeV) 1232, 35 ton, superconducting dipole magnets accelerate ions and focus them into bunches for collision
36,000 tons of coolant below 2K!

Proton-Proton collisions (hydrogen atom nuclei)

14 TeV centre of mass energy

100 billion protons per bunch 20 collisions per crossing 1 crossing every 25ns 600 million collisions per second

To store all collision data would involve storing 10 Petabytes of data a year ie a 20km high stack of CDs more than can be made

LHC Is constructed to help scientists in general and particle physicists in particular to answer certain key unresolved questions in Particle Physics. The unprecedented energy it offers has already started revealing some unexpected results that no one has ever thought of.

Why the LHC...

During the steady growth of Particle Physics in the last century physicists have been able to describe with increasing detail the fundamental particles that make up the universe and the interaction between them. The Standard Model.

Even though the standard model is highly successful it contains several gaps and cannot tell us the whole story. To complete the story experimental data at the tera scale is required. LHC promises this data.

What is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)?

The LHC is a very large particle accelerator, roughly 17 miles long and finished on September 10th, 2008. Its primary function is to use electric fields to force charged particles to move at very high speeds and still keep them under control.

What is it made out of?

The Large Hadron Collider contains: 2 adjacent parallel beams 1232 dipole magnets 392 quadrupole magnets 1,600 superconducting magnets 96 tons of liquid helium for temperature maintenance purposes

How does it work?

I dont know the answer to this one just kidding In simplest terms, the LHC works by forcing two beams of atomic particles to travel in opposite directions surrounding the physical LHC itself. Once these beams reach their maximum speed, the LHC forces them to collide in four places on their path. These collisions create new particles and energy, allowing physicists to use the detectors in the LHC to observe much about the basic structure of our world.

What went wrong with it?

The reason behind the inability of the LHC to be appropriately followed through with as anticipated on September 19th was an electrical fault between two magnets which caused an arc, making the helium leak. Once the outer layer of the helium broke, it flooded the area, breaking 10-ton magnets and covering the tubes of proton with soot.

WHAT DO PARTICLE PHYSICISTS DO? Some unanswered questions

Why do we observe matter and almost no antimatter if we believe there is a symmetry between the two in the universe? What is this "dark matter" that we can't see that has visible gravitational effects in the cosmos? Why can't the Standard Model predict a particle's mass? Are quarks and leptons actually fundamental, or made up of even more fundamental particles? Why are there exactly three generations of quarks and leptons? How does gravity fit into all of this?

The Particles and their Properties.

There are two types of particles that are thought to be fundamental. That is, they cannot be broken down into any smaller constituent particles. These two types of particles are the leptons and the quarks. However, these can, under the right conditions, be converted into energy, or be formed from bundles of energy. Also, the heavier ones can decay into lighter ones, with the release of some of their energy. As the regions of the universe near us are now in a much lower-energy state than they were shortly after the big bang, only the lightest particles in each family are now very commonly observed. Others can be re-created by high-energy collisions, such as those produced in particle accelerators.

The Leptons
The most familiar member of this group is the electron, but there are also similar, heavier (and hence more energetic) particles called the muon and the tau. For each one of these, there is a smaller partner called a neutrino the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino and the tau neutrino.

Each of these 6 also has an antiparticle, for example, the anti-electron or positron. The leptons are all capable of independent existence.

Properties of the Leptons

The electron, muon and tau all have mass. The neutrinos have no mass, according to the Standard Model. However, there is some evidence that neutrinos do have an actual, very small mass. The electron, muon and tau all have electric charges of 1, and their antiparticles have electric charges of +1. The neutrinos have no electric charge. All of the leptons have another property called spin. Their spins can be + or -.

The Quarks
The quarks are not capable of independent existence, and are found only as groups, making up larger particles (called bound states). There are 6 quarks, called up, down, charm, strange, bottom and top. The everyday quarks are the up and down quarks. For each quark there is an anti-quark. The quarks have mass and electric charge. The electric charges are either + or - for quarks, and - or + for the matching antiquarks. They also have spin of . There is also another property called colour charge, which comes in 3 varieties, red, green and blue. The anti-quarks have anti-colours: anti-red, anti-green and antiblue.

Rules The Particles Follow

This relates particularly to the grouping together of quarks. The bound states must be colour-neutral. This means that only two types of groupings are possible; 3 quarks (or 3 anti-quarks), or a quarkantiquark pair. The particles of the first type are called baryons, and the most familiar examples are the proton and the neutron. The second type is the mesons. Together they are called hadrons. As a consequence of this, the bound states can only have integral charges (0, 1, 2). There are also other rules, for example about spin, which must also be obeyed.

3 Some Familiar Particles

Example: The proton has a charge of +1. It is a baryon, so it is made up of 3 quarks.

u
+

Since the up quark has a charge of + and the down quark has a charge of -, the only way to make up a proton is uud. ( + - = 1).

u d
+

The quarks will be one each of rgb, making the proton colour-neutral, and all the rules are satisfied.

The History of Standard Model

1. The Nobel Prize winner
1979 Nobel Prize-- GLASHOW, SALAM and WEINBERG the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction.

1984 Nobel Prize-- RUBBIA and VAN DER MEER the discovery of the field particles W and Z, communicators of weak interaction.

A short summary of events

Ancient times 1802 1897 1911 1930 1932 1937 1956 1962 1969 1974 1976 1977 1983 1991 1995 1998 2000 2003 People think that earth, air, fire, and water are the fundamental elements. Daltons Atomic theory began forming. J. J. Thompson discovered the electron. Rutherford discovered positive nucleus. Pauli invented the neutrino particle. James Chadwick discovered the neutron. The muon was discovered by J. C. Street and E. C. Stevenson. First discovery of the neutrino by an experiment: the electron neutrino. Discovery of an other type of neutrino: the muon neutrino. Friedman, Kendall, and Taylor found the first evidence of quarks. The charmed quark was observed. The tau lepton was discovered at SPEAR. Experimenters found proof of the bottom quark. Carlo Rubbia and Simon Van der Meer discovered the W and Z bosons. LEP experiments show that there are only three light neutrinos. The top quark was found at Fermilab. Neutrino oscillations may have been seen in LSND and Super-Kamiokande. The tau neutrino was observed at Fermilab. A Five-Quark State has been discovered.

2. Question: What is Standard Model?

4. Physicists are human beings

1898 Joseph Thompson : plum-puddingmodel of the atom

1911 Ernest Rutherford: planetary model of the atom

It took 10 years to realize the muon wasnt Yukawas pion.

At the beginning, the quark model was not accepted widely.

The Story So Far

Electrons and their electromagnetic interactions are responsible for chemistry and day to day forces

Diracs Legacy
Electrons can absorb photons

But in Relativity, rotating this in space-time gives The electron travelling back in time is a hole or antiparticle Every particle has a twin of the same mass but precisely opposite charges particles and antiparticles annihilate into photons.

Gauge Theory - QED

How do you know which to call particle and which anti-particle? Nature has the same problem it may make a different choice in causally disconnected bits of space Nature has invented an interaction so that two charged particles can probe the choice each other made that force is electro-magnetism.

Understanding Mass - The Quantum Vacuum

t >h
The vacuum can borrow energy for short periods

E = mc 2
The borrowed energy can be used to create particles (You cant just create an electron because of charge conservation - but can create electron positron pair) The quantum vacuum is a seething mass of particles appearing and disappearing constantly.

How Can You Tell?

The virtual particle pairs interfere in electron scattering processes. g-2 is tested to 13 sig figs!

The effective charge seen in two electron scattering depends on the separation of the electrons.

The Strong Nuclear Force

Quarks come in 3 colours!

This difference changes the way in which the vacuum is polarized so that asymptotic freedom
Gross, Politzer, Wilczek

The strong nuclear force is described by a gauge theory except that the 8 gauge fields, gluons, carry colour charge..

Confinement
You can never pull hard enough to liberate a quark from a proton

The Quantum Vacuum

Every so often quantum effects create a quark anti-quark pair. The attractive force is so strong that binding energy >> mass energy The vacuum has lower energy if it fills itself with quark antiquark pairs!

The vacuum is really full of quark anti-quark pairs with a density 15 3 like that of an atomic nucleus (10 grams/cm ) !!

The Proton Mass

The quark pairs are responsible for the protons mass

Interaction energy provides proton mass

QCD & Strings

Strongly coupled QCD is a tough maths problem how do we compute beyond perturbation theory?

String theory gets meson properties right because a q anti-q pair look like a string A string is a one dimensional object with tension

BUT relativistic strings like to live in 10 dimensions! String theory contains quantum gravity

Gauge Gravity Duality

In recent years we have realized that strings in 10d are in fact the QCD string a weird and wonderful alternative description of quarks and glue
Maldacena

The extra dimensions are holographic creations. Classical General Relativity computations solve strongly coupled quantum problems! Is real gravity a hologram??

EG a quark is a string with an up label on one end and a colour label on the other

If the space-time stretches it the quark becomes massive

Quarks in a Dense QCD Plasma

Computations of gravity wave propagation tell us about transport properties of a quark gluon plasma

Larry Yaffes calculations of the shock wave produced by a moving quark

The ALICE Connection

A lead-lead collider at LHC

In heavy ion collisions we squeeze quarks together testing asymptotic freedom. At LHC energies the quark gluon plasma is a strongly coupled liquid Gauge gravity duality is currently our best tool to describe this mayhem!

What else have we found?

Massive gauge bosons for the weak nuclear force!

Why do otherwise identical particles have different masses?

The Origin of Mass

The strong nuclear force cannot explain the mass of the electron though Or very heavy quarks top mass = 175 proton mass

The Higgs Boson

We suspect the vacuum is full of another sort of matter that is responsible the higgs. a new sort of matter a scalar?

To explain the W mass the higgs vacuum must be 100 times denser than nuclear matter!! It must be weak charged but not electrically charged

The Search for the Higgs

EG look for Higgs decay to two photons

There are variants.

Is the Higgs some new quark anti-quark pair bound by a new ultra strong force? Should we embrace a new symmetry that requires a scalar for every fermion Supersymmetry

No Loose
What if our theories are wrong and there is no higgs?
Without the higgs our theory of WW interactions predicts scattering cross sections greater than one there must be something there What could it be? extra space-time dimensions - a bigger gauge symmetry SU(2)xSU(2)x - something new

2. Question: What is Standard Model?